CRIKEY: Tele sets up another “Muslim-bashing exercise”

Well, it was another slow-news day at the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday 2 October 2007. But you can always rely on your trusted Tele reporters to manufacture news when none is available.

“Schools used for Shady purpose” was the headline of one such story. I’m not sure what kind of piersed akumen would come up with a headline poking fun at someone’s name. The photo of Sheik Shady Soliman showed him in the dangerous position of ... wait for it ... talking on a mobile phone! Perhaps Dr Haneef must have lent him a SIM card.

The reporter in question, Claire Masters, then plagiarises key material of her report from a similar story published by Richard Kerbaj in The Oz from May 9. That’s 6 months ago!

Masters writes ...

In a lecture titled Rulings on Performing Jihad Sheik Shady said while the Prophet condemned the killing of children, "if they are involved (in fighting) then you have to stop them".

Here is Kerbaj's version ...

In a lecture titled Rulings on Performing Jihad, obtained by The Australian, Sheik Shady differentiates between defensive and offensive jihad and quotes the Prophet by saying anyone
who fights to defend their land, soul, and wealth was considered a "Shahid" (martyr). "If attackers or invaders want to invade a Muslim country or attack a Muslim country then it's obligatory on every Muslim ... to fight and protect the country," he says.

Sheik Shady says while the Prophet condemned the killing of children, "if they are involved then you have to stop them".

"If you have a child carrying a knife and coming to you, or a sword and coming to kill you in the middle of the battle, they (the fighters) are going to look at him and say 'the Prophet said not to
touch him' - no, that's wrong."

Kerbaj at least provided the entire quote from Shady, from which one can gauge part of the historical and theological context. He also mentions that the lecture in question was delivered in 2002. Masters didn’t mention any of this. Funny that.

And if radical Sheiks aren’t enough to have you shaking in your thongs, Edith Bevin has a story on why Sydney icon Harry’s Cafe de Wheels refuses to use halal meat in its gorgeous meat pies.

But nowhere in the report does the owner, Michael Hannah, limit his comments to halal. Hannah in fact refers to both Islamic halal and Jewish kosher meat. In other words, Hannah has made a business decision not to use meat that satisfies the religious requirements of either faith.

Still, that doesn’t stop many Muslims (and I presume Jews also) from eating there. A few months back, I enjoyed a meat pie and hot dog at the Liverpool branch with a local mosque president.

Muslim scriptures allow Muslims to eat meat (apart from pig meat) slaughtered and prepared by “People of the Book” (ie. Jews and Christians). Many Western imams interpret this to mean that any and all meat sold at the supermarkets and butcher shops of Western countries is halal by default. In other words, specific slaughtering procedure isn’t required. Naturally, this position isn’t very popular with halal butchers and halal certification agencies.

Michael Hannah told Crikey on Wednesday that on Monday afternoon he’d received a phone call from someone at the Tele who asked him a number of questions before slipping in words to the effect of: “We were wondering whether you use halal meat”. He was surprised at the question as neither he nor any of his staff had never initiated any such discussion nor issued any press release. He specifically told the reporter that he catered for neither halal nor kosher and that he didn’t want to discriminate against anyone. He also told her that he had never received any requests for halal meat from his many Muslim customers.

Hannah told Crikey that he was disgusted to read the story in the paper the next day. He described it as a “set-up”. He told Crikey he had no intention of being part of a “Muslim-bashing exercise”.

So there you have it. When news doesn’t exist, the Tele literally makes it up. Tele reporters are quite happy to plagiarise, misquote, lie and verbal others to manufacture sectarian and racial wedges where none exist. Gutter journalism at its lowest.

My advice to Sydney readers is this: Go out and enjoy a delicious meat pie from Harry’s. And when the remnants of the pie emerge from the other end, wipe using a copy of the Tele.

This is an expanded ersion of a piece first published in the Crikey daily alert for Wednesday 3 October 2007.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

A picture tells a thousand words ...

