Islam in Australia: Living and dying for the flag of Allah

[nero_bolt]

• Sydney-based radicaal Islamic group denounce Australian flag and talk about beheading ‘non-believers’
• Tony Abbott: “the only flag that should be flying is the Australian national flag”
• Wissam Haddad: “Shahada flag ... that’s a flag that I stand and live and die for and I don’t stand and live and die for the Australian flag”

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/islam-in-australia-living-and-dying-for-the-flag-of-allah/...

A SENIOR leader of radical Sydney-based Islamic organisation al-Risalah has denounced the Australian flag, as the group’s supporters posted Facebook messages about ­beheading “non-believers”.

Wissam Haddad, the head of the al-Risalah Islamic Centre in Sydney’s southwest, yesterday told The Daily Telegraph he followed the “flag of Allah” rather than the flag of Australia.

The flag, called the Shahada, is the same as the one used by Islamic State terrorists who have been spreading death and terror across the Middle East.

TIM BLAIR: A LOOK INSIDE SYDNEY’S MUSLIM LAND

TIM BLAIR REPLIES TO SOME OF HIS DETRACTORS

I’m not comfortable personally holding the (Australian) flag because this flag does not represent me as a Muslim. My flag is the flag of Allah. That’s my flag.

I’m not comfortable personally holding the (Australian) flag because this flag does not represent me as a Muslim

“For me to have the Shahada flag, as it’s called, that’s a flag that I stand and live and die for and I don’t stand and live and die for the Australian flag.”

Mr Haddad’s comments came just hours after Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Ray Hadley on 2GB radio that “the only flag that should be flying is the Australian national flag”.

The PM sat down with community leaders yesterday in a bid to allay fears about recently beefed-up counter-terror laws.

“We’ve got a serious problem of radicalised people going to the Middle East to fight with terrorist groups,” he said.

“Some of them will want to come back to Australia and they do pose a risk if they do, because they’ve been radicalised, militarised and brutalised by the experience.”

In the past week, al-Risalah followers have posted messages about beheading, in the wake of the shocking image of Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf’s son holding the severed head of a Syrian soldier.

This followed fellow terrorist and former Sydney boxer Mohamed Elomar posting similar photographs on Twitter. Al-Risalah members wear black supporter vests, which sell for $65.

The al-Risalah centre has hosted radical preachers, and Mr Haddad is a supporter of the Islamic State’s “Jizyah” protection tax on Christians and Jews in Syria and Iraq.

Also yesterday, teenage Muslim extremist Sulyman Khalid, who was arrested for an alleged hate crime against a Bankstown cleaner, has been released on bail. Mr Khalid, who calls himself Abu Bakr, will front Bankstown Local Court on September

[kilroy_is_here · Accepted solution]

Well when I look around the world I don't see a small group , I see thousands of Muslims running to join the course at the moment we see a trickle from Australia , but let's face it even the biggest dam can be destroyed by a hole the size of a pin if it is not dealt with,I personally believe the time to stand up fix a problem is when it's a trickle as once it becomes a flood it will very hard to contain , arrest and deport the radicles from this country now before they they can pollute any one else , it's not good enough to howl down those who speak out it's time more of us supported a stronger response arrest warrants should be issued immediately for the Australians fighting over seas they should be charged with treason and jailed for life or deported , if they are not in the country they should be bared re entry regardless where they are born, we must show that this is not except able here in this county

[kilroy_is_here]

Oh by the way I can name quite a few clueless nutters who have gone on to claim millions of lives in the name of their beliefs pol pot springs to mind straight away the list would be long and varied

[the_great_she_elephant]

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@kilroy_is_here wrote:
So let me get this straight we are not aloud to criticise Muslims in any way yet they can threaten to cut my head off and bomb my house, well I'm very sorry but if they day comes that they are outside my door hope you are there to stand between us and explain to them that one of us is wrong

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If someone has threatened to cut your head off or bomb your house I sincerely hope you went straight to the cops and reported him, whatever race/colour/religion he was.

[boris1gary]

is radicaal more radical than radical?

[i-need-a-martini]

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@kilroy_is_here wrote:
Well when I look around the world I don't see a small group , I see thousands of Muslims running to join the course at the moment we see a trickle from Australia , but let's face it even the biggest dam can be destroyed by a hole the size of a pin if it is not dealt with,I personally believe the time to stand up fix a problem is when it's a trickle as once it becomes a flood it will very hard to contain , arrest and deport the radicles from this country now before they they can pollute any one else , it's not good enough to howl down those who speak out it's time more of us supported a stronger response arrest warrants should be issued immediately for the Australians fighting over seas they should be charged with treason and jailed for life or deported , if they are not in the country they should be bared re entry regardless where they are born, we must show that this is not except able here in this county

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Do you actually SEE thousands running to join in? Or do you PERCEIVE there to be thousands running in to join the cause because there are bull **bleep** articles telling you so?

[boris1gary]

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@ufo_investigations wrote:

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even better to be antifascist

[i-need-a-martini]

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@the_great_she_elephant wrote:

Did anyone watch Media Watch last night regarding the supposed interview with ISIS Commander Omar Shishani on the 3AW Drive show? The sheer incompetence and gullibility of the interviewer would be ROFL funny had the spoof not gone viral and sucked in social media rent-a-patriots all round the world.

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I think that this sorry episode highlights the gullibility and hunger Australians have for the garbage that the media is irresponsibly feeding us.

