COMMENT: Too many friggin blogs!

Seriously, I really do have too many blogs. In this age of downsizing and rationalisation, perhaps it's time I issued a redundancy notice to a few of them. I'll start with the Aussie Mossie blog. The last time I posted there was June 2007.

I'll be transferring posts from that blog here. It will be a gradual process. As each post arrives here, it will be deleted from there.

The "philosophy" (if you could call it that) of the Aussie Mossie blog can be summarised as follows:

Two decades ago, an anglo-aussie PhD student named Yusuf Reeder joined forces with some friends to start a newsletter called 'The Aussie Mossie'. It folded after a year or so, but the memory lives on. We hope to revive it in all its stinging glory.

Another good reason for getting rid of that blog is that I discovered last Ramadan that a newspaper of that name is being published in Sydney. Though I'm not sure if it's still being published. The point is that there's no point having two publications of the same name!

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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TURKEY: The Mor Gabriel Monastery Dispute

The Midyat district located in the south eastern Turkish province of Mardin is home to the Mor Gabriel Monastery, belonging to the Syriac Christian congregation. In recent times, a dispute has erupted between the Monastery and local villagers over land adjacent to the Monastery building. That land, consisting of some 285 of the total 1,227 hectares on which the Monastery stands, was recently declared "woodland" by the Land Registry General Directorate.

Local Muslim village heads have brought court proceedings against the Monastery, seeking to have the wall built by the Monastery around the forested woodland removed so as to allow for grazing animals. This court dispute has now become an international incident, with both the EU and the Obama administration watching Turkey's handling of the issue very carefully.

There is some suggestion that local villagers are being "manipulated" to turn this into a religious issue, pitting local Muslims and Christians against each other. The (ironically Islamist-leaning) Turkish government is seeking to avoid this turning into a religious dispute, and is pressuring the farmers to withdraw their court application pending a government investigation into the historical land registry records.

You can find out more in this article from Zaman.

The Monastery is one of the oldest active Christian monasteries on earth. It pre-dates the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.

Speaking of whom, the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said (more or less):

Whoever mistreated a non-Muslim citizen of an Islamic state will have me witnessing against him on the Day of Judgment.

Turkey may not be an "Islamic" state. But its government should insist on minorities not being mistreated.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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LETTER: Peace and love at Easter

My hands are still smelling of disinfectant. I spent around 20 minutes washing feet at a church in Ashfield. Bill Crews' hands are probably also still smelling, as are the hands of two Buddhist monks from Strathfield. Each year, on the Thursday before easter, we get together at his church to wash the feet of those who have fallen on hard times. These days, the number of such people has increased dramatically.

Bill Crews is carrying on the tradition of Christ, who washed the feet of his disciples. In feeding the poor and homeless, Crews is carrying on the tradition of Muslim scholars and sufis such as the late Shaykh Muinuddin Chishti, not to mention the work of numerous Buddhist denominations.

Easter is a time when Christians celebrate a loving God who (Christians believe) gave His son to die on the cross and then be resurrected. Muslims and Buddhists don't share the letter of these beliefs, but certainly share their basic spirit. So do other faiths such as Sikhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.

Another thing all faith-communities have in common is that we're not monoliths. There are lots of different types of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews etc. Those who choose to show hatred and discord try to ignore this variety, to dehumanise believers and to present denominations as monolithically evil. Prejudice is built on the foundational myth of the monolith.

I wrote about the phenomenon of prejudice in a recent article for the Sydney Morning Herald. Here's an excerpt:

On the ABC's Q&A program on Thursday, columnist Andrew Bolt spoke of "a rejectionist strand" that made Muslim immigration experience different to the experiences of Greek and Italian migrants. Again, the underlying assumptions are based on ignorance. To speak of a recent singular wave of Muslim migration is to engage in historical revisionism. Virtually all waves of migration incorporated an element of Muslims, including Europeans from Albania and the former Yugoslavia .

Some Muslims came as refugees, others as skilled or business migrants. Some have hardly been out of an immigration detention centre for a few years. Others are descended from Afghan cameleers who married indigenous women in the 19th century.

Yet, for some reason, Australian Muslims are treated as some kind of monolith. We hear pundits and self-serving religious leaders speak of a mythical entity called the "Muslim community". The idea that Muslims define themselves primarily by their religion sounds ridiculous when one considers that membership of the Lebanese Moslems Association is limited to adult males eligible for Lebanese citizenship. Yet what happens at this Lakemba mosque is somehow a reflection of 300,000-odd Australians who feel inclined to tick the "Muslim" box on their census forms.

