Lifting the Media Veil on Costello & Sharia

The media circus

On Thursday 23 February 2006, Treasurer and Prime Ministerial aspirant Peter Costello delivered a speech to an audience at the Sydney Institute. Mr Costello provided some personal reflections on Australia’s developing culture and citizenship. Within a few hours, a veritable media circus began.

Predictably, some News Limited newspapers reported Mr Costello’s words as condemning all Muslims. Some of these papers had provided skewed and distorted reporting of similar comments made by the Prime Minister one week before.

The Fairfax Press, on the other hand, attempted to paint Costello as indulging in dog whistle politics, seeking diversions for the scandal of the Government’s knowledge of kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Others speculated that the PM wanted to be seen to be going further than the PM, taking a stronger stand on policy issues outside his Treasury portfolio.

Speaking before reading

Sadly, most migrant Muslim leaders bought into the circus, many expressing views on the Costello comments without having read the Costello speech. Some leaders accused Costello of deliberately seeking to marginalise Muslim communities by speaking of undefined Australian values and threatening the dual citizenship status of those seen to be opposing such values.

I must admit I initially agreed with them.

Until, that is, I read Mr Costello’s actual speech. I agree that Mr Costello’s “values” test for citizenship will be difficult to translate into workable legislation. Further, his views on sharia are at best simplistic.

Apart from these fairly significant bloopers, Costello’s comments were spot-on. The first two-thirds of his speech are fairly innocuous. But what sent the scribes, pundits and some Muslim leaders scurrying were the final 2 pages of comments on sharia and citizenship.

Australian values are sharia values

Peter Costello said that anyone who believes Sharia can co-exist with Australian law and Australian values should leave the country. Mr Howard described his comments as “fundamentally accurate”.

What neither fail to see is that if Mr Costello’s formulation of Australian values is correct, it might mean non-indigenous Australians will have to pack their bags and return to their motherlands.

Mr Costello says most migrants “become Australian citizens because they want to embrace the things this country stand for.” He lists six core Australian values including economic opportunity, security, democracy and personal freedom.

In 2002, a visiting Indonesian academic lawyer delivered a series of lectures under the auspices of the conservative Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). Professor Muhammad Fajrul Falaakh is Vice Dean of the prestigious Gadjah Mada University, among the top 100 universities in the world. He holds a masters degree from the London School of Economics, and was a Fullbright Scholar in the United States in 2000.

Professor Falaakh is also a senior figure in the Nahdatul Ulama (Council of Theologians), the world’s largest Islamic organisation. NU ‘s membership is more than double Australia’s population.

Falaakh delivered the annual CIS Acton Lecture on the topic of “Sharia and Pluralism in Indonesia”. He listed 5 basic values of Sharia agreed upon by Sharia scholars from all schools of Islamic law.

An edited text of Professor Falaakh’s lecture is still available on the website of the Centre for Independent Studies. If one compares the 5 basic principles of Sharia to the 6 values espoused by Mr Costello, one finds they are virtually identical.

Perhaps this is what Australian imams mean when they state in their sermons that Australia is a more Islamic country than most Muslim-majority states.

Sharia as legal tradition

But then, this should be of no surprise to anyone. After all, sharia is not a synonym for amputations and beheadings. Rather, sharia is the name of a legal tradition, a set of legal principles based on certain values. And those values are identical to the values expressed in the Old and New Testaments.

Further, legal scholars in both east and west are agreed that the traditions of sharia, English common law (from which our legal systems are derived) and European civil law have borrowed from each other and influenced each other. To this day, in a large number of Commonwealth countries, sharia and the common law sit side by side.

Historically, all legal traditions influence and are influenced by each other. This simple fact is taught to first year law students in universities across the world. Many of our fundamental common law doctrines are taken from the works of sharia jurists, and sharia has also borrowed from the common law.

A retired Justice of the NSW Supreme Court has written that alternate dispute resolution procedures adopted in Australian commercial law find their origins in Islamic commercial law. Further, Professor John Makdisi of the St Thomas University in North Carolina has written extensively on how common law and sharia traditions borrowed extensively from each other.

Sharia as ethics and liturgy

Some pseudo-conservative commentators present sharia as a system of medieval criminal punishments. But for some 300,000 Australian Muslims, sharia represents little more than ethics (honesty, enterprise etc) and liturgy (how to perform prayers, weddings and funerals etc.)

