Nadia Hasan has an article posted on the 'electronic intifada.' She claims not to be Muslim and to have no reason to wish to visit Palestine, other than to meet friends. She lives in Jordan. Her last name is Arabic. Her passport is from Chile.
Considering the work of al aqsa intifada with their random executions, kidnapping, torture and extortion, Ms Hasan has some friends. She tells the world little about her friends, or herself, other than the anti Israel message of being named Arabic and being turned back by Israel.
It isn't just fronts for terrorist activists that run an anti Israeli agenda. Respected left wing journals, such as the New York Times, Times of London and CNN are willing to run with terrorist propaganda. Any balanced news organisation, such as Fox, are blasted as being far right wing, which is greatly at odds with Fox's content.
TWELVE months ago, the states, territories and Federal Government agreed to prepare a national plan to “help all Australians work together to protect Australia from intolerance and extremism”.
ReplyDeleteWith the help of the Prime Minister’s Muslim Community Reference Group, a $35 million program was developed and, two months ago, approved.
It is aimed at coming to grips with extremists and includes a proposal for a world-class institute of Islamic studies, within a faculty of a prominent Australian university, to increase non-Muslim understanding of Islam.
It is to be hoped that some non-Muslim authorities are employed and that some of the self-appointed leaders of our Muslim communities enrol and are obliged to confront the realities of those Koranic texts which Islamofascists use to justify their insane violence.
One who might benefit is Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations Inc executive director Kuranda Seyit, who yesterday issued a statement calling for more Muslim migration to Australia to “improve the level of decency in our society and reinforce our treasured Australian values’’.
“The more Muslims the better this country is off in terms of good old fashioned decency. We should be so lucky,’’ he said.
Given the outrageous and bloody responses to the Danish cartoons last February and the lethal and destructive outbreak of hysteria across the Islamic world triggered by the scholarly address on the nature of God delivered by Pope XVI last Tuesday, which has not been condemned by anyone of any significance in the Australian Muslim community, it is hard to imagine what values Seyit could possibly have in mind.
As Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Andrew Robb told a conference of Australian imams in Sydney on Saturday, there is a “world-wide struggle going on for the soul of Islam, a struggle that will be won or lost by Muslims, not non-Muslims.’’
Australia’s Islamic leaders blame the media (and everyone else) for the bad press Islam receives but Robb said “unfair stigmatisation of most of Australia’s 360,000 Muslims is not the problem, it is a symptom of the problem. The stigmatisation is one of the consequences intended by the extremists.’’
“The extremists want to take the Muslim community back to the 7th Century,’’ he said - and at the weekend they did, murdering an elderly Italian nun working in an American-funded SOS hospital in Somalia and through a rash of predictable attacks on Christian churches.
A sterling representative of the “religion of tolerance’’ hardline Mogadishu cleric Sheik Abubukar Hassan Malinto urged his followers to hunt down and kill “whoever offends our prophet Mohammed on the spot by the nearest Muslim”.
But only the abjectly ignorant could have been offended by the Pope’s thoroughly researched address, although intelligent scholarly discourse on religion is apparently as alien to Islam abroad as it appears to be here.
As the attacks on the Pope show, anyone who examines Islam and the claim that it does not incite violence is invariably accused of vilifying Mohammed, religious intolerance or ridiculously, Islamophobia.
Despite radical Islam’s rabid apologists, and fellow travellers in the civil liberties lobby, and among various groups of anti-Americans, anti-Israelis and anti-Semites, terrorists from organisations such as Islamic Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah, Hamas, Hezbollah and their splinter groups, co-opt the Koran for their use.
For example, the Koran invites Muslims to “wage war’’ against Christians and Jews and to pray that Allah will fight against them (9:30), Christians and Jews are labelled “infidels’’ and “hypocrites’’ who live in Hell (66:9), those who claim Jesus is the Son of God are called “liars’’ (4:171, 10:66-69), and will have “boiling water poured over the heads, melting whatever is in their bellies and skins’’ (22:20).
