It’s been a while since I’ve eaten at a McDonalds Australia outlet but from memory, apart from the McOz (which is a promotional burger only), none of their other regular hamburgers contain bacon.

Infact the only thing on the entire menu that contains bacon I believe is the Bacon and Egg McMuffin, available only during breakfast times (6-10:30am). A quick visit to the McDonalds Australia website to look at their menu seems to confirm this (strong>Warning: The McDonalds Australia website is clunky and heavily bogged down with overexcessive use of Flash, so it’s probably easier to just take my word for it than visit the link above).

Given bacon’s virtual non-appearance on their menu, it’s safe to say that you’d pretty much have to go out of your way to get a hamburger with bacon in it.

Yet somehow, that’s exactly what happened to Mouhamad Khaled, his girlfriend Daphne Florence Austin and his father Walid Khaled.

Being muslim, naturally they couldn’t eat pork and well… whilst there were plenty of mature options available to them, the trio instead wound up violently assaulting police officers…

…over a hamburger.

…

…seriously.

I don’t know what exactly the three of them ordered, but the news.com.au say it was a ‘hamburger’ so that pretty much rules out the breakfast menu.

Upon receiving their hamburger and discovering the bacon inside, the Khaled’s and Austin flew into a rage and began ‘abusing counter staff’.

‘eh bros, wut’s this shit bacon in mah burger eh?

‘tryina make me sik eh? you guys r fuks yo, dumfuks I’mma call my bros and we’s gunna roll you all eh!

fo’real’


Thankfully before these knuckleheads had the opportunity to take it any further two police officers who were co-incidentally on the premises on the time intervened.

Upon being told to stop swearing and calm down, Walid Khaled (the father, and fifty three years old mind you) continued the tirade, now focusing on the police.

Not having a bar of it the police went to arrest him and that’s when his son and his girlfriend jumped in. Now attempting to restrain three rabidly violent people, Mouhamad made a grab for one of the officer’s handcuffs and began assaulting them with it.

Mouhamad struck ‘probationary Constable Matthew Sutherland on the head before swinging them at Senior Constable Alicia Bridges, hitting her’.

The attack happened in April and subsequently Mouhamad spent four months in custody before being granted bail.

As it stands now,

in Burwood Local Court yesterday, Magistrate Christopher Longley set a hearing date in February for Austin and Walid Khaled, who have each pleaded not guilty to charges linked to the brawl.


Not guilty? What, despite there being video surveillance in every McDonalds store in Australia and the fact that the prosecution have called on 29 witnesses to testify (everyone in the McDonalds store at the time?)

Yeah, good luck with that plea guys.

Amusingly the defence have called three witnesses in response.

Let me guess, the two Khaled’s and Ms Austin themselves?

Look guys I get it, you can’t eat pork because of your religion and you were upset that there was bacon in your burger but cmon.

Do what everybody else does when they have a complaint.

Complain to McDonalds management and get free McDonalds for a year, write a letter to your local MP, go on Today Tonight or A Current Affair… anything except carrying on like a bunch of obnoxious pork chops.

I’m not telling you to just get over it and eat it, of course your perfectly within your rights to not expect pork in your hamburger, but even if the staff themselves were being sneaky bastards and trying to stir you up (for whatever reason, I have no idea), that still doesn’t excuse your fuckwit like behaviour guys.

No doubt this will somehow turn into a race thing, despite the fact the race of the three assaulters is unknown. That and we can probably expect another Carnita Matthews false victimization plot thrown in as well by the defense in February, just for good measure.

Till then…

One of the things I’m proud of Australia is the fact that, despite having people from all sorts of cultures, religions and creeds, it’s that for the most part we all get along with the same reasonably secular common law.

Aborigines and their special courts aside, the rest of us abide by a system that embodies universal concepts and structures anyone can follow to lead a reasonably productive and fulfilling life.

The great thing is that, if you wish to follow extra laws and rules enforced by a religion or some other belief system, you’re welcome to (providing of course they don’t clash with our existing laws).

I don’t mind what people follow, so long as they don’t try to impose it on myself or the rest of Australia at large. That naturally covers the enforcement of any beliefs harboured by individuals or groups. What the individual chooses to belief or follow is up to the individual, how they interpret or do so within the constraints of the Australian legal system should be left to personal choice.

…something that a group of Wahhabi fundamentalists living in Western Sydney seem to disagree with.

