MUSLIM Australians have linked the Arab-Israeli conflict to violent extremism here, a federal parliamentary inquiry has been told.
Sign up for your free 2 month trial

Attorney-General’s Department senior official Jamie Lowe told a recent hearing that people at a community engagement forum had said that solving the Middle East conflict would get rid of the “violent extremism problem”.

Ms Lowe said that the comment was tongue-in-cheek because Australia was powerless to solve the crisis, but her department had passed it on to the Foreign Affairs Department as being of serious concern.

“Things happening in their countries of birth obviously have an impact on them here,” she told the federal multicultural inquiry.

The Herald Sun revealed yesterday that some of Melbourne’s northern suburbs had been identified as potential terrorist hot spots, with Muslim communities under surveillance by security agencies.

Muslim Australian Mohamed Elrafihi, who lives in the area, said that such surveillance stigmatised and isolated communities.

“It just reinforces the notion that Muslims are terrorists or a threat to wider society and they need to be watched so they can be controlled,” he said.

Tony Vlahos, who converted to Islam 11 years ago, said he was sick of people pre-judging Muslims.

“It makes my life difficult because when I tell people I’m a Muslim they have an impression that Muslims are terrorists,” he said.

“The type of people who do these terrorist acts are certainly not representative of us and we shouldn’t be labelled for their actions.”

A spokesman for acting Attorney-General Jason Clare said that the northwestern suburbs formed a vibrant community, and insisted geographic areas were not the focus for counter-terrorism activities.

SOURCE:Herald Sun

t’s an encounter that has gone into the folklore of our diplomatic service.

An Australian envoy meeting a senior Malaysian official heard a familiar complaint about critical coverage of his country’s politics in the Australian media.

He snapped back: ”The media in Australia are not owned or controlled by the government,” the envoy said. ”Here they all are, and throughout my time here, I’ve never seen a favourable report about Australia.”

Senator Nick Xenophon, who went up last month to join an international team looking at Malaysia’s electoral system, has just had a personal lesson in just how slanted and hostile its media can be. After the team published a highly critical report, the New Straits Times newspaper, owned ultimately by the ruling United Malays National Organisation or UMNO, went to work on him.

It took a passage from one of his old parliamentary speeches on a favourite topic – ”Scientology is not a religious organisation. It is a criminal organisation that hides behind its so-called religious beliefs” – and substituted the world ”Islam” for ”Scientology” throughout. It’s hard to think of a cheaper reporting trick in a strongly Muslim country.

Australians often trip rather too naively into Malaysia’s murky political world. Succumbing to the happy multicultural story of ”Malaysia – truly Asia” a lot of us don’t see the deep racial fears and antipathies swirling in the country’s history and heating its politics even today.

Malaysia is a country of great wealth and many competencies, but despite decades of high growth still falls behind its potential because it hasn’t yet shaken itself free of its poisonous beginnings. Riven by massive fraud, waste and economic distortion, it is a country of religious zeal, yet as noted by Bridget Welsh, a political scientist at the Singapore Management University, its political life is dirty.

”Murder, sodomy, secret trysts, sex videos and conspiracy are all commonplace, and corruption scandals occur regularly,” she wrote on the East Asia Forum website recently. ”Both sides wallow in this political gutter, each trying to darken the reputation of the other, and not fully appreciating how much the system as a whole has been damaged.”

Australia and Australians have often been a convenient diversion from this domestic mudslinging, with sniping reaching low points in the 22 years of Mahathir Mohamad’s prime ministership.

It’s getting testy again as Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Najib Razak, heads towards a critical national election trying on one hand to preserve the ethnic dominance endowed in UMNO and on the other to reform the discredited underpinnings of that power.

Najib took the prime ministership after the UMNO-led ruling coalition suffered a big setback in the last elections, in March 2009, losing the two-thirds majority in Parliament that allowed it to make constitutional amendments and control five of the 13 states to a three-party opposition alliance put together by UMNO’s alienated former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.

Najib came with a lot of baggage – notably a kickback scandal on French submarines purchased while he was defence minister, about which two examining magistrates in Paris would like to interview him – but he’s tried to wield a new broom.

Anew economic policy is aimed at watering down preferences for ethnic Malays. Stakes have been sold off in bloated public sector enterprises to try to make them more efficient. Last month, the government repealed the colonial-era Internal Security Act, which allowed indefinite detention without trial, and it changed the public assembly law.

But the reforms haven’t resulted in much perceptible change. The UMNO membership is resisting a loss of Malay perks, entrenched cultures remain in public enterprises like the national airline, and a replacement security law has been widely condemned by local and international human rights groups as wide open to similar abuse as the old one.

One result has been that Najib’s personal approval has been running at a high 69 per cent in the opinion polls, while the UMNO coalition’s support has been a lacklustre 46 per cent or so, suggesting the public give Najib marks for trying but don’t think his efforts will work. About a third of those favouring Najib say they will still vote for Anwar’s opposition.

Najib’s support also has flicked sharply downwards when familiar instruments of repression are wielded. A movement for electoral reform called Bersih (meaning ”Clean”) led by a doughty woman barrister, Ambiga Sreenavasan, has had its demonstrations declared illegal and then met with massive police force. The latest was in Kuala Lumpur last Saturday, attended by tens of thousands. Xenophon and other observers shared in a dousing with tear gas and water cannon.