Today I can honestly say that the News Limited media have done Muslims a huge favour. Both The Australian and Daily Telegraph have blown the cover on a rort involving the Islamic Council of NSW and its community housing program.

I guess the papers can't get it right all thee time. I found it rather disturning that the Daily Telegraph's website carried the headlines of "Muslim refugee housing scandal" and "Muslim refugee housing 'rort' probed".

The problem was that the illustration accompanying the article was the one to the left of this paragraph. I mean, what on earth does a woman wearing a face veil have to do with a housing scandal? Yes, it does involve Muslims. But how did women get involved? After all, the two people at the heart of the scandal are men, not women. Why bring the small minority of Muslim women who wear face veils into the picture? What have rthey got to do with the scandal?

I'm not sure who the online editor of the Tele is these days. The last fellow I spoke to some time ago when i did a blog for the tele was a decent sort of chap. But this kind of silly stereotyping should be left to Fleet Street.

And as usual, the comments are of the sort you'd expect at Tim Blair's blog (minus the threats of violence and swearing). Here's the first one ...

Another Left-Wing Labor failed Initiative. Why have an organization looking after Muslims only? Why not all Australians? Another racist left-wing pc effort gone wrong!

Yep, nothing like racists accusing their victims of racism! Welcome to tabloid land!!

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

COMMENT: Is John Howard linked to al-Qaeda?

Sydney readers beware! Osama bin Ladin's minions is on the prowl, seeking recuits for his grand jihad.

The Herald-Sun reports of ...

... a weekend recruitment drive by Muslim extremists espousing the teachings of Osama bin Laden.

The Hun also provides this amazing insight into the workings of anti-terrorist agencies:

Terrorist recruitment tactics have been in the spotlight since eight young professionals were arrested over the latest wave of UK bombings.

So until that thankfully-incompetent chap was found burning and screaming "Allah" at Glasgow, no one in the intelligence community bothered about how terrorist groups and cells recruit members.I can just imagine ASIO chief Paul O'Sullivan telling his researchers and operatives: "OK, fellas. I've just read in the Hun that a bomb's gone off. Let's find out how these people recuit!".

And what sophisticated methods are used by al-Qaeda to recruit in South Western Sydney? The Hun offers this insight:

Flyers for the event, the Islam Mercy to the Worlds Conference, have been dropped in cafes and restaurants around Sydney's southwest.

Mick Keelty had better send some of his blokes down to some of these places to watch these well-trained operatives in action.

With so much exclusive information, why would the Hun need to contact the organisers?

Conference organisers did not return the Herald Sun's calls last night.

I wonder why.

So what links these loud-mouthed and irrelevant imams to al-Qaeda? The Hun says they are ...

... devoted to bin Laden's poisonous brand of Islam, Wahhabism.

Wahhabism also happens to be the official religion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is also the sect followed and promoted by one of Mr Howard's closest friends in Aussie Muslim circles. The Hun article refers to the young Sydney graduate Kamal Taleb who

... returned to Australia after 15 years in a Saudi Arabian seminary devoted to fundamentalism.

I know Taleb personally. He studied at the Islamic University of Madina in Saudi Arabia. Mr Howard's friend facilitated Taleb's enrolment and even wrote him a reference.

I guess, using the Hun's logic, John Howard is directly linked to al-Qaeda. So am I. And because you are reading this article, so are you!

I'm no fan of Wahhabism. But seriously, to claim all Wahhabis are linked to OBL is as lame as suggesting all Irish Catholics were and are linked to Sinn Fein. Or suggesting all Tamils are linked to the LTTE.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

CRIKEY: The Oz – Always alarmed but rarely alert?

Today’s front cover of The Australian has a story splashed about a “Home-grown jihad threat”. The story is then referred to in The Oz’s editorial entitled “Vigilance alone will not win this war”.

