|
 |
ADC Webwatch
11 July 2010
Volume 3 No. 26 |
Only chance to live for Ahmad Ali is to join enemy's enemy
Hazara minority hounded by Taliban |
|
AHMAD Ali has a compelling response to any Australian official who suggests Afghanistan is now a safe destination for failed asylum-seekers. "Since Muslims like you have been involved in the killing of other innocent Muslims, it's God's punishment that he has ordered all Muslims to kill infidels like you," reads the letter - addressed to him and posted on the door of his brother's button shop less than 12 months ago by Taliban insurgents. "We will be considered infidels if we disobey God's order."
The young Afghan Hazara fled the despotic former Taliban regime and its brutal treatment of Shia Muslims in January 2001 only to spend more than three dark, confusing years behind razor wire in Australian detention centres. He relinquished his claim to asylum in 2004 to return to his war-scarred country and ailing parents, but has been dogged by Taliban threats in both Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since. The Gillard government is considering moves to send asylum-seekers back to Sri Lanka and Afghanistan under a toughened border protection regime. Amanda Hodge, The Australian, 6 July 2010 |
Ban Islamic extremist preachers says MP Michael Johnson
The paradox of intolerance |
PREACHERS of Islamic extremism should be barred from Australia, a federal MP has said. Michael Johnson, a lower house independent, has also called for a debate on banning the burqa. He said Prime Minister Julia Gillard and his former boss, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, needed to repudiate the leadership of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global Islamic group which wants Australian Muslims to reject democracy.
"Join together and repudiate the extremism of this global movement and ... guarantee that none of its international preachers ever receive a visa to step on to Australian soil again," Mr Johnson said in a statement. The release was issued in response to an article in The Australian which reported Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders urging participants in a western Sydney conference to join the struggle for a transnational Islamic state. Mr Johnson said Australia's Judeo-Christian heritage promoted inclusion, openness and transparency. The Australian, 6 July 2010 |
Battle lines drawn on boats
Ayslum seeking and border protection debate |
JULIA Gillard has embraced her own version of the ''Pacific Solution'', pledging to send asylum seekers to be processed in East Timor as she toughens her stance on the issue for the election.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott also announced new hard measures - vowing to send home asylum seekers who destroy their identification papers - ensuring border protection will be a central campaign battleground. Unveiling her policy only days after she neutralised the mining tax, Ms Gillard announced the government would lift the ban on processing Sri Lankan claims.Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott have announced new measures to deal with asylum seekers.
The government is confident that, after Monday's United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees country report, which found conditions have improved in Sri Lanka, many or most will be rejected. The ban on processing Afghans continues. The surprise initiative for offshore processing is a big turnabout of government policy and comes after strong pressure from party power brokers to toughen up because of the electoral damage the issue was doing Labor. Whether East Timor will ultimately accept the Gillard processing centre plan remains up in the air. Michelle Grattan, The Age, 6 July 2010 |
Julia Gillard's gunboat diplomacy
Recycled policy creates suprise |
DEPUTY East Timor PM Jose Luis Guterres yesterday indicated his country would be unable to accept Australia's plan to build an asylum-seeker processing centre. Amid increasing signs of opposition to the plan in East Timor, Ms Gillard yesterday held discussions with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and pledged $25 million to fund a crackdown on people-smuggling across the region, including patrol boats and surveillance planes to help Jakarta's efforts.
East Timor leaders Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos-Horta will meet this morning to debate the Australian government's plan, but Mr Guterres yesterday said his country had previously rejected a similar request from former foreign minister Alexander Downer and was still "not in a condition to accept a detention centre". The Australian wife of Mr Gusmao, Kirsty Sword, who is visiting Sydney, yesterday said she also was surprised at Ms Gillard's plan. Paul Maley and Stephen Fitzpatrick , The Australian, 8 July 2010 |
Europe arrests on terror links
Al Qaeda operatives nabbed in Norway |
|
THREE men arrested in Norway and Germany on suspicion of terrorism are ''one node'' in the global terror network that plotted the foiled attack against the New York subway and planned to blow up a shopping centre in Manchester, European and US counter-terrorism officials say. The three Muslim immigrants to Norway - a Uighur from China, an Iraqi Kurd and an Uzbek - are alleged to have had ties to operatives of al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Also linked to those operatives were Najibullah Zazi, who tried to organise the subway attack, and men arrested in Britain in April 2009 in the Manchester plot. The plotters all had ties to Saleh al-Somali, an al-Qaeda leader killed by a CIA drone strike in Pakistan last year, a senior US intelligence official said.