Bersih’s concerns are echoed by the foreign observer group. The electoral system gives wide scope for gerrymandering, with electorate sizes ranging from 7000 to 100,000 voters. Suspiciously, numbers of new voters, over 30 per cent of the previous total, are being registered in opposition-held electorates. Party monitors have just been barred from scrutinising the eligibility of intending voters at polling stations.

Armed force and police personnel have their votes scrutinised by senior officers, and the 240,000 public servants assigned to election duties are required to make postal votes. But strangely, the hundreds of thousands of Malaysians working overseas or employed away from their home towns are not allowed to make absentee votes. A snap poll – a campaign is usually only about 10 days – means a lot of the country’s best and brightest won’t have time to return to their place of registry.

Bersih’s experience with the Malaysian traditional media – owned either by the ruling parties in the case of the newspapers and commercial television, or by politically-directed state broadcasters – illustrates the problem of unequal access to campaign coverage. Before its recent mass demonstrations, media stories have linked it variously to Christian, Jewish and communist conspiracies, and even Islamic extremists.

The internet, with portals like Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today, has given outlets for opposition voices and analysis that reach urban, well educated voters. But rural people get only the slanted pro-government media, at best anodyne, at worse mendacious.

Xenophon’s experience suggests the settings won’t change for the election Najib seems about to call. It’s a pity, given what Malaysia could be.

SOURCE:smh.com.au

Just in time for the President’s reelection campaign to pick up steam, the Obama administration last week declared an end to the War on Terror. A few drone strikes, and voilà – mission accomplished! Yet, in an awkward coincidence, in the same week as that announcement came the release of an online video course exposing the alarming degree to which we are losing the broader war against the enemy we officially refuse to identify.

Of course, it was never a war on “terror” anyway; as many have pointed out, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. We weren’t waging a War on Blitzkrieg in World War II. And terrorism was never the only threat posed by our Islamic enemy, which Obama limits to “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” In fact, our focus on violent jihad has left us vulnerable to the subversive Muslim Brotherhood’s more insidious “civilization jihad,” which continues apace.

Obama himself has been supportive of the Brotherhood’s rise to political power internationally and has opened the door for them at home. He has literally welcomed them into the White House (at least his predecessors made them work for such access by infiltrating), pretending that we are now partners in the political process instead of enemies. But while the Obama administration trumpets this and the waning influence of al Qaeda as the end of the ill-named War on Terror, Frank Gaffney declares that we are no closer to victory than we were on 9/11.

Gaffney runs the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a nonprofit organization for national security research and policy advocacy founded in 1988. In 2010 Gaffney and CSP published Shariah: The Threat to America, a highly acclaimed report on the dangerous reality of political Islam. Now he and his team have rolled out a free, ten-part, online “video briefing” entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course,” designed to educate American citizens about “a threat most Americans are even unaware even exists within our country, let alone the peril it represents”:

Gaffney describes the course as a “distillation of all we’ve learned” in the 24 years since the CSP’s inception. Narrated by the quietly intense Gaffney himself, the videos range from fifteen minutes to two hours in length (eight hours total), and define how and why our very civilization is in danger.

Part 1 lays the groundwork in “The Threat Doctrine of Shariah & the Muslim Brotherhood.” Part 2 elaborates on the Brotherhood’s plan to “eliminate Western civilization from within” in “The Brotherhood’s ‘Civilization Jihad’ in America.” In Part 3, the course takes a closer look at the Brotherhood’s penetration and manipulation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America – a development which will come as a shock to those who are concerned only about the complicity and naiveté of the left.

In Part 4, the course examines a case study in such infiltration, the story of a Brotherhood-linked conservative activist named Suhail Khan. Part 5 offers examples of the many ways in which Khan’s mentor, influential tax reform advocate Grover Norquist, and his team are actively promoting the Islamist agenda, and Part 6 scrutinizes how Norquist’s Islamist protégés are running for office as Republicans. In Part 7, Gaffney et al. examine how Norquist’s ongoing Islamist influence operation is advancing the agendas of the civilization jihadists.

In “Part 8: Team Obama & the Islamists,” the course looks at “Brotherhood-associated individuals who have been allowed access to – and, in some cases, given prominent positions in the Obama administration” – figures like the influential Daliah Mogahed. Then in “Part 9: Team Obama & the Islamist Agenda,” the course takes a hard look at Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” this country, in a “two-hour deep drill-down into the disastrous policies of the Obama White House, its State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and more.”

The course isn’t solely educational. It also seeks to empower American citizens “to take myriad steps to counter this civilization jihad.” It concludes with “Part 10: What’s to be Done?” in which Gaffney offers practical suggestions on “how to defeat the most serious and imminent of such dangers in our time”: the attempt to impose shariah through violence or stealth. Those suggestions include educating others, engaging the media and elected representatives, and developing a support network. Some of these steps can be undertaken as individuals, some through organized efforts, and others as a nation.

The website also provides Endnotes for documentation, and Resources which include links to books and films on the subject, like Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad and Islam: What the West Needs to Know. The Resources section contains links as well to organizations like CSP and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and to activist groups such as Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America and Stop the Islamization of Nations.
The site also lists 16 “Key Findings” about shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of which “there is an urgent need for rigorous congressional oversight and investigations aimed at exposing the extent of the civilization jihad – and the need for corrective action aimed at countering it.” A sampling of those findings:
A unique and monumental project by Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course” is both an essential guide to comprehending the depth and breadth of the threat posed to America by the Muslim Brotherhood, and a useful plan of action to counter that threat.

SOURCE:FRONTPAGEMAG.COM