THE AUSTRALIAN
February 7, 2006 Tuesday
Where is the Muslim outrage about real hate speech?
Tim Blair
Leading Australian blogger Tim Blair, at timblair.net, published the 12 Danish cartoons of Mohammed yesterday
AUSTRALIANS have received their orders. According to The Sydney Morning Herald: ''A senior Islamic cleric has called on Australia's media not to publish the cartoons which have sparked riots across the Muslim world. Sheik Fehmi El-Imam, the general-secretary of the Board of Imams of Victoria, warned reprinting the cartoons here could disturb people who can do things that we don't want them to do. In some parts of the world there is rioting against the Danish and the Dutch, we don't want that in Australia, the sheik said today. Unfortunately, New Zealand has [published the cartoons] ... I'm trying to avoid, to put far away, any possibility of disturbing the peace in Australia.''
Odd that this concern over maintaining the peace doesn't limit Muslim commentary on other religions or communities. The Islamic Bookstore in Lakemba, for example, sells the vicious anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as various anti-Christian titles (Crucifixion -- or Cruci-FICTION?).
Sheik Khalid Yasin, a regular guest lecturer in Australia, declared that ''there's no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend'' and denounced modern clothes as the work of ''faggots, homosexuals and lesbians''; Christians, he said, deliberately infected Africans with AIDS. Yasin wouldn't merely draw cartoons of homosexuals -- he'd have them put to death in accordance with Koranic law. One imam told Australian students that Jews put poison in bananas. Iraqis voting in their country's elections were shot at and otherwise intimidated by Islamic extremists whose banners announced: ''You vote, you die''. These friends of free speech were also observed photographing those who dared vote. Sheikh Feiz Muhammad told a supportive Bankstown crowd last year that women deserve to be raped if they wore ''satanical'' garments, including anything ''strapless, backless, [or] sleeveless'', and also ''miniskirts [and] tight jeans''.
All of this is far more hateful and moronic than those 12 Danish cartoons, not one of which depicts the Muslim prophet eating babies, poisoning fruit or infecting Africans with AIDS. Far from being against hate-speech, many Muslim spokesmen seem to be aggressively for it; until, of course, someone contemplates publishing harmless drawings of an old beardy guy.
Swedish feminist Nalin Pekgul, in The Wall Street Journal, laments that Islamists are driving moderate Muslims out of Europe:
WHEN I was 13 years old, my family had to flee Turkey for political reasons. My father fought for the Kurdish peoples' human rights. We came to Sweden in 1980 and, like many other Muslim immigrants, settled down in Tensta, a Stockholm suburb. We had unemployment and prejudices that led to ethnic tensions. But we also had happy children and ambitious young people with bright hopes for the future.
I stayed in Tensta as an adult, even though I could have afforded to move to a more prosperous neighbourhood. This led to accusations that I lived there just because it's ''politically correct''. I never chose to live in Tensta to improve my image. The only reason I didn't want to leave was that for 25 years Tensta was my home. Many of my closest friends live there. If my children got sick and we didn't have any medicine at home, there were always so many families around us to ask for help. This gave me an enormous feeling of security -- a feeling most people who choose to live where their roots are probably know.
Unfortunately, the neighbourhood I called my home for so many years has changed. It's no longer the familiar place it used to be and, most importantly, I no longer feel safe in Tensta. The influence of Islamic fundamentalists has grown so much that it is now impossible for me and my family to live there any more. I'm tired of being expected to speak badly of Christians and Jews just because I'm Muslim. I'm tired of the hate preachers. I'm tired of seeing women condemned for the way they dress. I don't want my daughter to be exposed to this type of aggression in the future. So I will soon have to leave Tensta.
National Party senator Barnaby Joyce, on the ABC's AM yesterday, says the man on the street is not interested in the AWB saga:
IT'S an argument that'll be big in Canberra and amount to absolutely nothing on the street, you know. It's one of those typical Canberra things that's an argument for the elite and not for the street. I welcome the Labor Party to spend as much possible time on that issue, and to go, to run with that for the next six or seven months, because they're just wasting their time. The more time they spend on that will just suit us fine because it's just not grabbing out there. Ask anybody at your local service station how they feel about AWB's wheat deals in Iraq, and they'll say, 'Look, I don't even think about it at all.'