As shown above, the ethics of sharia do not pose a problem for Australia. Further, sharia liturgy has been practised in Australia for over a century. Indeed, Australia law allows a number of religious legal systems (such as Jewish religious law) to operate in the contexts of family law, estates and other areas.

The letter and the spirit

Christ, recognised as Messiah by Muslims, castigated rabbis of his time who followed the letter but ignored the spirit of sacred law. Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad brought sharia as the outer manifestation of religious values. He also brought an inner manifestation, which has been given a variety of labels by Muslims but which is commonly known in the West as sufism.

A tiny minority of Muslims seek to establish sharia without sufism across the world. They are the source of virtually all terrorist groups in the Muslim world. Their theology is regarded by mainstream Muslims as isolationist and fringe. They distort sharia by imposing it on people without the inner discipline of sufism. They are openly hostile to sufi tradition.

These people seek to destroy Islam from within. They are arguably more of a threat to Muslims than non-Muslims. Hence, the majority of their victims are Muslims. Mr Costello would like to see such people leave Australia. Most Muslims, on the other hand, would prefer to see these people leave our planet.

Charity and distorted perceptions

These people distort our perceptions about sharia. Most Australians regard sharia as purely consisting of draconian medieval punishments. Mr Costello’s own inaccurate comments about sharia are a manifestation of distorted perceptions. Instead of criticising inevitable and understandable ignorance, Muslim leaders need to educate the community about their faith and values.

The Qur’an teaches that when giving charity, give of things you value. Australians have followed this Qur’anic teaching by sharing with Muslim migrants so much they value – wealth, jobs, education and greater liberty to practise Islam than exists in most Muslim countries. Muslims too must share what they treasure – their religious and ethical values. If Aussie Muslims do not share their faith with their countrymen, how can they blame the rest of Australia for not understanding them?

The author is a Sydney lawyer. iyusuf@sydneylawyers.com.au

© Irfan Yusuf 2006

Fun with forums ...

I’ve been having some fun times on the forums associated with that magnificent website Online Opinion (OLO). This fantastic initiative deserves our support. I urge you all to donate to keep this superb website alive.

The forums are especially entertaining as they are a place where a variety of nutcases congregate. These are usually the same people who make up the cheer squad for views expressed on the blogs of Tim Blair and Peter Faris.

You might want to check out the comments left on the OLO forum website to my (rather clumsily worded) questions as follows:

“I'd just like to ask B_D, mikijo and all the other armchair Nazis here a simple question. If the Federal Government decided to round up Muslims and have them detained in detention camps, would you support such a move?

Further, would you support laws that would allow persons of Muslim origin to be killed?

I'm just trying to gauge where all this discussion is heading.”

I’d also encourage you to check out the forums associated with Ted Lapkin’s latest attempt to portray all Muslims as a bunch of embassy-burners. I’ve set a few challenges for young Ted. It makes for fascinating reading.

© Irfan Yusuf 2006

Australian Doublespeak and that nasty "M" word

That nasty ‘m’ word

It’s official: Howard doesn’t like the ‘m’ word. Neither do his supporters, whether they be (at least one) anti-abortion MPs or some allegedly conservative columnists writing about the Cronulla riots in the op-ed pages of that American publication calling itself The Australian.

Which ‘m’ word is that, you may ask. Is it the name Muhammad? Certainly, that’s a word open to abuse in most neo-con circles, especially after an obscure neo-con newspaper in Denmark decided to publish a dozen or so cartoons.

Or maybe it’s that other ‘m’ word, the one that could well be used to describe Australia unless we follow Danna Vale’s advice and make abortion pills a tad harder for Australian (as opposed to, say, Muslim) women to access. I mean, let’s face it: in today’s conservative parties, you can say what you like about Muhammad and Muslims, but don’t even suggest the Health Minister’s rosary could cause any harm to non-Muslim ovaries.

Actually, the word I am thinking about combines both these distasteful alien religious elements. John Howard has declared that he doesn’t like the word ‘multiculturalism’, and his view is shared increasingly by members of his party (both organisational and parliamentary wings) and by his friends at The Australian.

That diplomatically useful ‘m’ word

Howard may not like the word, but successive Australian Ambassadors to Indonesia can’t get enough of it.