Simply put, pretty much every negative stereotype you hear about Islam in one way or another originates from modern day Wahhabi nutjobs.

Women not being able to drive, being denied education, all that nonsense about having to have chaperones, Sharia law yeah, it’s all there in Wahhabi. Not surprisingly, Wahhabi is wildly popular in Saudi Arabia and the like and wherever Wahhabi exists, it pretty much tends to clash with mainstream societies and even other muslim groups.

Here in Australia much of the Wahhabi belief system is simply incompatible with our way of life (regardless of which religion you do or don’t follow or what your beliefs are).

For starters, most Australians aren’t too keen on Sharia and like myself, I imagine would utterly refuse to be governed by it (or any system that resembled it).

For a recent Islamic convert in Sydney however, this wasn’t enough and his own greater religious circle took it upon themselves to administer their own form of punishment after the follower in question was seen drinking alcohol.

After a night out drinking with some mates,

The 31-year-old was asleep in his apartment in Silverwater, in Sydney’s west, when he woke to find four bearded men in his bedroom about 1am (AEST) yesterday.

Three of the intruders restrained him on the bed while the fourth man used a cable to lash him 40 times. The attack lasted about 30 minutes and left the man covered in welts.

The man reportedly told police he had only recently converted to Islam and that fundamental Wahhabi Muslims were punishing him for having a few drinks with friends.


Let me be the first to say, what the flying fuck?

This didn’t happen behind closed doors in Saudi Arabia, in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan or in a remote tribal village of Pakistan – this happened in the largest and most populous city in Australia, Sydney.

Following the attack the man was reportedly terrified and moved out of his home. He reported the assault to police but is now ‘afraid and has since become hesitant to cooperate with authorities‘.

Obviously the Wahhabi community of Sydney is going to be small and no doubt the men who administered the punishment are known to the victim. So why the hell hasn’t anyone been arrested yet?

Reluctance to co-operate aside, surely it’s not that hard to at least bring people in for questioning?

Thankfully the wider muslim community of Sydney have condemned the attacks and called for justice;

“This criminal act has no place in Islam. As Australian Muslims we are required to follow Australian law, not take the law into our own individual hands,” Ahmed Kilami, from the Muslim Village, told the Seven Network.

“I hope these guys are caught and face the full force of the law.”


I hope so too. And further to that, if this is the kind of nonsense Wahhabi muslims are bringing into Australian culture, why are we letting them do it?

Having your own belief systems is fine, but lashing people because they don’t follow your beliefs? What’s next, mutilating people, beheadings and honor killing?

As they say, to hell with that. Take your Sharia law and shove it guys.

Carnita Matthews hasn’t had a very good run at being a licensed driver in Australia.

Since she first received her learner licence in 1998 at the age of 33, she has twice had her provisional licence suspended for totting up too many demerit points and twice had her licence suspended for non payment of fines.


Finally, Matthews’ licensing woes came to a head last year when she was pulled over by police for not displaying her P plates.

For this she was fined $276 and ordered to pay court costs.

Following the court’s decision, Matthews then went on to accuse the police officer who booked her, Sergeant Paul Kearney, of racism and ‘attempting to tear her burqa off her face‘.

Matthews made the claims on Channel 7 as well as in a sworn statutory declaration filled and handed in at a local police station.

During the subsequent court case, Matthews was revealed to have completely fabricated the claims after police video footage of the incident was admitted as evidence.

The video footage showed no such attempt by Sergeant Kearney to remove Matthew’s burqa.

Or in other words, she lied.

For deliberately making false statements in court under oath, Matthews was sentenced to six months in jail, which she appealed.

Yesterday the case came to a conclusion and Matthews was let off scot free.

Why?

Because Matthews is better than the rest of us. Carnita Matthews wears a burqa you see and is subsequently completely above Australian law.

Time and time again we’ve been told that people wearing the burqa do so out of religious necessity (despite this in itself being a myth) and that worries over identification are nonsense.

Well, wake up to yourselves people. Yesterday, those nonsensical fears became a reality.

In her appeal Carnita Matthews argued that because she wore a burqa and did not have to provide a signature, there was no way to prove it was infact her who lodged the statutory declaration. In light of this Judge Clive Jeffreys agreed and upheld Matthews appeal.

