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The Koranic verses are not negotiable

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/the-koranic-verses-are-non-negotiable/story-fni0cwl5-1227639731821

http://bit.ly/1RFEkEI

The Daily Telegraph

December 10, 2015

RECENT calls for a reformation of Islam, akin to what happened with Christianity in 16th century Europe, are all very well. But the suggestion has a fundamental flaw which goes to the nature of the Koran.

When Tony Abbott calls for a religious revolution to confront the ‘‘problem within Islam’’, this implies that something may be rotten within the Koran itself. Such an ‘‘honest debate’’ would be fruitless ­because the sanctity of the verses are non-negotiable.

The Christian Gospels were written up to four decades after the crucifixion of Jesus by his eyewitness disciples, based on their repeated recollections of his words and deeds.

However, the Koran is ­believed to be the actual words of God as revealed and recited as verses through archangel Gabriel to his messenger ­Mohammad, in the Arabic language, without translation, without interpretation. Hence, there is no wriggle room to argue that “what God really meant was this”.

Unlike the Gospels which were enriched by parables about the New Testament of love and forgiveness, the Koran is a thorough prescription that governs virtually every aspect of life from birth to death. It leaves little room for modernisation and adaptation.

What can be debated, though, is the man-made ­implementation of the words, especially regarding the true meaning of jihad, purity and cleansing in the context of ISIS propaganda.

The Christian Reformation was successful in redistribution of power in hierarchical churches and stamping out abuses of power such as “indulgences”.

But it did not seek to flush out any words in the Scriptures. On the contrary, Martin Luther translated the Bible so that it was more ­accessible to more people. Some speak of reform when what they really seek is an audit of all the verses that ISIS misuse as a pretext to “justify’’ violence. If that is what they want, then they should just say so, but be prepared to at least read the entire Koran first.

Some have even sought to expunge all the verses that promote violence and contradict the premise that Islam is a religion of peace.

Ironically, this is what ISIS purports to be offering — a revolution to the purist version with literalist interpretations.

But this version is fraught with contradictions as bearded old men seduce boys to perform suicidal terrorism, acts that the bearded old men are not prepared to commit, but expect the boys to believe in the hedonistic rewards that await martyrs in paradise.

If what Tony Abbott seeks is an audit of the ideas driving ­extremism, this requires policing of Imams and cyberspace, and he should know that this is what our intelligence authorities already do.

If the intention is to have an honest debate, he may be wiser to learn from his successor Malcolm Turnbull who recognised that ISIS leaders “defame and blaspheme Islam”.

An honest debate would also open up questions of double standards. For example, as the far right voices such as ­

Reclaim Australia and Rise Up Australia morph from cyberspace and coalesce as street protests, do we ask white leaders: what causes radicalisation and violent extremism in your culture? With the abuses of power revealed by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, do we ask respective ­religious leaders to confront theological problems within their scriptures?

If anyone seeks to understand the contents and ideas within the Koran, then they should seek an open meeting with the Australian National Imams Council.

If Abbott is seeking to add an intelligent political voice to the anti-Muslim ‘‘crusade’’, then he needs to be offering more than this red herring.

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Peers vital to turning troubled teens from jihad

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/peers-vital-to-turning-troubled-teens-from-jihad/story-fni0ffsx-1227558178885

http://m.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/opinion-path-of-least-resistance-produces-least-results-in-fighting-radicalisation/story-fnihsr9v-1227557973356?from=google_rss#load-story-comments

http://bit.ly/1jLv2Kf

Herald Sun and Courier Mail, 6 October 2015

 

Path of least resistance produces least results in fighting radicalisation

THE gnashing of teeth over another radicalised teenager and another innocent fatality has triggered questions on how this could have been averted. While Strike Force Fellow rewinds the video footage in this critical incident investigation, authority figures rewind the recent years to see how this angry kid escaped their radars.

These authorities include police, politicians, imams and professionals who work with youth. Too often, the incubation takes place out of their gaze in the darkness of a bedroom and the glow of a laptop, where one beckoning voice to take up arms is amplified, while voices of reason are drowned out.

The counter-radicalisation authorities have knocked on many doors but they are the doors of least resistance and have produced the least results.

Ministers visiting respected imams have produced many meetings, consultations and photographs. But breaking bread together has not broken the radicalisation pathway.