The present Ambassador, Bill Farmer, and his brave staff are still nervously housed behind tight security in the fortress-like Australian Embassy building on a main street of Jakarta’s CBD. The building was the scene of a terrorist attack on 9 September 2004 in which 10 Indonesians died and over 200 were injured. The blast was so big that the 100kg Australian crest fell from the embassy wall and crashed to the ground.

Despite their understandable jitters, Farmer and his crew maintain brave smiles as they struggle to find all sorts of novel ways to use the ‘m’ word in almost every press release. The problem is that Indonesian journalists are just as smart as ours. And they can read.

During the last two weeks of January, I travelled with a delegation of young Aussie Muslims on an exchange program sponsored by the Australia Indonesia Institute and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Each year, the Institute sends a delegation of young Australian Muslims to visit a range of individuals, organisations and institutions from across the spectrum of Indonesian opinion. Delegations of Indonesian Muslim youth leaders also visit Australia.

Our delegation consisted of two lawyers, an engineer, a researcher and a police woman. Two of our delegation could speak fluent Bahasa Indonesia. We had to front up before some of Indonesia’s top journos for a news conference. We felt confident we would represent the national interest well, and so did the embassy staff.

Indonesian journos do have internet access

One of the embassy heavies was with us, and she very capably and confidently briefed Indonesian journos about how Australia is multicultural, about how Muslims are all living very comfortably thanks very much, and about how we even have a Ministry for Multicultural Affairs.

The Indonesian journos, of course, had heard it all before. So when it was their turn to speak to us, they had already memorised the relevant offensive lines from the op-ed pieces written by the Stones and Windschuttles and Donnellys that are regarded as reflective of ‘mainstream’ opinion by the head honchos at The Australian.

It became a bit embarrassing listening to the journos throw neo-con mantras in our direction like patriot missiles. In the end, we had no option but to speak the truth. We were cornered by well-researched scribes, and had to somehow weasel our way out.

‘Guys, listen: the stuff you are throwing at us is published in an American-owned newspaper. Seriously. It isn’t reflective of what most Australians think. If it was, it would sell far more copies and be much more profitable than it actually is.’

The journalists just weren’t convinced. One blurted out:

‘But the newspaper is called The Australian. And we know the paper is very supportive of the Howard Government. We have been following it during your last federal election.’

What could we say to that? Indonesian journos, after all, do have internet access. They can also read Latin script, and many can speak fluent English. In fact, quite a few were educated in Australia.

So there we were, a bunch of Australians trying to help the embassy sell a certain official line, and the biggest obstacle in our way was an American-owned newspaper. Yep, some op-ed writers may think they are helping the government, but their infantile rants and imbecilic prejudices are harming our national interests in our own backyard. They are facilitating DFAT spin to be unspun by savvy journalists in our region.

Indonesian press and the ‘p’ word

Howard may not like the ‘m’ word, but President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and most of the politicians and religious organisations in Indonesia are all in favour of the ‘p’ word.

One Indonesian academic from the liberal Muslim Paramadina University in Jakarta told our delegation that ‘pluralism’ is a much more effective and inclusive concept than tolerance or multiculturalism.

Indonesia is not the first country that comes to mind when words like pluralist, liberal and democratic are mentioned. During the decades of Suharto’s ‘New Order’, liberal democracy was in short supply. And we have all heard the horror stories of violence between various Muslim and Christian denominations in Ambon and Sulawesi.

Indonesia isn’t a perfect place. During our stay, we saw plenty of evidence of inter-racial and inter-religious tension. In Indonesia’s university town of Yogyakarta, we visited an interfaith group known as Interfidei. We heard from their (mainly Muslim) workers about the difficulties Christian communities face in establishing new churches.

We were also given the run-down on how Catholicism and Christianity are regarded as separate religions (a sectarian relic of Dutch colonial rule), and of efforts to have Judaism recognised as an official religion. Believe it or not, there are Indonesian Jews living in Surabaya.

But in Indonesia, inter-racial and religious violence and its underlying sentiments are not applauded in the op-ed pages of national broadsheets. Indeed, media ownership in Indonesia is a reflection of the pluralism that Indonesians take for granted. In the world’s largest Muslim country, the highest selling national broadsheet, Kompas, is owned by a Catholic foundation.

Imagine the outcry if Muslim interests bought our own national broadsheet.

(First published in New Matilda on 22 February 2006.)

An Ignorant Australian?