For all intents and purposes, there was no way to prove Matthews lodged the statutory declaration. Yet somehow it was legitimate enough to be used in court action in her prior case against the police.

Of course in order to have proved that Matthews did indeed hand in the statutory declaration herself, police would have needed to confirm her identity by asking her to remove her burqa.

This however is currently legally impossible due to police currently not having ‘legal power to require women to show their face if the women refuse on religious or cultural grounds‘.

Does anyone else see a problem here? Maybe problem is understating it, allow me to rephrase;

Does anyone see a big gaping elephant sized loophole in Australia’s already weak as piss legal system?!

The upholding of the appeal wasn’t the end of it of course. Furthermore, Judge Jeffereys decided to rub salt into the wounds of honest Australians by declaring that ‘even if Mrs Matthews had made the complaint, he could not be sure she knew it was a “false” statement‘.

Are you kidding me?

Someone lies about an incident they were directly involved in and some judge is going to tell me there’s no way to be sure they knew they were making a false statement about it?

What’s the definition of lying again? Oh that’s right, making a false freaking statement.

Meanwhile the police seem to have their heads completely up their arses in terms of public reaction to Matthews getting off scot free. In discussing the appeal, Police Minister Mike Gallacher stated ‘he did not expect this to inflame community anger about women wearing full face coverings‘.

Right. Because there’s nothing infuriating about someone lying, going to court about it, being proven to be lying, getting jail time and then getting off scot free because nobody can make a positive identification due to bullshit religious tolerance.

Sorry Galagher but as an Australian I’m fucking furious. As should all Australians be, muslim or otherwise.

Time and time again in the burqa debate the issue of identity has come up and here we have a woman literally hiding behind her burqa to get away with crime.

Religious tolerance be damned. The law is the law and if you want to function in Australian society you better damn well follow it or expect to be harshly punished.

Anything less is simply unacceptable.

All this despite a population that is dwarfed by most other countries entering these conflicts.

Because of a lack of traitors in our wartime history, it’s especially so that the case of David Hicks understandably makes many Australians see red. Myself included.

Simply put, Hicks is an Australian citizen who, in the midst of the Afghanistan war, was caught batting for the other team.

Sold to the US military, Hicks was then transferred to the infamous Guantanamo Bay where he was detained for six years. Upon release he served a further nine months in jail in Australia before being released into society.

To this day he remains at large.

The issue of David Hicks usually procures two types of people. There are those who see him as being ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ and a victim of an unfair judicial process.

Then there are those like me, who seem Hicks as a traitor of the highest order. Someone who should have been stripped of his citizenship and left to rot in Guantanamo Bay as an unknown.

Harsh? Perhaps. But make no mistake. Hicks knew exactly what he was doing, who he was fighting for and what he was getting himself into.

This week Wikileaks’ latest release was a collection of 779 secret files from Guantanamo Bay, one of which is the detainee file of a David Michael Hicks… or as we know him, David Hicks.

The Wikileaks’ Guantanamo file on David Hicks details Hicks military training and really, to suggest Hicks was in the wrong place at the wrong time is an insult to general intelligence.

Hicks began his military career by training with the Kosovo Liberation Army for three months. Due to his late arrival into the conflict however Hicks training wasn’t sufficient enough and he failed to enter combat, despite wishing to do so.

Believing he was ready for East Timor though, Hicks then flew over there but was left ‘disappointed by his lack of readiness and participation in certain situations‘ (situations which were not elaborated upon).

So, turns out three months of KLA training does not a hardened war veteran make, who’da thunk?

Returning to Australia and determined to see out his military fantasies, Hicks then applied to the Australian Army but was knocked back due to his ‘low level of formal education‘.

This is where the buck should have stopped, but gung ho Hicks wouldn’t have a bar of it. Instead, Hicks took up Islam and went to Pakistan to further his military training. There, Hicks got involved with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a known terrorist organisation, is

one of the largest and most active militant Islamist terrorist organizations in South Asia, operating mainly from Pakistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba members have carried out major attacks against India and its objective is to introduce an Islamic state in South Asia and to “liberate” Muslims residing in Indian Kashmir.


Sounds like a wonderful bunch of people.

Hicks joined and trained with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (Guantanmo file spelling) and then tried to gain insertion into Indian controlled Kashmir. Having joined an organisation known for conducting attacks against India, who knows what Hicks might have got up to had he of been successful.