These imams are often locked up in offices, late at night, holding committee meetings, planning religious events and fielding media questions. Like clergy in other faiths, they are more likely to be sitting at a boardroom table than sitting opposite an angry teenager who refuses to pray at the mosque.

ISIS recruitment videos have been “successful” because they use Western youth as their beckoning mouthpieces, appealing in English to their peers that they understand their isolation: “For all my brothers living in the West, I know how you feel … you feel depressed … the cure for the depression is jihad.”

ISIS recruitment videos have been “successful” because they use western youth as their beckoning mouthpieces, appealing in English to their peers that they understand their isolation.

The young recruiters also tell their vulnerable targets not to listen to their imams or their parents. Hence, the youth are less likely to pray in the traditional mosques.

Community engagement with Muslim elders renders a similar result. Having been involved in these honorary roles for more than 25 years, we could point bureaucrats in the right direction and we could organise forums but we are unlikely to be personally acquainted with the youth in question.

Consulting with social workers and youth workers is a step closer to the grassroots but the teenagers in these environments have at least broken their social isolation and hear a diversity of voices. The youth on dangerous pathways are less likely to attend the PCYC or sports clubs but they may be in their social neighbourhood.

The suggestion by Attorney-General George Brandis that school teachers could be trained to “spot a jihadi” oversimplifies a complex pathway that is too often clandestine. Memos could be issued about this “de-radicalisation in schools strategy” but it risks creating false alarms and Islamophobia in school grounds, while missing other forms of radicalisation such as white supremacy. Engaging with all these adult groups who understand their responsibility to collaborate with police and politicians is the well-worn path but the path to radicalised youth may require detouring off these smooth surfaces.

When authorities intercept a teenager on this radicalisation path, there is often moral panic about homegrown jihadis and the threat that this dangerous disease may be contagious. But that situation presents a perfect opportunity to learn about the pathway from an “expert”. Which websites did they visit? What were they promised? Who are their recruiters? Such a person could be galvanised and later deployed as the frontline of defence in the grassroots and cyberspace resistance against radicalisation.

The defecting and disillusioned jihadis who have renounced ISIS are the true “experts” whose first-hand testimony from behind bars could be recorded as a counter-narrative. When isolated youth key in trigger words in the search engine of their computers, this pop-up video could automatically appear, from youth to youth, warning their peers about the three-dimensional reality, compared with the two-dimensional rhetoric.

These credible counter-narrative videos could refer to the imprisonment resulting from breaking the foreign fighters legislation.

They can inoculate other vulnerable youth against this dead-end street that was sold as a path to paradise. Youth peers are more likely to derail the radicalisation pathway by planting seeds of doubt and creating opportunities to offer non-violent alternatives to redressing isolation and anger.

This may include sports groups, political parties, prayer groups, social justice groups and even expert work in de-radicalisation.

In my first job as a street worker with runaway youth, my most effective outreach was done by former street kids whose understanding of the plight and emotions was lifesaving.

In my book What My Daughters Taught Me, I explain how teenagers have so much to teach – if we open our ears and listen. By helping me to become a better widowed parent with mutual honesty and respect, I did not need to discover any dark secrets second-hand.

Youth are a fountain of wisdom, waiting to be heard.

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Bigots recruit for ISIS

http://thehoopla.com.au/bigots-isis-recruiters-default/

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BIGOTS RECRUIT FOR ISIS

By Joseph Wakim Daily Dilemma, Must see
September 30, 2014

While Australian defence forces are engaged in an international war against ISIS militants, some local vigilantes have become self-appointed defence forces.

They may believe that they are defending Australia from the potential enemy within, to degrade and destroy ISIS.

But are they helping the Australian military campaign, or helping the ISIS recruitment campaign?

A look at the language used by the ISIS recruiters and the language used by Islamophobes bear chilling similarities. Both tell their young male Muslim targets: you are unloved and unwelcome in the West.

The official ISIS recruitment videos use cinematic quality and anthemic music. They show revelling recruits singing and applauding, akin to a campfire celebration. It tries to seduce young men who aspire to be warriors.

The Australian, British and other Western recruits who speak on these slick videos tell their Muslim targets that they understand their alienation. “For all my brothers living in the West, I know how you feel … you feel depressed … the cure for the depression is jihad.”

They appeal to a sense of belonging “from a Muslim brother’s heart to another brother’s heart.” They use expressions such as “finally among your people.”