Its advertisements pose the question: “Are you an informed Australian?” But if you believe what has been written in The Australian on 20 February 2006 about Muslim migrants, you will probably end up a bigoted, or at best, ignorant Australian.

The Australian newspaper has attempted to paint a picture of a singular Muslim culture hostile to mainstream Australia, showing extreme attitudes toward women, being powered by a sense of “jihad” and showing an inability to adapt to the Australian mainstream.

In the past, The Oz has published numerous opinion pieces supporting or suggesting such a view. The authors have pointed to the alleged inability of Muslim migrants to adapt to Australian conditions. Alternately, they have used Muslims as a scapegoat in an attempt to impose their own cultural monolith on Australia’s multicultural status quo.

Even when parliamentarians have made (and then withdrawn) infantile allegations against Muslim migrants (such as the recent embarrassment with Danna Vale’s contribution to the RU482 debate), The Oz allowed its op-ed pages to be graced with an article by Muslim-hater Mark Steyn supporting Vale’s withdrawn and discredited views.

The Australian has now decided to publish excerpts from an interview with the Prime Minister, excerpts which the paper originally meant to publish on or about 11 March 2006 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Howard government. It is unclear exactly why the paper has chosen to do so at this time.

Mr Howard has made some recent remarks on what he views as unfortunate traits limited to a small minority from within Muslim communities. Some of Mr Howard’s remarks are correct, whilst others are perhaps reflective of popularly-held misconceptions.

This article will not focus so much on what Mr Howard said. Rather, it will focus on the editorial baggage which The Oz has tried to attach to Mr Howard’s comments.

Mr Howard’s words were about a minority, but what The Oz attempts to do is to generalise these traits into characteristics of what it describes as “Muslim culture”.

In an article entitled “Howard hits out at ‘jihad’ Muslims”, George Megalogenis writes about the PM “strongly criticis[ing] aspects of Muslim culture, warning they pose an unprecedented challenge for Australia's immigration program.”

The paper went onto report about how “[t]he Prime Minister also expressed concern about Muslim attitudes to women.”

So we have “Muslim culture” and “Muslim attitudes”. The suggestion is that exists a singular Muslim culture, that it is a migrant culture and that it has implications for Australia’s immigration program.

And what evidence has been presented of a singular Muslim culture? Who knows? Perhaps more importantly, who cares?

The Oz’s editorial of 20 February 2006 provides some background behind the interview with the PM, which was held “to discuss multiculturalism, immigration and the integration into our society of new arrivals”. In this context, Mr Howard “was asked if he was confident that Muslims would integrate as thoroughly as the wave of Asian immigrants of the 1980s and 90s had done.”

The very fact that such a question could be asked shows the exceptional ignorance of the editorial’s authors. It suggests that Muslim migration is a recent phenomenon, and that Muslim migrants all have the same culture. Muslims are painted as a recently-arrived monolithic migrant group.

The reality is that Muslims have been migrating to Australia for over a century. Apart from the descendants of Afghan and north-west Indian cameleers and hawkers, there were a large number of post-war Muslim migrants from Albania and the former Yugoslavia.

Hardly 4 decades after the Gallipoli campaign, Australia relaxed its White Australia Policy to enable migration of Turks from Cyprus and Anatolia. Today, Turkish Australians are some of the best settled migrants in the country. Turks manage more mosques than any other ethnic Muslim group.

If they seriously believe that Muslims make up a singular monolithic cultural group of migrants arriving after the wave of Indo-Chinese migrants of the 1980’s, one wonders which Australia the editors of The Oz have been living in all these years.

The editors claim that “[i]n recent years we have had no one, other than some Muslims, bringing such missionary zeal to the establishment of their own religion and society within our own.”

Exactly what is the problem with establishing one’s culture and institutions isn’t explained. Islam, like Christianity, is a missionary faith. Displaying missionary zeal is not in itself illegal. Neither is establishing mosques or schools. Indeed, the Howard government has been committed to the public funding of independent schools.

Muslim missionary work has been performed in Australia since the arrival of the first Muslim settlers in the 19th century. The vast majority of Muslim missionary work has been peaceful, usually in the form of speeches by imams and visiting scholars.

The Oz editorial laments “… the attitude of some of our latest arrivals who see the relaxed and tolerant lifestyle of their neighbours as some sort of affront to their passionately held beliefs.”