Both the editorial and the story cite the arrest of a number of Australians by Lebanese authorities for being involved in terrorist activity. The same article and editorial then cite as an authority on radical Muslim youth a young chap who is associated with another Islamist group (known as the al-Ahbash) whose representatives have been arrested in Lebanon in relation to the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

That isn’t all. The Oz claims that Mustapha Kara-Ali ...

... was given a $200,000 grant by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in June last year.

This is absolute nonsense, and the journalists who wrote the story know it. In fact, Mr Kara-Ali is not the recipient of a single cent of government funding.

This is amateur and sloppy journalism most unbecoming of a national broadsheet. Surely the journalist has an obligation not to just repeat what his source tells him. Surely where the information can be independently verified, the journalist can check the facts.

All Richard Kerbaj et al had to do was look up the website of DIAC and see for themselves that Kara-Ali hasn’t received any money. Further, the grant was actually awarded to al-Amanah College, an independent school run by the Lebanese al-Ahbash sect. The amount awarded was not $200,000 but rather $157,866.

Kerbaj then faithfully reports Kara-Ali’s outlandish claims about “ideological sleeper cells” representing some 3,000 Sunni Muslim youth. No indication is given of how that figure is calculated, what research methodology was used, what criteria were used to determine whether a young person has become radicalised and which ethnic groups are involved in the research.

Most tellingly, Kerbaj doesn’t bother to ascertain whether Kara-Ali is qualified to make such alarmist statements or to carry out such research.

(It’s interesting to note that Kara-Ali’s qualifications are predominantly in engineering. He has no social science, sociology, demography or anthropology qualifications whatsoever.)

Kerbaj doesn’t question Kara-Ali’s statement that

... the Muslim community in Australia is still new.

How can this be when the current Mufti appointed by the Australian National Imams’ Council has lived in Australia since the early 1950’s? And isn’t Kerbaj aware of Albanian and Bosnian (formerly Yugoslav) Muslims who have lived in Australia since the 1920’s?

All in all, it is sloppy journalism, written and presented with a view of supporting a clear editorial slant on these issues.

A version of this was first published in the Crikey daily alert for Monday July 02, 2007.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007


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COMMENT: The Daily Telegraph struggles to retaliate ...

Poor Luke McIlveen from the Daily Telegraph today claims to have exposed ABCTV's Media Watch

... fighting claims of hypocrisy after its website published anti-Semitic comments mocking the Holocaust and claiming a Jewish conspiracy.

McIlveen says the offending comments were placed on the MW forums the day after the episode which castigated the Tele (and, to a lesser extent, the Sydney Morning Herald) for moderating and allowing racist and inflammatory comments on its blog.

It took McIlveen an entire 7 days to discover the comments. By that time, as McIlveen’s Opinion Editor Tim Blair notes on his personal blog, the comments have already been removed. Blair himself first published the comments on his blog on 18 June 2007.

I’m not exactly sure where the hypocrisy on MW’s part is. It’s not as if anyone at MW is suggesting that such views should be aired because they are “held by many Australians, especially in Sydney ”. Nor does anyone at MW suggest that only persons with “bourgeois sensibilities” insist the law be obeyed.

The anti-Jewish comments are appalling. But then, McIlveen quotes MW’s executive producer Tim Palmer saying “the posts remained on the website for a ‘few minutes’ before being taken down” (this is confirmed by Blair’s blog). Further, the removed comments don’t talk about turning Jews into compost or vilifying them for the colour of their skin or other physical features.
Tim Blair wasn’t a happy camper on Tuesday night, after MW was broadcast. Those commenting on his blog were complaining about their posts on MW’s forums not being published. Perhaps the reason for this is that Palmer believed (with good reason) that in fact the comments were posted by Tim’s blog fan club.

As if to underscore the amount of pain the MW expose has caused him, Blair made a highly personal attack on Tim Palmer. However, Blair’s attack on Palmer was nothing compared to his highly defamatory references to an up and coming Australian children’s author.