The recruitment videos tap into victimhood and injustice, ironically referring to children who are beheaded for being Muslim and conjuring “Palestine pounded” after the “Jews have taken it.” It implores its profiled targets to “look and see and wake up and understand why this is happening.”

Australian Muslims should not be seduced by this allure and would not relate to the identity crisis of the recruits.

But there are Australian media outlets giving oxygen to the same lethal messages.

They are online and on toxic talkback, amplifying venom that was once deemed bigoted. The war against ISIS overseas has unleashed a war against Islam locally. It appears that the factual filters are off and so are the boxing gloves.

Just on one site, the comments called for rounding up, deporting and banning Muslims. They competed for the most despicable descriptors from Satanists to a-holes, to evil, to rotten, to barbaric to flea-ridden camel jockeys. They refer to the prophet as twisted and the Koran as a comic book.

Any Muslim reading these rants may realise that they reinforce the message of the ISIS recruiters.

When local Muslim speakers protest that “we have been victimised for years and years,” he is again echoing the propaganda of the ISIS recruiters.

These verbal messages are reinforced with actions, as captured on the Islamophobia Register Australia. Some of these hate-based crimes include attacks on the most visible Muslims, women in hijabs, as well as vandalism on mosques and a knife-threat at an Islamic school. There are also death threats to Muslim leaders including the Grand Mufti, which have been reported to police.

Even from the chambers of federal parliament, there are calls by Senator Jacqui Lambie and Senator Cory Bernardi to ban the burqa, despite no shred of evidence linking this face covering to security issues. They probably meant the niqab where the eyes are uncovered, as burqas are worn in Afghanistan, not Australia. Moreover, the proposed private member’s bill may breach section 116 of our constitution: “the Commonwealth shall not make any law … for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion.”

The (mis)appropriation of all Muslims into one dangerous basket puts all adherents of Islam on a scaled continuum as pre-disposed to violent extremism and ISIS sympathisers under cover.

But the cumulative effect of such vigilantes and hysteria can have the exact opposite result.

It can remind Muslims that they are unwelcome, unAustralian, never one of us.

Some who feel insulted and intimidated by the bombardment of bigotry may resort to the register, the police and the relevant authorities. Some will try to ignore it and take precautions to keep their families safe by minimising public appearances (shopping centres, crowds, parks), hence restricting their freedom of movement. The older generation would have experienced a similar ‘open season’ during the 1991 war on Iraq and the 2001 war on terror.

But the younger generation may be both alert and alarmed. Some young males may already feel angry, for various sociological reasons. They may be ignorant about their own religion and may be susceptible to the beck and call of ISIS who would be rubbing their hands: “See – we told you! The West hates you. You are a victim. You are depressed. Come to your brothers where you belong.”

Ironically, the Islamophobia may drive these Muslims towards the margins of society, towards radicalisation, towards the ISIS enemy. Using a migration paradigm, the Islamophobes are creating the push factor which feeds into the ISIS pull factor.

Perhaps we need to deploy an Operation Hammerhead to counter these vigilantes. They are not making Australia safer, but helping their enemy, by default.

The front line of defence has often been the very people that they are targeting: Muslims who have risked their own safety to tip-off police about suspects. Whoever endangers Australia obviously endangers these families and also endangers the long term reputation of their community.

While the vigilantes aid and abet ISIS, the Grand Mufti Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed has denounced ISIS and their recent fatwa as committing crimes against humanity and sins against God.

So who is really degrading ISIS and who is feeding them with free recruits?

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Christian Minorities an endangered species

http://bit.ly/12UGBmd

9 July 2013
ABC The Drum
CHRISTIAN MINORITIES AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Emerging democracies in the ‘Arab Spring’ may have claimed an innocent casualty: Christian minorities.

If the crudest consequence of elections is ‘majority rules’, then minorities need protection. Westerners who laud the ‘Arab Spring’ cannot have it both ways, waving the carrot of democracy with one hand while waving a big stick with the other hand if Islamic values prevail. While a constitution may enshrine safeguards, this depends on who constitutes the majority.

As protestor Dalia Youssef declared from Tahrir Square after the recent en masse toppling of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, “the voice of the majority of people in any country is democracy.”