The most recently arrived waves of Muslim migrants (apart from skilled tradespeople, professionals or business migrants) have been asylum seekers from Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa. Apart from one Bosnian charged following the recent anti-terror raids, there is not any evidence of such attitudes being held by any of these categories of asylum seekers. Nor is there evidence to suggest that Afghans or Bosnians or Somalis or other similar groups live and work in ghettoes or enclaves.

The Oz continues: “Since the end of World War II, Australia has prided itself on the ability of everyone to fit in. The waves of Greek and Italian migrants have been absorbed in two generations. They are now no easier to pinpoint than the Scots or Irish immigrants of a century before.”

Exactly the same can be said for Albanian and Bosnian Muslim migrants from the post-war era. It can also be said for many Turkish migrants, whose dress and appearance makes them indistinguishable from other European Australians. One wonders whether The Oz’s editors have ever visited Smithfield or Penshurst in Sydney and attempted to identify a Bosnian Muslim who isn’t sporting a prayer cap.

The Oz goes onto state that “Asian immigrants of the last part of the 20th century are now doing likewise. None of these peoples harboured any hope or desire to imprint their culture over that which existed here.”

So how does one define “imprint” of a culture? Have Vietnamese or Chinese migrants suddenly started only eating meat pies? Is Sydney’s China Town being dismantled? Did we see the last of the Chinese New Years celebrations in late January?

The Oz editorial shows how completely divorced it is from reality in the following lengthy paragraph:

“Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some of our newest Muslim immigrants. They have arrived with attitude. They have a mindset that disapproves of our relaxed and socially unstructured lifestyle. Their young men, raised in the strictures of Muslim households, do not understand, and have no wish to accept, the freedoms young Australian women take for granted. It was this clash of cultures that fuelled the Cronulla riots and which is at the heart of Mr Howard's warning.”

Again, none of the most recent Muslim arrivals had any involvement in the Cronulla riots. The riots were said to be in retaliation for the assault on surf life savers by certain people of “Middle Eastern” appearance. I am yet to meet someone from Bosnia or the Horn of Africa of Middle Eastern appearance. Further, there is no suggestion of involvement by Afghans.

Rather, where there are young Middle Eastern looking men showing bad attitudes to women and the law, they are mainly from more 2nd and 3rd generations of more settled migrant groups – Lebanese and Pakistanis. The boys convicted of gang-rapes were not Afghan or Somali or Bosnian. They were boys from Lebanese and Pakistani families.

In adding editorial baggage to the PM’s recent pronouncements, the editorial writers of The Australian are seeking to paint a coherent picture of a monolithic culture of recently arrived Muslim migrants. But examined against the reality of wave after wave of Muslim migration, the picture painted looks little more than incoherent pieces of paint hurled onto the canvas.

© Irfan Yusuf 2006

With friends like these ...?

I realise that if New Matilda were a country, it probably wouldn't be ruled by a conservative government. But I am sure it must have some conservative readers, and in my case, at least one conservative writer.

Conservatism isn't very popular in certain quarters. Listening to the way some conservative leaders carry on, it isn't hard to guess why.

I am writing this piece after spending around 2.5 hours with 250 people at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, filming a 60 Minutes show on the Cronulla riots. I heard NSW Opposition Leader and Liberal State MP Peter Debnam repeatedly call for the jailing of '500 young Middle Eastern thugs' who have allegedly been terrorising Sydney for over 10 years.

These kids must have been driving around Sydney in hotted-up cars and harassing people since they were in kindy!

Comments like Debnam's make me wonder whether one needs to fail an IQ test to lead a conservative party these days. But then, so many of today's conservatives are about as conservative as Josef Stalin. They play games with racial and religious tensions, their words parroting the worst rhetorical excesses of tin-pot dictators from the Middle East and Africa. And their media cheer squad of spin doctors and commentators aren't much better.

The Islamic Republic of Victoria?

Dr Janet Albrechtsen is regarded as a media pin-up girl for the conservative side — Australia's very own Ann Coulter. Some might recall Coulter writing in the immediate aftermath of September 11 the following words of wisdom and good sense on the US-based pseudo-conservative website, 'Townhall'

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Albrechtsen, thankfully, never descends to this level. However, in a recent column for that American newspaper called The Australian, she airs her concerns that, 'Victoria's religious vilification laws are working in ways that make the place look like an Islamic State-in-waiting.'