McIlveen goes to all this trouble to castigate the kinds of comments that his own editor would happily allow to be moderated on his blogs. Clearly, on the Tele’s past of the blogosphere, racism is only wrong when it’s against indigenous people or anyone deemed Muslim.

The Tele’s editorial asks:

Perhaps its opposed to the vilification of Arabs, but has no problem with the harassment of Jews.

The author of that editorial should read the blog of the Tele’s Opinion Editor and ask whether vice versa is true.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007



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COMMENT: Loewenstein's novel?

An article on the Australian Jewish News website talks about Melbourne University Press publisher Louise Adler in rather non-complimentary terms.

Adler is one of a number of prominent Jews who has signed a petition saying she refuses to defend anything and everything the Israeli government or armed forces does. This naturally makes her unpopular in some Jewish circles.

Yet the real source of wrath toward Adler can be found here ...

Adler has been criticised in the past for publishing Antony Loewenstein’s anti-Zionist novel, My Israel Question. (emphasis mine)

Well, that's one novel way of attacking someone's book.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007



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COMMENT: Reporting on Malaysian Politics

Last June, I found myself in Malaysia on an exchange program organised by the Australia-Malaysia Institute. Our program was managed by staff at the Australian High Commission.

Ours was one of a number of programs organised by AMI. Another program is organised specially for journalists. Someone associated with the journalists’ tour told me something very interesting about the attitudes of some Australian journalists. Here is what that officer told me, more or less …

I was with a group of other journalists to Kelantan state, which is currently ruled by the PAS Party [the Islamic Party of Malaysia]. They met with PAS officials and also with a group of non-Muslim PAS supporters called the PAS Supporters’ Club.

I was shocked by the behaviour of a number of the journos. One couldn’t believe how any non-Muslim could even consider supporting for PAS. He kept badgering a PAS supporter about the dangers of sharia law and how they could honestly accept status as second class citizens. Each time the PAS supporters explained why they supported PAS, this journalist would shake his head and say things like: “You must be brainwashed” and “How much are they paying you?”

A few weeks ago, I dined with a group of Malaysian journalists who were visiting Australia on an AMI exchange program. One was of Indian Catholic background from Kelantan. I asked him about PAS and non-Muslims. The journo told me about his father.

My dad is on the executive of our parish council. Before approaching PAS, he had been waiting for 8 years to get our church extensions approved. UMNO were in charge of planning in our state at that time. They kept making promises but my favour could never get anywhere with them.

Then PAS came into power. My father told his committee he wanted to approach the new Chief Minister. The committee told him to try but not to expect too much as this was an Islamic fundamentalist party and they would probably try and shut down the church.

My father approached the Chief Minister and told him about the problems he was having with the church extensions. The Minister listened careful, shook his head and apologised to my father.

“This is terrible. You have every right to worship, and we have no right to stop you. Let me see what I can do. We are all believers in God, and no believer in God should stop another believer from building a house for God.”

Within a week, we received confirmation of planning approval. My father was surprised. Later, he found out from Hindu friends of his that their contested temple approvals were also granted.

PAS and UMNO both compete for the Muslim vote. But UMNO shows its Islamic face by Malay chauvinism and making life difficult for non-Muslims. PAS shows their Islam by helping all religious people.

You won’t believe this, but the PAS Chief Minister comes to our special Mass services as much as he can. He also visits the opening of Hindu temples.

How can one explain this? Is PAS just making hard-headed political decisions? Are they being pragmatic? Quite possibly, yes. But this is the power of democratic government. Short of ethnic and religious cleansing, democratically elected governments have little or no choice but to ensure they seek and maintain support from as many sectors of the community as possible.

The problem with some Western journos and commentators is that they believe democracy doesn’t have enough strength to reign in religious parties. Others used their own sectarian prejudices to argue that anything even remotely resembling Islam can never sit comfortably with democracy.