Those who disbelieve are “surely the vilest of animals in the sight of Allah’’ (8:55), and polytheists are “the worst of creatures” (98:6).
While many in the West encourage multi-faith dialogue, they have to overcome Koranic admonitions such as “do not take the unbelievers for friends’’ (4:144). “do not be close friends with any other than your own people’’ (3:117) and “when you meet unbelievers, behead them until you have made much slaughter among them’’ (47:4).
No doubt some imams will quibble about these translations, but the references are from editions by reputable publishers Penguin and the King Fahd complex for the printing of the Koran in Saudi Arabia.
And there are plenty more just as blood-curdling, used by imams like Saudi Sheik Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, at the al-Haraam mosque, the most important in Mecca, who preached the annihilation of Jews in his Ramadan address in December, 2002, in which he also branded Jews as “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs’’.
It goes without saying that there are many fine Muslims, like the charming Javanese woman I had coffee with last week, who are disgusted by those who use Islam to incite violence. Naturally, no disrespect is meant to such people.
To blindly cave in every time a Muslim, or anyone else, gets excited about something someone has said in the most restrained and decorous manner is to indulge in the same sort of supine, spineless attitude that prevailed at Munich in 1938.
And to ignore those who preach hatred, no matter their religion, is to play Russian roulette with civilisation.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/do_not_cave_in_to_hate_bigots/
Australia could co-operate more closely with other countries in pursuing their wanted criminal or terrorist suspects within our borders, including conducting electronic surveillance on them even though the person hasn’t conducted an offence under Australian law. This is one of a range of possible changes to Australia’s mutual assistance arrangements with foreign governments flagged by the federal government yesterday. Other possible changes raised in a discussion paper yesterday include making it easier for foreign governments to freeze suspected proceeds of crime in Australia and forcing suspects to supply DNA samples to a foreign government, even though the person has committed no offences here.
ReplyDeleteThe possible changes were raised by Justice Minister Chris Ellison is a discussion paper released yesterday.
Senator Ellision said the increase in transnational crime and terrorism had made mutual assistance agreements between countries an increasingly important law enforcement tool.
“The emergence of new technologies and the growth of international travel have made it increasingly common for the witnesses, evidence and proceeds of a crime which has been committed in one country, to be located in another,” he said. “Without mutual assistance, a successful investigation or prosecution of murder, terrorism or child sex offences may be frustrated or never even get off the ground.”
Under the government’s review, however, the policy of not extraditing suspects to countries where they might face the death penalty will continue.
The possible changes would also make it easier for a foreign country to ask Australian authorities to cross check a DNA profile against Australia’s national DNA data-base. Australian authorities would also provide easy access to phone taps and other “stored communications” in the hands of local law enforcement agencies.
The changes appear to make a lot of sense, although it raises the issue that information inadvertently collected on Australians during electronic surveillance of foreign suspects here could find its way into the hands of foreign governments.
The federal government is taking public submissions on the discussion paper until October 13.
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/closer_global_crime_fighting_ties/
There’s an interesting contrast at the moment in the way different state police forces handle misconduct allegations against their officers. In WA, the police commissioner has reinstated five suspended officers prior to that state’s police anti-corruption body holding public hearings into possible misconduct. In Victoria the chief commissioner disbanded the squad at the centre of misconducted allegations ahead of similar embarrassing public hearings. As a result, one commissioner is under fire from outside his force, while the other is under internal attack.
ReplyDeleteThe much anticipated Office of Police Integrity hearings in Victoria of alleged assaults against suspects by members of the Armed Offender Squad began yesterday, with some colourful claims of individuals being “tortured”.
The “torture” comprised a suspect, who was arrested after planning an armed robbery, being allegedly kicked, punched and pushed down stairs. Other allegations include a gun being held to the head of a suspect and a suspect being threatened with death. “On any analysis, (the allegations) would equate to a form of torture,” counsel assisting at the OPI hearings said.