This comment appeared in an Albrechtsen article after she spent some 15 paragraphs claiming that all Muslims across the Islamic world were getting completely violent and hysterical over the Danish cartoons.

Victoria's religious vilification laws must have been fairly radical legislation. Let me guess: was it called the Ayatollah Khomeini Appreciation Act 2006? Or has Steve Bracks decided to change his title from Premier to Caliph? (See, One Nation had a point: those dimwits south of the Murray should never have allowed a Leb to become Premier!)

In the same article, Albrechtsen made some legitimate points about the hypocrisy of Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons. I have made similar criticisms and comments and had them published elsewhere, including in the Dominion Post (the NZ newspaper that recently published all 12 offending cartoons).

The difference between my criticisms and Albrechtsen's is that I don't regard all Muslim cultures as being absolutely inconsistent with Western values.

Miranda links Osama bin Reagan to Cronulla

Albrechtsen may have her prejudices. Heck, we all do. But at least she writes with vigour, passion and some intelligence.

Miranda Devine, on the other hand, rarely if ever displays much sophistication in her pieces. Her recent column analysing the international storm over the 12 cartoons is an example of this.

In one 900 word article, Devine somehow manages to find a way of linking the ">following:

*Osama bin Reagan;
*The September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington;
*An alleged unofficial policy to go soft on thugs responsible for post-Cronulla reprisal attacks;
*The murder of a Dutch filmmaker;
*A survey by a Victorian teachers' union;
*Driver's licence photos;
*Government initiatives to train home-grown imams.

And what do all these disparate and unrelated things have in common? Does Devine have a clue? Probably not. And who is the sole 'authority' cited by Devine in support of her thesis? None other than US hate-monger extraordinaire Daniel Pipes.

Playing the Pipes of War

For those wanting to see American Talibanism in action, I urge you to visit Daniel Pipes's website. Pipes has visited Australia on a number of occasions, usually at the invitation of the Centre for Independent Studies or some other conservative think tank.

On one occasion, Pipes suggested that 'radical Islamists' should be hunted down and eliminated. He estimated they constituted 10-15 per cent of the world's Muslim population. Considering there are around 1.2 billion Muslims on this planet, this means Pipes wants to see at least 120 million Muslims massacred. Nice chap, isn't he?

Pipes also suggests that the best way for nations to respond to the kidnapping of their citizens in Iraq is to lynch Muslim minorities. His article was reproduced in the Melbourne Age on 15 September 2004.

In the context of the Danish cartoons, Pipes is once again peddling his conspiracy theories about how all those nasty Muslims are trying to take over Europe, the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Moon, Saturn, etc.

With enemies like that

Seriously, I could go on and on about Albrechtsen and Devine and their sad excuse for conservative analysis. But ultimately I have to agree that they do have a point. The response of some Muslims in Damascus, Beirut and elsewhere has been completely over-the-top. Where these two commentators go wrong is they take that small minority of dimwits and attribute their stupid behaviour and antics to an entire faith community.

(Albrechtsen and Devine also are completely ill-equipped to talk about freedom of speech when they themselves have supported draconian sedition laws — but that's a separate point that can be discussed on another occasion.)

Writers like Albrechtsen and Devine seem to have a pathological hatred of Islam (I can only say 'seem to have' because I honestly don't know what they really think). But some Muslims claiming to love Islam share a large responsibility in generating that hatred.

In Iran, a newspaper is having a Holocaust cartoon competition. That's just so funny, isn't it? I'm in stitches. Neo-cons produce cartoons and we retaliate against the memory of six million who died unjustly. Gee thanks, guys.

Muslims who go around burning embassies in the name of Islam are as evil and destructive as people who get drunk and stoned and go around singing the national anthem and waving our flag while assaulting anyone deemed 'Middle Eastern'.

If you feel hurt about something, the worst thing you can do is lash out at innocent people. Because when you do, people who can make a difference start to ignore your grievances. They focus instead on the ugliness of what you did.

Muslim protestors need to understand that if they react and respond to every provocation out there, they will be screaming and shouting until the halal cows come home to be slaughtered. They have to remember (if you pardon me mixing metaphors) that they have bigger fish to fry.

The Albrechtsens and Devines of this world are actually doing Muslims a favour. Instead of spending more time hacking into them, I might consider inviting them out to lunch. Then we can talk as human beings and not as opponents in some intra-conservative war.