Aussie journos and commentators reporting on Malaysian politics need to read more widely and think outside the square. Subscribing to news portals like Malaysiakini.com is a good start. Getting to know and understand the ethnic and religious landscape of the country is another. But whilst Aussie journos continue presuming that any group or party related to Islam is little more than an outlet of al-Qaeda or part of some international conspiracy to destroy the West, they really won’t get far.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

COMMENT: What the halal?

I was sitting in a McDonalds store in Drummoyne munching on a fillet-o-fish the other day when I decided it was time to insult my intelligence. I grabbed a copy of the Daily Telegraph and came across a report by Luke McIlveen that former Guantanamo inmate Mamdouh Habib had been apprehended by police at another McDonalds store in Bankstown .

McIlveen quoted police sources on the reasons for arrest. He also quoted a staff member at the McDonalds. McIlveen then inserted the following piece of information:

McDonald's outlets in the area are certified providers of halal food, catering for the large Muslim population.

What the ... ? What was the relevance of that to the story? Did Habib get arrested for having bacon on his otherwise halal burger? Were the police officers upset because he should have been at the mosque saying his afternoon prayers? Did the slaughtered cow from Habib's hamburger resurrect itself and complain to the police about its flesh being eaten by a former terrorism suspect?

Perhaps McDonalds stores keep the Tele to remind patrons that there is one thing in their stores containing more superfluous fat than their burgers ...

© Irfan Yusuf 2007

CRIKEY: How the tabloids made up the sample citizenship test ...

The Federal Government has today introduced a Bill to institute compulsory testing for Australian citizenship aspirants. And if we believe what we read in the tabloids, we already have a sample of questions that might be asked.

The Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph published sample questions on 18 May 2007, claiming they were

... [s]ample citizenship questions devised by the Federal Government.

The Herald Sun said it

... was given an exclusive insight into the likely content of the new test, to come into effect later this year.

Other News Limited tabloids also ran the “exclusive” sample questions. The Oz did not, and neither did the Fairfax press.

The Federal Government and DIAC were severely criticised in Crikey for the poorly drafted (and in some cases quite silly) questions. Muslim groups were also cited in the Daily Telegraph opposing the questions.

The Hez fired-up in its editorial section on 19 May:

Here's a quiz on Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews' 20-question citizenship test for would-be Australians: It is a) a good idea; b) xenophobic and unfair; c) a waste of time.

If you answered a) you would be correct -- because there is no reason migrants who want to be citizens should not have a basic knowledge of Australian history and values.

The proposed questions, revealed in the Herald Sun, serve an important purpose.

They concentrate the minds of potential citizens on the need to know who we are and why being an Australian is a privilege.

Yet the reality is that neither the Minister nor DIAC had anything to do with the so-called “exclusive” sample questions. The Senate Standing Committee On Legal & Constitutional Affairs grilled DIAC officials in Estimates hearings on 22 May.

Indeed, on page 56 of the Hansard record, Minister for Human Services Senator Chris Ellison cites Kevin Andrews as declaring that the questions were

... constructed by the newspaper ... we haven’t yet even constructed the questions.

Departmental Secretary Andrew Metcalfe confirmed that DIAC’s media unit ...

... did not talk to the media about any of those issues ...

... even adding that ...

... the term ‘journalistic licence’ presumably exists for a reason.

He said further:

The information I have is that the test that was published in the newspapers was entirely invented by the media, but it is clearly based - following some research - on statements that had been made by the Minister about the topic ... I think that it could all be traced back to someone sitting down and saying 'The Minister has talked about certain things; what would a test look like?' and it moved on from there. But as far as I know, what has appeared in the media does not represent the questions that would actually be asked in the test itself. Why do I know that? Because those questions have not yet been framed (emphasis added).

In other words, the tabloids made the whole sample test up, passed it off to unsuspecting readers as “exclusive” and “devised by the Federal Government” before getting plenty of mileage off the back of the community's outrage to the fictional questions.

A version of this was first published in the Crikey daily alert for 30 May 2007.

Words © 2007 Irfan Yusuf


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