But one of the lawyers representing detectives under investigation said the hearing was nothing more than a show trial to justify Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon’s decision to disband the 30-member squad on September 8 – just before the plan for the public hearings was made public.
What emerged yesterday was that the allegations involve nine members of the squad and come from three suspects with criminal records. The uphill battle for the OPI, which is being tackled head on by the Victorian Police Association for its handling of the allegations, will be overcoming the public’s lack of sympathy for armed robbery suspects. Also in the union’s sights is Commissioner Nixon, who according to association secretary Paul Mullett has denied her detectives natural justice by pre-emptively disbanding the squad.
On the other side of the continent the WA Chief Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan has been justifying his decision to reinstate five suspended senior officers, including two assistant commissioners, involved in the Andrew Mallard wrongful conviction case.
The WA Corruption and Crime Commission is to hold public hearings into the prosecution of Mallard, who served 12 years in jail for murder before being released earlier this year. The inquiry will include why crucial evidence beneficial to his case was apparently withheld during his trial.
Commissioner O’Callaghan reinstated the five officers more than a week ago on the basis that a cold case review of the original murder had been completed. He had originally planned to release the findings of the review, but was requested not to do so by the CCC because it could jeopardise the planned hearings.
The weekend Commissioner O’Callaghan told Perth’s Sunday Times that he was now reconsidering his reinstatement of the five officers before the CCC hearing. “Based on the information I had before me at the time I was quite confident with (the decision) but that was a week ago,” he said.
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/forcing_the_issue/
Like the fall of Constantinople:
ReplyDeleteSWEDEN swept away 12 years of centre-left government on Sunday in favour of a conservative candidate who has pledged to revise the welfare state.
Socialists everywhere will have to point their prayer mats to some other Mecca.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/sweden_gets_real/
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/09/18/1158431644433.html
Beyond parody. The Pope warns against Muslinm extremists who use violence to promote faith, and gets this back:
ReplyDeleteAl-Qaeda in Iraq posted a statement on the internet threatening to “smash the cross” and issuing a warning to the Pope. “We say to the servant of the cross: wait for defeat.”
To read the Pope’s full speech, a beautifully argued plea for reason even in faith, is to be convinced of two things.
First, much of the Western media framed him, some maliciously, accusing him of saying much more than he did, and of saying it more crudely. Reason is dying even in the West, I sometimes fear.
Second, the Muslim leaders who have damned him and threatened him clearly had no interest in finding out what he actually said, or of engaging with it with any honesty. They clearly wanted to take offence, and no appeal to reason with them seems to work, either.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/al_qaeda_damns_pope_for_making_muslims_seem_violent/
The Australian reports:">The Australian reports:
ReplyDeleteA BABY suffered serious electrical burns, witnessed repeated acts of domestic violence and lived in horrific conditions among piles of cat faeces for 22 months before Victorian welfare authorities finally took her away from her drug-addicted mother.
The state’s Department of Human Services was first notified of concerns for the girl in March 2001, when the child was three months old.
Despite the mother’s first child being removed from her care in 1999, the second child was not removed by the department until January 2003. ...
On her first visit, the worker found the child, then 19 months old, wearing only a sodden nappy that had leaked on a three-seater couch. It left a pool of urine that the mother made no attempt to acknowledge or clean up.
The girl was also eating yoghurt with hands that were covered in urine. Asked by the worker to take away the yoghurt, bathe her daughter and change her nappy, the Aboriginal mother, who was 21 years old when she gave birth, said: “I’ll do it after I finish my smoke and coffee."
The story gets much worse, but the question is obvious: why was this child not removed much, much sooner?
Is it because she was Aboriginal? Is it because, as I’ve warned so often, that we leave Aboriginal children in grave danger that we would not tolerate for children of any other race because we are so terrified of the “stolen generations” myth?