All had been under surveillance for some time and their arrests were brought forward because of fears that news of the operation could be published, officials said. The 39-year-old Uighur came as a refugee to Norway in 1999 and became a citizen three years ago, Janne Kristiansen, head of Norway's Police Security Service, said. That man, reportedly the group's leader, and a 31-year-old asylum seeker from Uzbekistan with legal residence in Norway, were arrested in Oslo. Bjoern Lindahl, The Age, 10 July 2010 |
Pakistan political rivals join in fury
Victims of terror unite in protest |
| PAKISTAN'S political rivals, united in anger after deadly attacks by religious extremists, will co-operate to hold a national conference on ways to fight terrorism. In a rare incident of collaboration in Pakistan's fractious politics, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani from the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), has agreed to convene the conference proposed by main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, who heads the Pakistan Muslim League (N).The announcement follows a suicide bomb attack on the revered Data Darbar Sufi shrine in the eastern city of Lahore last Thursday that killed 42 and injured about 200. No group has claimed responsibility for it.
Mr Gilani yesterday held a meeting of provincial chief ministers and top security officials to discuss law and order. The all-party national conference on terrorism is expected to be convened within a week. On Saturday Mr Sharif urged the Pakistan government to negotiate directly with Taliban insurgents. However, it is unlikely that representatives of any militant groups will attend the conference on terrorism. Even so, analysts welcomed the proposed meeting because it indicated a growing political consensus about combating terrorism in Pakistan. Matt Wade, The Age, 6 July 2010 |
Sufi tragedy should be remembered
"All three theistic religions have a decidedly patchy history in relation to their mystical traditions" |
With the speed of a meteorite, the news of the recent suicide bombing at the Data Ganj-Bakhsh Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan, came and went. More than 40 people were killed, including children. Almost 200 were injured. The loss of safety at Pakistan's most important Sufi centre was incalculable. But within days of the tragedy, it was absent from our media and our minds. It is understandable that with the regularity of these violent catastrophes, it is hard to maintain appropriate levels of outrage about Taliban activity in Pakistan or Afghanistan, never mind compassion for the victims. Yet there are cogent reasons why this event should be remembered and why we should continue to be concerned. Punjabi Taliban apparently carried out the attacks. These are fundamentalist Muslims who regard the Sufi community of Data Ganj-Bakhsh with extreme hostility for their relatively liberal religious views. The attack was condemned as "barbaric".
And it horribly exemplifies the internecine struggles that can make differences of perspective within a single religious faith every bit as dangerous as anything experienced between people of different faiths or cultures. Such attitudes are not new. Nor are they limited to struggles within Islam. As an example far closer to most Australian lives, sectarian violence between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland resulted in 3500 deaths between 1969 and 2001. We need no persuading to see how dangerous it is when violence is fanned by self-righteousness. It is characteristic of all religious fundamentalists to believe they have a monopoly on truth, and that their views are endorsed by God. Stephanie Dowrick, The Age, 10 July 2010 |
Hung(a)ry for justice: butchered in Budapest
Justice delayed is justice denied |
Today he is an 88-year old pensioner, known as Mr Charles Zentai. But in 1944, it is claimed he was 23-year-old Hungarian Arrow Cross Ensign Károly Zentai (also known as Károly Steiner). And he is believed to be guilty of murdering an 18-year-old boy in the Hungarian capital of Budapest. Last Friday he had his day in court. Actually it was one of many such days. And unless Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard intervenes or Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban takes time out from eating dobosh at Gerbeaud, one of Budapest’s finest cafes, Australians will never know the truth. And relatives of a tortured, beaten and murdered Hungarian teenager, 18-year-old Péter Balázs will never taste justice.