Acting on information given to him by a member of the Taliban he’d met in Pakistan, Hicks then went off to Afghanistan in search of more military training. I’m not sure whether or not he found it or not… but the Guantanamo file then states that he returned to Pakistan to ‘study the Quran for four months‘.

Running around with Islamic terrorist organisation in the heart of Pakistan and Afghanistan and taking Quran studying sabbaticals, it’s probably safe to assume that at this point Hicks was a religious nutter.

As evidenced in a letter he sent to his mother on the subject of jihad;

As a Muslim young and fit my responsibility is to protect my brothers from aggressive non-believers and not let them destroy it.

Islam will rule again but for now we must have patience we are asked to sacrifice our lives for Allahs cause why not? There are many privileges in heaven. It is not just war, it is jihad.

One reward I get in being martyred I get to take ten members of my family to heaven who were destined for hell, but first I also must be martyred.

We are all going to die one day so why not be martyred?


Yes, David Hicks was all to willing to martyr himself fighting the non-believers, which in this case was primarily the armies of the west, including that of Australia.

Returning to Afghanistan after his Quran studying efforts, Hicks then trained with Al-Qaeda in ‘Basic Military Training, City/Urban Tactics, Mountain Tactics and Intelligence/Target Gathering‘.

Despite Hick’s Guantanamo file stating he trained in Al-Qaeda’s Al Farouq and Abu Obeida terrorist training camps, Hicks denies any such thing;

There were three or four camps under the name of Camp Farouk at that time in Afghanistan. I attended the open mainstream camp, not terrorist camps.

I would not have been there if there was any suggestion of terrorist activity or the targeting of civilians.

How would a white boy new to Islam, not understanding local customs or languages, largely uneducated in the ways of the world, get access to such supposedly secret camps planning acts of terror?

The camps I attended were not Al-Qaeda. I did not hear about such an organisation until my arrival in Guantanamo Bay.


Mainstream camps? What mainstream camps?! How were the mainstream camps any different to the terrorist camps, who was funding them and why?

Furthermore, despite these proclamations of innocence and not knowing anything about Al-Qaeda, Hicks boasted to his family back in Australia that

There are a lot of Muslims who want to meet Osama Bin Laden but after being a Muslim for 16 months I get to meet him.


Yeah, because y’know, I’m sure Osama Bin Laden himself goes around to all the non-terroristy ‘mainstream camps’.

So, just to recap, Hicks claims he didn’t know what Al-Qaeda was prior to his capture, yet was running around Afghanistan Al-Qaeda terrorist camps having meetings with Ban Laden and other Al-Qaeda operatives.

Yet he has the balls to declare he was just there participating in some sort of open mainstream military training camp.

Leaving his training at the Abu Obeida terrorist training camp early, an impatient Hicks went to join Al-Qaeda on the frontlines. Shortly thereafter he was called back to Khandahar for a meeting with senior Al-Qaeda co-ordinator and planner, Abu Hafs.

Following the collapse of several Taliban controlled fronts, Hicks fled the area in the back of a truck and was it was then that he was captured by Northern Alliance soldiers and then sold to the US military.

In the prime of his military fantasy world, Hicks was cut down and prevented from seeing combat. Combat which, if he had of had the opportunity to engage in, would have no doubt been against coalition forces, including that of Australia.

In the subsequent years of his imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay, many called for Hicks release on the grounds that he was an Australian citizen. Yet so little did Hicks value his Australian citizenship that he traded it in for a British citizenship in an attempt to escape detainment.

He did this after seeing the British government campaign heavily for the release of British prisoners, but after a successful procurement of British citizenship, was knocked back on the grounds that he was an Australian citizen at the time of his capture.

Shortly thereafter Hicks was also stripped of his British citizenship too.

Following on from that, in an attempt to distance himself from the islamic jihadist nutter image he’d carefully crafted for himself over the past few years, Hicks also renounced Islam whilst serving time in Guantanamo.

To say Hicks is a man with little to no loyalties or convictions is an understatement.

I mean if you’re going to go off and fight for the country you hold citizenship to and get caught in the thick of it, at least stand by what you believe and don’t be a soft cock about it.

Even when criticising Hicks for what he is, it’s difficult to peg him on it because his story is full of flip flops, contradictions and a mountain of behavioural evidence against him.

Would I have cared if Hicks had of been held in Guantanamo indefinitely? Not likely.