Professor Robert Manne, our leading “stolen generations” propagandist, recently confirmed in a debate that even the saving of Topsy, a 12-year-old girl with syphilis, was a racist act that proved the truth of the “stolen generations”. I repeat: when even the saving of a syphilitic child is called racist, no wonder we won’t save similarly abused Aboriginal children today.
The Australian‘s story goes on:
... The mother was subsequently found to have a history since early childhood of severe domestic violence, substance abuse, neglect and deprivation.
When the mother was three, her older sister had been murdered.
The “stolen generations” myth is killing Aboriginal children right now. It is racist and genocidal to push a theory that causes so much harm, when it is based on so little truth.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/another_stolen_life/
After all those headlines declaring the Howard Government knew of the AWB bribery of Saddam’s Iraq, Federal Court judge Neil Young warns that the fun of a good lynching may be over:
ReplyDeleteJustice Young said AWB’s executives were “very concerned to explain AWB’s claims of innocence and to secure the Government’s ongoing support”.
If the Government already knew the AWB was corrupt, why would the AWB have tried so hard to pretend to the Government that it was not?
Commissioner Terry Cole has yet to deliver his own findings on the AWB scandal he has been investigating, but the clues so far suggest his own thinking isn’t so very different on this point. I suspect that several journalists who have repeatedly and aggressively pushed the line that the Government knew all along Saddam was being bought off will be furious to find the facts won’t match their reporting.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_media_wont_be_happy/
This kind of stuff can only be written by people who have not seen or even imagined the reality of what they write about. Here’s Nahum Ayliffe, a Uniting Church youth worker and Australian Democrats candidate:
ReplyDeleteOn Tuesday, Pope Benedict detonated a thought bomb outside every Mosque in the known world. A truck bomb might have caused less grief.
Don’t our playgrounds teach that old saying about sticks and stones any more?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/pope_worse_than_a_truck_bomb_says_modern_church_worker/
The Wall Street Journal announces in its editorial some good news for terrorists -and bad for their potential victims. Hard aggressive questioning of the kind that journalists and activists like to call “torture” has been virtually ruled out by the US military in its updated Field Manual:
ReplyDeleteSo Iraqi and Afghan insurgents won’t even face the prospect of your average good cop/bad cop routine. The manual allows for a watered down version called “Mutt and Jeff” in which interrogators can affect different personalities. But the Manual admonishes strongly that the intelligence “collector must be extremely careful that he does not threaten or coerce a source. Conveying a threat may be a violation of the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice].” We kid you not. “Mutt and Jeff” is the worst that Abu Musab al Zarqawi could have expected from the Pentagon had he been captured alive…
All of this has to be counted a severe setback for the war effort if Mr. Bush is right that interrogations have played a key role in the antiterror fight and that “tough” methods are sometimes necessary. Last year ABC news reported that 11 top al Qaeda figures broke only after “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of suffocation and is the most controversial of the known techniques employed.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/captured_terrorists_wont_go_to_water/
f we really want to blame ourselves for Muslim rage against the West, let’s not pick and choose what it is about us that is so offensive.
ReplyDeleteI think Health Minister Tony Abbott is right - that list of our more troubling sins is much longer than the one the Left likes to focus on:
Combating terrorism means facing up to all the ways in which Western societies fall short of their professed ideals. How can alienated Muslim males be expected to respect women, for instance, when this city’s bookstands, billboards and TV shows proclaim that women are sex objects?
How can devout Muslims be expected to regard Western societies as the flowering of civilisation when so much of modern music, art and writing is obsessed with the banal and the degrading? How can people be expected to take our professed respect for human life seriously, when they constantly see footage of the innocent victims of Anglo-American and Israeli air strikes?