Sometimes those you perceive as your enemy do you more favours than sycophantic best mates. With enemies like that, who needs dumb friends?

(First published in New Matilda on Wednesday 15 February 2006.)

With freedom comes responsibility ...

One Saturday night around 6 years ago, I was out partying with some Young Liberal mates in Sydney CBD. My mates and I had a deal – they’d buy their own drinks. They’d also buy me lots of soft drink out of respect for my religious sensitivities. They’d get drunk. I’d then drive them home.

I’d also supply the humour, much of it plagiarised from others. On one such occasion, we were walking past what appeared to be some inebriated English backpackers. One of the Poms bumped into me and shouted: “Move out of the way, Paki!”

I turned around after he’d walked past. I thought I’d pay him back with some hilariously insensitive humour. It went something like this.

“Hey Pommy? You got any pictures of your mum in the nude? No? You wanna buy some then?”

It wasn’t my joke. It came from the British comedians Mel Smith and Grif Rhys Jones. My friends were having a good laugh for a short while. Until, that is, when we saw the entire mob of backpackers running our way.

When we finally left them behind, my friends counselled me as best as they could after a few too many.

“Mate, you shouldn’t have said that. Yeah, it was a joke. But you said it about his mother. Even a drunken backpacker gets offended when you insult his mum. You should know that. You could have had us in hospital.”

In Aussie culture, we know there are certain things you never bring up at the dinner table. One is politics. The other is religion.

We are living in a society which doesn’t take religion all that seriously. Freedom of religion basically means freedom from being religious. People take the piss out of religious symbols all the time.

But there are some things you don’t poke fun at. For instance, you don’t poke fun at the Holocaust in front of a Jewish person. You don’t poke fun at the massacres that took place during the Spanish Inquisition or else you’ll offend Jews and Muslims.

And as the world found out after Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” was published, you don’t poke fun at the Prophet Muhammad.

Seriously, I think a lot of Muslims are overreacting (to say the least!) over the 12 cartoons. They are also being manipulated by their kings, generals, emirs and presidents-for-life who are egging them on.

Syria is a police state ruled by a ruthless Ba’ath Socialist regime, the same party that Saddam Hussein belonged to. It’s believed over 50% of the Syrian population belong to one or more secret police forces. If the Syrian government wanted to stop the torching of Danish and other embassies, it could have.

Muslim governments are manipulating the situation to gain popularity from their people. Instead of focussing on the many problems face, Muslim rulers are seeking a diversion to keep their people busy.

And yes, in Western countries newspapers are allowed to ridicule and lampoon anything and anyone within the bounds of the law. But just because something is lawful doesn’t make it right.

As a nation, we were grossly offended when some thugs decided to pull down and defile the Australian flag in retaliation for the Cronulla riots. We value our flag and are offended when it is insulted. It isn’t just a piece of cloth.

Similarly, Muslims get offended when one of their Prophets is lampooned. Some of them are reacting in a stupid and counterproductive fashion. But that doesn’t make publication of the cartoons right.

Across the Tasman, 2 Fairfax-owned papers based in Wellington and Christchurch have published the cartoons. To their credit, Kiwi Muslims have thus far reacted peacefully. They have even offered to write letters to Muslim countries threatening to boycott Kiwi exports.

The newspapers claim they are standing up for free speech. Yet publishing a cartoon depicting a Prophet of Islam wearing a turban looking like a bomb is hardly free speech. It is more like freedom to insult and offend without taking responsibility for the consequences.

New Zealand may lose upto $100 million dollars in exports thanks to the decision of Fairfax papers to publish the cartoons. Australia has more to lose if our media proprietors throw good sense and sensitivity out the window and publish the cartoons.

Our farmers have been through years of drought. Which newspaper standing up for free speech will be ready to compensate or farmers is millions of dollars in export revenue from Muslim countries is lost?

My message to newspaper proprietors is simple. Before you decide to publish, show us the cash you’ll provide to compensate all those innocent Australians whose livelihoods will be affected by your allegedly principled stance.

Just as with power, similarly with freedom comes great responsibility. I hope Muslims learn to calm down and start solving problems more important than 12 offensive cartoons. I also hope newspapers will be sensitive enough to understand that insulting 1.2 billion people isn’t the most rational way to make a point about freedom of speech.

iyusuf@sydneylawyers.com.au