Despite legally being an Australian citizen there are some things, that if you actively engage in, in my eyes you forfeit the right to call Australia home.

Training with nutjobs and actively engaging in a war Australia is participating in ranks highly on that list.

Meanwhile, having learnt his lesson and after a brief PR blitz to clear his name, Hicks now lives in Sydney with his wife Aloysia who, being a human rights activist, no doubt fell in love with the ‘poor Australian citizen wrongfully imprisoned by the evil Americans’ fairytale Hicks and his supporters tried to spin to the Australian public.

Frankly I’m not and will not ever have a bar of it. Hicks is traitorous scum and quite frankly forfeited his right to ever set foot on Australian soil the moment he took up a military cause against the nation he belongs to.

David Hicks; a permanent shit stain on Australian citizenship, if you will.

Without the mining and resources industries, Australia is essentially a country with little to no manufacturing interests and a large white collar workforce. Once those minerals and resources dry up, we don’t really have all that much to offer the world except for our beef.

We have massive welfare costs and as for importing labour, rather than importing producers, we focus on charity cases with zero skillsets, or those with degrees for the white collar sector.

Don’t get me wrong, Australia will survive without the mining and resources industry, it’s just that you’re going to see the cost of living skyrocket.

And who will be the most hard hit by this cost?

Those we’re currently importing with zero skillsets from war torn countries who also happen to be predominantly Muslim.

In Europe there’s been large unrest recently in Germany, France and England as large migrant Muslim populations seek to carve out their own piece of society, largely ignoring the established structure and populations already present.

So noticable has this segregation become that just last week British Primeminister David Cameron ‘condemned Britain’s long-standing policy of multiculturalism as a failure, calling for better integration of young Muslims to combat home-grown extremism‘.

This is a dramatic shift in policy from the established ‘let anyone who arrives  do anything in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism’ that Britain and most western countries have adopted over the last few decades.

In Australia it’s no different. A steady stream of migrants have entered the country and with the blessings of the local, state and federal government, sought to set up various enclaves around Australia’s cities shunning our rich and established society.

Tolerance and cultural acceptance has been preached to the population at large and bar a few scuffles here and there we’ve complied.

It’s alright for shopfronts to carry signage exclusively in non-English, they don’t use English back ‘home’.

Suspended sentences are handed out for even the most heinous of crimes, after all it’s not poor diddums fault they arrived from random war torn shithole country X. Heinous crimes are virtually a career over there.

And then of course there’s the housing, welfare and social costs of dealing with these people who, whilst happy to receive our help, then want nothing to do with us.

In Europe this has failed. What we have now are large areas of the local populations left feeling alienated in the face of growing subdivisions of people quite happy to form their own little groups and pretend they’re not in Europe.

In Australia, left unchecked we’re not too far behind. Arguably we’re even more at risk seeing as we haven’t experienced local home grown extremism as a country. Yes, nutjobs live here and occasionally shock us with their acts of terror, but we’ve yet to truly witness a large scale catastrophe as a direct result of fostering minority groups o differentiate themselves from mainstream Australia.

In light of Cameron’s speech in the UK, Australia is not without its politicians taking note and hoping that we learn something from watching Europe’s multiculturalism unfold.

Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews lashed out at political leaders who failed to speak out on the rise of extreme Islam, claiming the silence contributes to the rise of One Nation-type movements.

Liberal frontbencher, Mitch Fifield, warned of the danger of “parallel societies” developing as has occurred in Europe where hardline Muslim groups preached sharia law rather than Western values.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi warned Australia must avoid the mistakes of nations that allowed religious fanatics to prosper “before it is too late”.


One needs only to look at certain suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne to see these parallel societies are already well on their way to providing the same cultural problems in Australia as Europe is currently facing.

Meanwhile, as the European governments have done before it, the Australian government simply ignores the problem and asks us to bury our heads in the sand;

The Government and the Greens dismissed the fears, saying the nation should focus on the “positive” aspects of its diverse ethnic heritage.


Nobody is saying we shouldn’t focus on the positive aspects but simply dismissing the negatives? How does that address anything?

It’s rare that as a country we’re able to witness our future happening overseas right before our eyes in the existing generation. It’d be stupid to pretend that the people who migrate to Australia are any different.

One look at the fledgling segregation in Australia easily confirms that.