Furthermore Australia, for all its virtues will continue to carry an obscene moniker on its back: that, due to disinterest from a series of post war governments, Australia has become a safe haven for the most wicked of men, whose involvement in unspeakable crimes against humanity, including acts by Hitler’s Nazis (and their collaborators), genocidal maniacs from Cambodia, North Korea, Rwanda, and Sudan continue to pollute our cities. And our wholesale apathy is to blame. The conduct of many such arrivals is, at the least, worthy of careful examination and in some cases, should merit incarceration, denaturalisation and extradition.Last Friday we learned a few things. Few of them pleasant. We learned that an 88-year-old resident of Willetton in Perth, wanted for questioning in Hungary for the alleged murder and torture of the Jewish teenager during World War II, successfully appealed his extradition. Jonathan J. Ariel, Online Opinion, 9 July 2010 |
Ahmadinejad questions 'fairy tale' Holocaust
Nuclear nightmare: Holocaust denial and Genocide advocacy |
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the historic dimensions of the Holocaust but rejected the label of an anti-Semite, the Fars news agency reported Friday. "The West made a claim - about the Holocaust - and urges all the people in the world to accept it or otherwise go to prison," Ahmadinejad told a group of Islamic scholars Thursday in Nigeria, where he attended a summit of the Developing Eight, a group of countries with large Muslim populations. "The West allows everybody to question prophets and even God but not to pose a simple question and open the black box of a historic event," he charged.
Ahmadinejad had earlier sparked international fury by calling for the eradication of Israel from the Middle East and its relocation to Europe or North America and by describing the murders of 6 million European Jews by Germany's Nazi regime as a "fairy tale." He said Thursday that the Holocaust was an excuse for Israel and the West to take land away from millions of Palestinians and give it to Israel.
Iran does not recognize Israel and maintains that a referendum by all Palestinians, including refugees, and Jews should decide the future fate of a Palestinian state. Haaretz, 9 July 2010 |
There's a reason Mel plays crazy people so well
Equal-opportunities repulsiveness |
Once again, the suspicion is that the aspect of his movie characters for which Mel has to really strive is not the latent insanity - he hasn't been playing with a full set of rosary beads for a few decades now - but the aspect that has made them sympathetic to audiences down the years. His reported comments have drawn condemnation from African-American leaders, although one obviously doesn't need to be black to be vaguely turned off by Mel's apercus. Indeed, one didn't need to be Jewish to object to his comment, made to the officers who arrested him for drink-driving in 2006, that ''the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world''. Mel's is an equal-opportunities repulsiveness, and we mustn't shut out anyone from taking offence on anyone else's part.
Will he survive this? Hollywood may be a small town, but on past form you wouldn't bet on Mel being made its outlaw. He may be its loner, but it didn't take long after the anti-Semitic driving-under-the-influence business before he was back on the talkshows with his Mayan epic Apocalypto being garlanded. So while there's an argument that this latest business will be the last straw, I'd say Mel will go on. A more intriguing question is whether his audience will accept the uncomfortable truth that Mel Gibson's offscreen unpleasantness is inextricable from his onscreen charisma. Via the alchemy of celluloid, the one becomes the other. Marina Hyde, The Age, 11 July 2010 | |
|
|
ABOUT ADC WEBWATCH
Welcome to ADC Webwatch, a weekly update on what the public is hearing about issues of race, tolerance and human rights. Skim the newsletter to stay abreast of the issues or click on the hyperlinks for more information.
ADC Webwatch is published by the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission, a community organisation dedicated to opposing antisemitism and racism and promoting respect and tolerance.
|
|
Phone: |
CONTACT US
+61 3 9572 5770 |
| Fax: |
+61 3 9572 5775 |
| Mail: |
PO Box 340 |
|
Caulfield South 3162 |
|
Melbourne, VIC. |
|
Australia. |
| Email: |
reception@antidef.org.au |
| Articles cited do not necessarily reflect ADC views. | |
|
|
UPCOMING EVENTS
Multifaith Future Leaders Program
A 3-day leadership training workshop and ongoing program for 18-26 year olds committed to interfaith contacts. Expressions of interest now open for 2011. Click here to read the brochure.
Click here to register your interest
Multifaith Future Leaders-Supper in the Sukkah. Tues,
28 Sept at 6.30 pm
East Melbourne Synagogue, 488
Albert St, Melbourne.
East Melbourne City Synagogue:
The oldest functioning synagogue in Victoria.
To read more, click here
View website:
melbournecitysynagogue.com
Volunteers required for Courage to Care Exhibition -
11-22 October 2010
Norman Smorgon Hall, 53 Walpole St,
Kew. Email Bev Rosenberg at
bev12@optusnet.com.au
|
|
|
 |
Antisemitism 
