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 ...
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
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.
All in all, it is sloppy journalism, written and presented with a view of supporting a clear editorial slant on these issues.
© Irfan Yusuf 2007
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