The consequences of ‘majority rules’ haunts the original Middle East Christians since the crucifixion itself. When Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked the assembled masses to choose between two prisoners, the majority ruled that Barabbas be released and Jesus be crucified. Despite the injustice and the manipulations, the man on the throne merely washed his hands and turned away. The besieged Christians of the Middle East fear that this history may be repeating itself.

Those who live in majority Muslim nations are facing unprecedented fear and exodus as their churches and clergy are attacked. As a Maronite Catholic who was born in Lebanon, it astounds me that the birthplace of Christianity and the indigenous descendants of the first Christians are not afforded better protection, compared with Saudi Arabia and Israel. I have even been asked “are there still Christians in the Middle East?” It would be a tragedy if this was no longer an ignorant question but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The statistics are staggering: A century ago, one in five Arabs were Christian, whereas now they number one in 20.

The sectarian war in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion has halved the Christian population to less than 400,000.

In October 2006, Orthodox priest Fr Boulos Iskander was kidnapped, held to ransom, then beheaded in Mosul. Another 17 priests and 2 bishops have been kidnapped since then. The terror has culminated in the Al Qaeda-linked attack of Our Lady of Salvation Chaldean Catholic Church in Karrada in November 2010, killing more than 50 parishioners and two priests during a Sunday sermon. Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wijdan Michael declared that this attack was “an attempt to force Iraqi Christians to leave Iraq and to empty Iraq of Christians.”

In Egypt, Al Qiddissine (Two Saints) Coptic Church in Alexandria was attacked by suicide bombers as parishioners were leaving the midnight mass on January 1, 2011, killing 23 people. Another 13 Copts were killed in violent clashes after Shahedin Church was burnt south of Cairo in March 2011.
On September 30, 2011, the dome and bell of St George Coptic Church in Edfu were burnt to the ground. Hence, the 8 million Coptic Christians in Egypt have a litany of reasons to feel more vulnerable than ever in their own homeland.

The anti-Christian embers spread across the border to Libya, where a Coptic church was bombed near Misrata on December 30, 2012. Another Coptic church was attacked by armed Muslim militants in Benghazi on 28 February 2013.

In Syria, over 300,000 Christians have already fled in fear as foreign jihadists terrorise the ‘infidels’ in pursuit of a Salafist state. Saudi sheiks subsidise these salafists even though this US-ally has no churches to bomb as they are prohibited.

On April 22, 2013, two Orthodox bishops were kidnapped by armed men from Kafr Dael, a rebel-controlled area in Syria. Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church and Bishop Boulos Yazigi, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, remain missing. During her first visit to Australia last October, peace activist Mother Agnes Mariam declared that that the foreign infiltration of Syria harbors a “a hidden will to empty the Middle East of its Christian presence.” The sectarian strife is now spilling over from Syria into Lebanon, where Christians are already a shrinking minority of about 34 per cent compared with the last census in 1932 when they constituted half the population.

In his timely book ‘Christianophobia’, British journalist Rupert Shortt highlighted the plight of Christian minorities in seven Muslim-majority countries. He warns that the eradication of Christians from their biblical heartland may be a ‘blind spot’ for those who are distracted by the ‘Arab Spring.’ He posits that their persecution is magnified by anti-Americanism and the false belief that Christianity is a ‘Western creed’

Indeed, Christian minorities may have become scapegoats and held to ransom for the ‘crusade’ declared by US president George W Bush during the ‘war on terror.’ Many of the anti-Christian attacks in Arab lands have been ‘justified’ as revenge for anti-Muslim attacks by Christians in the West, such as Florida pastor Terry Jones who burnt the Koran in 2011.

It is the height of arrogance to laud Arab societies for ‘importing’ western ideologies of democracy, when in fact the new generation of Arabs have their own aspirations and ideologies. Ironically, it is the importing of ideologies of theocracy from US-allied Gulf states that has hijacked the pro-democracy uprisings, but rarely registered on the Western radar. Indeed, it is these ideologies of sectarian supremacy, rather than Islam or Muslims per se, that pose the biggest threat of extinction to the indigenous Christians.

If the Christian Arabs were an endangered species of whales, there would be collective outrage, rescue efforts and intervention by the International Court of Justice.

Joseph established the Streetwork Project for exploited children in Adelaide in 1986, was appointed Victorian Multicultural Affairs Commissioner in 1991, and founded the Australian Arabic Council in 1992.