Islam in Australia and the Urgency of Reform.

Note: Relations with Islam and muslims in Australia obviously have to be broader than simply arresting them under the Terrorism Act. Australia, as a Western nation, will generally act within the Western framework that is current in relation to Islam. The Catholic Church will continue to be a major international player in the field of Western-Islam relations.

It is useful to keep abreast of these developments as they occur. PC whining about 'the poor put upon muslims' is not a policy with any benefits to Australia. Nor is it any good to pretend that the problems faced by muslims, in Australia and elsewhere, are 'all someone else's fault'.

Australians need to get serious about this situation. It is not going away.
(mike davis)

The story below is from John Allen, a very well known journalist who covers the Vatican.

(Extract from 'The Word From Rome' 31 March 2006)




...Again at the level of content, the dominant storyline in the transition from John Paul II to Benedict XVI is obviously continuity. He was elected with precisely that expectation.

There is, however, one intriguing area of contrast: Islam. To put it bluntly, Benedict is more of a hawk, pursuing a kind of interaction with Muslims one might call "tough love."

The new climate has in part been driven by widely publicized incidents of anti-Christian backlash in the Islamic world, most dramatically the Feb. 5 slaying of Italian missionary Fr. Andrea Santoro in Trabzon, Turkey, a small hamlet on the country's Black Sea coast. A 16-year-old Turk entered St. Mary's Church in Trabzon and pumped two bullets into Santoro's lungs and heart, shouting Allah akbar, "Allah is great." He later said he had been agitated by the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons.

Though the teenager's father told reporters his son is psychologically disturbed, most senior figures in the Vatican, where the Santoro murder made a deep impression, saw it as part of a rising tide of anti-Christian sentiment in fundamentalist Islamic circles. That impression was underscored by the recent threat of a death sentence for Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert from Islam in Afghanistan.

In his March 23 session with cardinals, much conversation turned on Islam, and there was general agreement with Benedict's policy of a more muscular challenge on what Catholics call "reciprocity." In essence, it means that if Muslim immigrants can claim the benefit of religious liberty in the West, then Christian minorities ought to get the same treatment in majority Muslim nations.

To take the most notorious example, if the Saudis can spend $65 million to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome, in the shadows of the Vatican, then Christians ought to be able to build churches in Saudi Arabia. Or, if that's not possible, Christians should at least be able to import Bibles, and the Capuchin priests who serve the Arabian peninsula ought to be able to set foot off the oil industry compounds or embassy grounds in Saudi Arabia without fear of harassment by the mutawa, the religious police. The bishop in charge of the Catholic church in that part of the world recently described the situation in Saudi Arabia as "reminiscent of the catacombs."

It's the kind of imbalance that has long stuck in the craw of many senior figures in the Catholic Church, but these complaints were largely suppressed in the John Paul years as part of the pope's Islamic Ostpolitik. John Paul, who met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his papacy, and who during a 2001 trip to Damascus became the first pope to enter a mosque, believed in reaching out to Islamic moderates and avoiding confrontational talk.

Benedict XVI clearly wants good relations with Islam, and chose to meet with a group of Muslim leaders during his August trip to Cologne, Germany. Yet he will not purse that relationship at the expense of what he considers to be the truth.

No doubt, Benedict intends this tougher line as a stimulus to Islamic leaders to take seriously the challenge of expressing their faith in a multi-cultural, pluralistic world. Whether it's received that way, or whether it simply reinforces the conviction of many jihadists about an eternal struggle with the Christian West, remains to be seen.


Comment: As this is written, yet another group of Australian muslims have been arrested and will be charged under the Terrorism Act. Clearly, this cannot go on; serious policies have to be introduced to integrate all the Australian muslim communities into the broad mainstream of Australian life.

This problem of 'no policies for muslim integration' is now acute and the principle sufferers are the Australian muslims. The late and unlamented Carr Government of NSW completely ignored the growing problems in the muslim communities, preferring to simply financially bribe the various muslim groups and muslim business leaders who marketted themselves as being able to 'control' the muslims.

It is time for a policy which removes the muslims from being 'controlled' by these spivs and their allies, the imams. A better way is to induce all the muslims in Australia to join in the mainstream of Australia and free themselves from the backwardness of their present circumstances.

The administrative key to such a policy is to emphasise the individual Australian muslim person, male and female. It will be counter productive to approach 'Institutional Islam' and expect reform. All reform requires that power holders give up a lot of their power and allow it to be redistributed to new power holders. The spivs and imams currently holding the various muslim communities in their thrall (including the use of violence, threatened and delivered)will not go quietly. Their power can only be broken by serious government policies.

The Australian media needs to start thinking about this matter. Serious policies need to be evolved.

Is anyone awake in Canberra or Macquarie Street or Spring Street?