The last point is the one that the Left likes to hammer, although as Abbott goes on to suggest, the truth of it is more complicated. But as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (no neo-cons at all) suggest in their book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, it’s the degrading of women by the West (in the eyes of devout Muslims) that may be much more provocative. But where is the Left on that, or on thte drift to barbarism of so much contemporary culture, especially in the high arts?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/more_the_bikinis_than_than_bombs_perhaps/
My parents were among a generation of migrants who would have laughed at the kind of thinking that lies behind an article that begins like this:
ReplyDeleteThe federal government has denied its spending on integrating new migrants into Australia has been inadequate.
Under proposed laws, migrants would be required to know Australia’s history, culture and values, as well as English, before being granted citizenship.
Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration Andrew Robb released the citizenship discussion paper on Saturday, calling for submissions on the merits of introducing a formal citizenship test.
Labor spokeswoman for citizenship Senator Annette Hurley told the Nine Network she supported the government’s moves, but said more needed to be spent on integrating migrants into the community.
“You can’t say to people, `You must learn English within three or four years’, when in fact you don’t allow them proper classes, classes that have childcare attached,” Senator Hurley said.
As so many countless migrants could tell you, the help you get today to learn English and to settle in painlessly is so far ahead of what earlier arrivals were ever offered. The difference now is not measured in what is missing but what has been added.
Here’s a few of them:
* New arrivals have come to a country whose culture-makers now stress that the place is rotten with a shameful history, (so best not join).
* Government multicultural policies now stress that the best cultures are the ones migrants come from, not join here.
* Those same policies steer the most money and the most influential government posts to those migrants who keep most apart. An assimilated Dutchman neither wants nor gets a penny, but an unassimilated cleric can get on a prime minister’s advisory council.
* Migrants now can get TV from home piped in, locally printed newspapers of their old language, government-funded ethnic services, cheap TV calls to back home and enough money in these cheap-travel days to fly back to the old village almost every year. If you are Muslim, the chances are better than even that your local imam speaks your language - and almost no English. Why assimilate? What’s the incentive to to learn about your new country and its past - as so many migrants did voluntarily before without needing childcare facilities and new government regulations?
I don’t mention that last bit to criticise but simply to note a change - and note, too, that this represents a big new challenge to governments. Time to scrap multicultural policies and replace them with something more urgently needed: citizenship policies.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/no_childcare_shouldnt_mean_no_english/
The Pope is lectured by two Sunday Times journalists who can’t even be frank when they are being blind:
ReplyDeleteThe best that can be said of the Pope in this instance is that he has played unintentionally into the hands of Islam’s critics, thus raising the likelihood of inter-religious violence.
Blind: Can’t they see how absurd it is to criticise the Pope for warning of Islam’s history of spreading faith by the sword when the man is now being threatened with violence by, er, Muslims?
Not frank: The writers say the Pope’s comments raise “the likelihood of inter-religious violence”, as if it’s just as likely Christians will now bomb or assassinate Muslims in a war of faith as it is that Muslims will attack Christians. What the authors really meant but refused to say - not being as honest and brave as the Pope they criticise - is that the Pope’s warning might lead to more Muslim extremists attacking Christians.
Heavens, Islamists might even kill - I don’t know - a nun. An elderly one. In Mogadishu, perhaps. While the local imam calls for the Pope to be killed, too.
UPDATE. Meanwhile, back in the mosques of the religion that surely doesn’t tolerate violence...
ISLAMIC clerics in Sydney and Melbourne are using covert tactics to preach martyrdom and jihad to young followers, recruiting them under the guise of classes teaching the Koran.
Singapore-based terrorism analyst Rohan Gunaratna told The Australian that despite their denials and stronger terror laws, religious leaders in the two cities continued to preach violence to impressionable followers, though they now did it away from their mainstream teachings.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/attacking_the_pope_wont_get_you_killed/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intifada
ReplyDeletehttp://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5729.shtml
Yesterday I came to Aqaba, Jordan, and today I went to the border at 8 am.
I was nervous, but at the same time I felt good, doing something that I had been anticipating for a long time.