One reader named "The Spectator ' decided to type up a letter and send it to the Sydney Morning Herald who forwarded it onto me. I thought I would share it with readers as it is relevant to this blessed time and to the issues raised in my Herald article. I've made some slight adjustments to the text.

April 3 3009-04-03

YOU AND YOUR CAMEL F*CKING MATES JUST DON'T GET ...DO YOU?

Why do you think there is a phobia against you second class citizens? I will give you a few hints ...you moronic uneducated imbecile.

The formation of a Middle eastern Crime Unit...why would this be. ?

The constant flow of Middle eastern names that crop up each time there is and arrest

The Shabby Sheiks mosque performance calling the police

The drug trade and bikies awash with these low lifes like you.

Car rebirthing,ATM raids, drugs, rapes ( Whats a fine bunch the Skafs were )

In your article you mentioned the Greels and Italian migration...big difference ...these people came to this country to work, and work they did...not bring their criminal ways and mentality to disrupt and corrupt a country that opened their doors and took them in from their war torn peasant backgrounds. You breed like flies and live like the pigs that you are.

I would suggest you and your criminal mates ( Adam Houda, another prime example) piss off back to where you came from...you are persona non grata and not welcome here. You are parasites and leeches on Australian society

Maybe Fred Nile is right. His concerns when low lifes like you and your Muslim mates want t change the way we live in are a danger to the freedom and democracy of this mighty country that our forebearers fought and died for .

"The Spectator '

I wish all my friends a happy easter. That includes "The Spectator '.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO/IRAQ: Zahra weeps for her husband ...

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a nasty place. There was little political freedom. Opposition figures were murdered, as were any persons deemed by the regime to belong to the opposition.

At the same time, there was security for ordinary Iraqis. It was a time when Iraqis lived side by side, when even the most devout intermarried across sectarian lines. Then the Americans and Brits came and toppled the dictator Saddam Hussein. The vacuum was filled by various forces - Al-Qaeda, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, sectarian militias and criminal gangs.

Sectarian strife is new to Iraq and has split apart families including the family featured in the following documentary entitled City of Widows, shown on the AlJazeera English documentary show Witness. Here is a short summary of the videos.

Filmmaker Rashad Radwan follows Zahra, a Shia in Iraq, as day after day, she visits police stations, hospitals and morgues in a desperate search for her kidnapped husband, and in the face of disapproval from a society where widows are still expected to be invisible.

The documentary is in two parts.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf






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OPINION: Fifth column in Crescent Times - Show Us Your Memoirs!

Some months back, I completed the manuscript of my book, a memoir about my flirtation with certain forms of “political” Islam during the 1980’s and ‘90’s.

I got up to some pretty freaky stuff back then. But I couldn’t help wondering after I finished the manuscript – why would anyone want to buy my book in particular? After all, it’s not as if my activities were anything worth grabbing that fridge magnet for. (Isn’t it funny how no one seems to remember the phone number on that fridge magnet ...)

I did read a few books by the likes of Maududi and Shariati and Maryam Jameelah. I even contemplated heading off to fight jihad against the Soviet Union. I certainly never attended a terrorist training camp (though a representative of the Afghan Hizb-i-Islami faction did give a Friday khutba at an AFIC camp I attended in the late 1980’s). I certainly never did exciting things like recruit hundreds of Aussie Muslim kids for al-Qaeda or one of its franchises. The closest I got to the Taleban was going on khurooj (a word meaning ... um ... don’t ask me what that word means) with the Tabligh Jamaat in the Karachi suburb of Korangi. In fact, I reckon I came closer to embracing religious extremism when I joined the Liberal Party.

For a more authentic action-packed blockbuster account of jihadist fundamentalist islamo-fascist islamist terrorist extremist extremism, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the release of former al-Muhajiroun spokesman Hassan Butt’s memoirs. Entitled The Trouble With Islamist Infidel Caged Virgins, Butt’s book tells the story of a young man who once acted as al-Qaeda’s third-in-command, heading its UK operations and recruiting millions of young British Muslims for jihadi missions across the Milky Way.

In one of his more daring missions, Butt recruited suicide bombers from Mars for al-Qaeda’s first mission to the moon, hoping that their mission to destroy this huge piece of green cheese might lead to sufficient Muslim unity to launch bin-Ladin’s Caliphate-cum-dictatorship on Eid al-Fitr. If Muslims cannot find an agreed method for moon sighting, why not just martyr the moon?
And if you’re stupid enough to believe the previous two paragraphs, you’re probably as imbecilic as a host of British politicians and international media outlets, some of which paid Butt huge sums for his “exclusive” story of how he recruited hundreds of British youth.