We are being taught to fear something that never existed but our defensiveness is causing paranoia to marginist groups like the ones quoted in the OP.

[boris1gary]

just part of the "Team Australia" campaign, this rubbish keeps up there will only be about 47 people in the team.

[the_great_she_elephant]

I've just discovered that all the volunteers in my local St Vinnies shop are Catholics - is it safe to let my grandchildren hunt for bargains there?

[boris1gary]

an answer to tim blairs "article",  c&pd the entire article

http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/sydneys-muslim-land-a-locals-perspective-20140...

'Sydney’s Muslim Land':   a local's perspective

Date August 19, 2014

I was born and raised in the Canterbury-Bankstown area. Over the course of my relatively short life, I’ve seen my fair share of sensationalist news articles and poorly edited video packages on my local area, featuring the standard shots of women in niqabs walking past ‘exotic’ grocers as bearded men scurry inside. But yesterday’s article in the Daily Telegraph entitled ‘Last Drinks in Lakemba: Tim Blair takes a look inside Sydney’s Muslim Land’ really did manage to set a new bar of awfulness in the already awful climate of representations of Muslims in mainstream media.

Blair opens his article with a lamentation of the impending demise of ‘one of the last Anglo holdouts’ in Lakemba, the Lakemba Hotel. He remarks that the characteristic which sets Lakemba apart from the rest of Sydney is not its multicultural flavour, but its Middle-Eastern ‘monoculture’. He adds as a helpful aside while ‘all the restaurants’ in Lakemba serve great food, the bookshops are full of scary material, going on to provide several quotes from three books he happened to spot amongst the hundreds on shelves. The image of one entitled ‘Women Who Deserve to Go To Hell’ is then featured alongside that of a male mannequin placed outside a clothing shop, whose drawn-on, black texta beard  is captioned as ‘crudely Islamified’. Add in a few images of Halal butchers and a shot of Australian Mohamed Elomar allegedly holding up a severed head in Iraq, and you get a complete picture of what the suburb of Lakemba is all about.

Or not. It’s difficult to even begin to unravel the long line of fear-mongering stereotypes and tired clichés which underpin this article.  But one can only try:

1.)    ‘Muslims are all Arab’

The title of the article suggests that it offers an insight into a ‘Muslim land’. But elsewhere Lakemba is also rather confusingly referred to as a ‘Middle-Eastern south-western suburb’ and being akin to ‘any Arabic city’. Never mind the fact that not all Muslims are Arab, or that the most populous Muslim country in the world is actually our neighbour, Indonesia, or the fact that in 2010 the Pew Research Forum statistics indicated in 2010 that 62.1% of Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific and only 19.9% in the Middle-East and North Africa.

2.)    ‘But all brown people are the same, aren’t they?’

According to the 2011 census data on languages spoken at home in the State Suburb of Lakemba, languages categorised as Indo-Aryan, in particular Bengali and Urdu, far outnumber Arabic. This is reflected in the mix of restaurants and grocers along Lakemba’s main street, the obvious indications being shops such as ‘Bangla Bazar’ and ‘Ekush-Bangladeshi Thai Chinese Restaurant’ alongside the few Lebanese restaurants referred to in the article. But this kind of diversity isn’t of the type people like or understand. Because there are varieties of brown people in Lakemba, they all become essentialised into one big fat lump of ‘monoculture’.

3.)    ‘Muslims don’t know how to speak for themselves’

Despite offering a ‘look inside’ the suburb, Blair doesn’t appear to have actually engaged in conversation with any Muslims at all in ‘Sydney’s Muslim Land’. Instead, he bases his many observations on street signs, food samples and three books he picks up which he says ‘caught my eye’. When he does decide to get some information on what the suburb’s Muslim residents are like, he goes straight to two non-Muslim locals who give their opinion of what they think Muslims are like. This is reflective of a recurring trend of representations of Muslims in mainstream media: they are spoken to and about constantly, but never allowed to actually speak for themselves.

4.)     ‘It’s okay though, they have good food!’

Ah, the racist’s fall-back. After all, no one who likes a kebab could possibly be racist, could they? Blair claims to somehow know that ‘all the restaurants’ in Lakemba serve good food, despite the cuisines on offer ranging from Pakistani to Indonesian to Moroccan and thus impossible to canvas into a single culinary entity. He then offers the handy tip that if you don’t know what to order in a Lebanese restaurant, just go for something with the word ‘mixed’ in it. Plus, the ‘unusual hours’ of Lakemba grocers during the month of Ramadan render them super-convenient.

One of the page’s creators, Will Scates Frances, stated that he created the page “as a satire of the kind of reporting that turns Lakemba into a scary place of Islamic people who are so scary that they don't even have enough voice to be quoted in an article about 'them'”. At the time of writing, the page has over 700 likes, and the hashtag #TeamMannequin is trending on Twitter. Last drinks, or last laugh? You decide.

As laughable as this is in the context of the real fear generated by these types of articles, it points to the existence of a more insidious, everyday racism in which diversity is only tolerated in the form of offering new and ‘exotic’ culinary tidbits to sample.

Within hours of the publishing of the article, a Facebook page entitled ‘The Crudely Islamified Mannequin Man’ was set up to commemorate the many achievements of the stoic bearded mannequin so prominently featured in Blair’s article. 

Zeynab Gamieldien is a resident of Canterbury-Bankstown