I crossed the Jordanian border without any problem, only 15 minutes later I picked up my bag again and started walking to the Palestinian side which is controlled by Israel. Two armed guys were waiting there and asked me for my passport. They look each other and asked me "Where are you from?" despite that one of them had my Chilean passport in his hand. After that I went to the questioning room, and two other officers were there and asked me the normal questions -- well, normal by Israeli standards. All the questions were about my family name, why my name is Nadia Hasan, if I am Muslim. I answered no, I am Christian. "But why do you have a Muslim name; why don't you change it?" Twenty minutes more of that and they let me pass. They even told me, "Welcome to Israel, enjoy your time here."
I got to passport control and a big group of tourists were there. Everyone got their visa in less that five minutes. When was my turn, I saw a familiar face, the woman in the control office was the same one as last year, who gave me a one-month visa told me, "If you don't like it, go back to Chile. We don't want more Palestinians here!"
This time, everything was normal. She asked me for my passport, and checked my name at the computer. She was looking at it for more that two minutes. At that moment I knew that my name was there, but what kind of information they have, I don't know. She called in a guy, then another woman, and then another guy. All of them were talking in Hebrew, sometimes glancing over at me, then reading again -- I don't know for how long, I was so nervous.
A different officer came to me and started to speak in Arabic. I told him that I did't understand, but he continued to speak in Arabic. After that he told me "good luck" and asked me to go to the check room again. Well, he didn't ask such as order me "move now."
I entered in the questioning room and I had all the Israeli security with me, more than 15 persons, all of them not older than 22, playing an important game in their life, with power in their hands and with a terrorist in front of them. I saw excited eyes, waiting for the orders of the oldest man, the guy with the largest M16 in his hand.
They opened all my bags, put everything on a table and start to check all it, every last item. A young woman told me that she need to check my body, and with a smile on my face I answered, "OK, no problem" When she was checking me she whispered to me, "I am sorry, but is my work -- can you take of all your clothes?" I replied yes, but I want to keep my t-shirt on (I didn't want to show my tattoo). However, she checked all of me -- open your legs, close your legs, sit here, up and open your legs again, etc. Just like last year.
After the woman from last year came and asked me if I was in Israel before, I answered yes. "Why are you coming again?" I have friends here. "Arabic friends?" No, Israeli friends. "Israelis?" Her face changed. Yes, Israeli friends. She asked me their names and I gave them to her.
I was then asked for my other passport, a passport that I of course don't have. I was asked about Gaza, about Nablus, about other Arab countries, about my name again ...
She then left me alone, I checked the time, was 10:30 am. I was thinking that my future in Palestine will depend on her decision. I wanted to smoke, but of course I was not allowed to do do so, and told sit there and wait.
I continued to wait, nervous but quiet at the same time. I had been waiting for this moment since I was refused from my homeland last year, six long months before. I was there once more, ready to experience it all again.
I checked the time, it was 12:15. I asked if I could use the bathroom, but they told me no, to sit and wait. After ten minutes the woman came back. I wanted to cry; I knew that she held my dreams in her hands. She gave me back my passport, I took my bags (after putting everything back inside) and I started to walk away.
Tears filled my eyes as all my memories from Palestine flooded my head and my heart. I thought about every person that I met in Nablus, how much I wanted go back, how close I was.
One man stopped me and told me something that I had heard before and didn't want to hear again: "Welcome to Jordan."
I was back in Aqaba, with Palestine in front of me but farther away than ever.
I went through the Jordanian border once again, my bags feeling lighter than before. The tears were still in my eyes, but my legs were stronger. What the Israelis on the other side don't understand that every time that they refuse a Palestinian at the border they recognize that the Palestinians are there. They use those guns to keep something that doesn't belong to them. They are afraid to see us through our eyes, to acknowledge that we are here, near, and always will be near. For the truth is that Palestine exists.
Nadia Hasan lives in Amman, Jordan, where she waits to return to
Palestine. She was first deported by Israel in September of 2005,
and this essay was written in March 2006, after third attempt to
return to Palestine.