But don’t expect many of these media outlets to admit they got sucked into Butt’s lies. It turns out that evidence of Butt’s fraud was given before a British court in December 2008, but the court placed restrictions on Butt’s testimony being made public. Those restrictions were only recently lifted. And so it’s only now that the media can report that Hassan Butt told the court that he totally fabricated his stories and told stories “the media wanted to hear”. Here’s my recreation of the court transcript based on the few media reports available:

Andrew Edis QC: So, you were a professional liar then?

Hassan Butt: I would make money, yes.

Andrew Edis QC: If the money’s right you’ll say absolutely anything?

Hassan Butt: Absolutely anything, yes. If I wasn’t going to cash up on it, someone else was going to cash up on it.

Before his admissions, Butt had apparently dobbed in a host of people to various law
enforcement and intelligence authorities, claiming they were all terror “suspects” or part of “extremist cells”. Back in early 2007, Butt claimed on the US 60 Minutes program that he was an al-Qaeda insider for some 10 years, and had met the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers.

Butt went to Lahore in Pakistan after 9/11. From there, he made some highly publicised pleas for British Muslims to join him in fighting on the Taliban side in Afghanistan. By December 2001, Butt was back in England and trying to sell his story to a British tabloid for a cool £100,000. Apparently fighting for the Taliban wasn’t as lucrative as selling the story.

Since then, Butt has peddled his frauds to the highest media bidders. Butt’s high profile media appearances have also forced politicians and law enforcement officials to take him seriously. Only God knows how much time and public funds have been wasted on allowing Butt to peddle his fantasies.

Butt’s proposed memoir entitled Leaving Jihad [ed: which appears now to have changed its name to Leaving al-Qaeda] is already available from Amazon.co.uk, and you can sign up for a copy when it becomes available. If it becomes available.

In my case, I’d be happy to show you my memoirs.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Sheik Hilaly fights for his life in Lakemba ...

On Tuesday afternoon, I was forwarded a copy of an anonymous email from three Muslim sources. This in itself is nothing special -- Muslims are recipients of sh-tsheets as much as members of even the most mildly political group. But what made this email strange is that it concerned an upcoming election at the Lebanese Moslems Association (LMA) which manages the Imam Ali ben Abi Taleb mosque in Lakemba and employs Sheik Hilaly and other imams.

The LMA's constitution contains a provision that only adult males entitled to a Lebanese passport are eligible to have full membership and voting rights. Which raises the question -- why was the same email sent to my three sources, two of whom are women and one of whom is an Anglo-Australian man and all three of whom live nowhere within 300km of Lakemba?

The email referred to Sheik Hilaly calling up "the Anti-terrorist unit ... on Tuesday; They (Hilali and his mob) are accusing the 'young boys' at the Mosque of being extremists and potential terrorists". The email also referred to Sheik Hilaly's sermon last Friday when he allegedly described a group of young Muslim men as "Taleban in Lakemba". The email claims Hilaly used terrorism fears to play LMA politics.

These are our children he is talking about, our husbands, and our brothers. How can a Shiek [sic.] make such FALSE accusations. These people he is accusing are innocent -- his accusations can lead to long term jail sentences for these innocent people who have families to support.

So why was the email distributed so widely? An election was coming up. LMA elections are always hotly contested affairs, especially given the large amounts of real estate and other assets the LMA owns. Though time and again, the LMA has shown a complete unwillingness to deal with PR issues. Go to the LMA website and try clicking the box marked "MEDIA PRESS RELEASE".

Hilaly is again in hot water, this time over kicking down a door inside the mosque and then allegedly accusing another person of causing damage to the door. His explanation wasn't too convincing, and all he has in his favour is that the report was from A Current Affair, a program with not much of a reputation when it comes to accuracy.

Hilaly's antics could be seen as him resisting generational change in the LMA. Certainly during his catmeat fiasco, LMA executive members (all of whom were 2nd and 3rd generation Lebanese Aussies) distanced themselves from Hilaly and openly expressed a wish to be done with him. LMA elders opposed these young men.

Hilaly is also accused of using Machiavellian LMA politics to protect his position. As an employee of the LMA, Hilaly should be above politics. Yet Hilaly isn't the first imam to play politics. Imams are in a precarious position, often with no written employment contract and no job description, and expected to juggle conflicting instructions from an executive frequently in a state of civil war.

Hilaly's catmeat speech was more than likely leaked to The Oz by a sectarian opponent from a rival mosque. Such an opponent could not have had access to the mosques video. When members of the executive are leaking videos to the media and sending out sh-tsheets across Australia, it seems likely that Hilaly's days as senior imam at Lakemba are numbered.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO/COMEDY: Perving, Saudi style ...

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VIDEO/COMEDY: Arab-Muslim pick-up lines ...

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