Senator Bernardi warned of a growing “cultural divide” in Australia.

He cited the advent of Muslim-only toilets at a Melbourne university and the halal method of meat slaughter as cultural practices that must be opposed.


Both minor but one step closer to the greater problems now being currently faced in Europe. Halal meat is something I can compromise on (provided it doesn’t in any way affect the availability of pork), but Muslim only toilets?

I know Muslims have to wash their feet or something for prayer but surely installing a foot basin in existing toilets and getting on with life is easier then retrofitting new exclusive toilets that only encourage segregation.

If some guy or girl can’t wash their feet in a normal toilet for everybody else, then god help them integrating into the rest of society.

Whilst I hope I don’t come across as an alarmist (I’m certainly not suggesting this is a ‘warning to Australia’ or any such), I do think this is something that needs to be addressed. Moreso anyway than simply outright dismissing it and instead solely focusing on the positives of diversity.

Diversity definitely has its positives yes, but not at the cost of society at large. There’s are reasons countries are messed up and people are fleeing them, and in my opinion Europe is well on it’s way to experiencing the same problems. At which stage I’m sure we’ll see an exodus of people fleeing an ultimately failed policy that was too lax to begin with.

Although delayed, I’d rather not see Australia follow a similar path. We study foreign economies and industry to make ours better, so why not apply the same to society?

Are Australian’s and our government that naive to think what’s happening in Europe won’t happen here?

Moderates would have you believe that this isn’t a problem though. Through tolerance and acceptance the idea is that, even under fundamentalist rule, the government still caters to those who don’t subscribe to the ruling religion.

The reality however is much different. If you don’t subscribe to whatever religious beliefs are in power, god help you if you disagree or have an issue with any of it.

As demonstrated in Islamically dominated countries recently, here we are not even half way into January of 2011 and already the craziness of a religiously dominated government has raised its ugly head.

Ladies and Gentlemen, from Somalia to Pakistan – here’s how two of arguably the most batshit crazy countries in the world have chosen to see in the new year.

First up, Somalia.

All I really know about Somalia is something something possible diamond trade something something didn’t they have a war a while back and something something there’s a famine there isn’t there?

Other then that it came as a total surprise to hear the militants in southern Somalia had ‘banned unrelated men and women from shaking hands, speaking or walking together in public‘.

Oh dear.

This isn’t some religious one day in a year type deal either. This ban applies to every freaking minute of every day.

Walking down the milkbar, BETTER MAKE SURE THERE’S NO UNRELATED FEMALES ABOUT!

Hopelessly lost and want to ask for directions? DON’T YOU DARE ASK SOMEONE UNRELATED FROM THE OPPOSITE SEX FOR HELP!

Yes, under crazy Islamic Al-Shabab religious law, day to day life in Somalia has undoubtedly taken a turn towards sucking even harder.

Oh, and the penalty for breaking this law?

People who break the rules could be imprisoned, whipped or even executed.


Marvellous!

Meanwhile over in Pakistan (yeah this is going to be a blast), over 20,000 people rallied to protest against the repeal of an amendment to blasphemy laws after a Christian woman was recently sentenced to death.

These blasphemy laws dish out the death penalty to anyone who blasphemies against the prophet Mohammad.

Just last week government official, Salman Taseer, was assassinated by one of his bodyguards after he publicly ‘sought to reform the law‘.

And then as if it wasn’t bad enough that someone was assassinated over proposed changes to the law, half the country seems to think his assassination was perfectly justifiable!

Pakistan’s most high-profile political killing in three years has bitterly divided the country, horrifying moderates, but winning praise from religious scholars and lawyers who festooned the presumed killer in garlands.

Banners at the event included some supporting Taseer’s presumed killer, police commando Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri.

“Mumtaz Qadri is not a murderer, he is a hero,” said one banner in the national Urdu language.


When it comes to violence and Islam, what we’re looking at here is the equivalent of priests openly praising and supporting child molesting members of the clergy… and yet somehow this is socially acceptable in Pakistan.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?!

In an age of preached tolerance and calls for acceptance of people’s differing religious beliefs and cultural values – it’s a hard pill to swallow when witnessing the utter ridiculousness that exists in some corners of the globe;; all of course in the name of religious law.

And god help us should they ever get a foothold elsewhere on the planet.

Yes you might not agree with everything and certain parts of your new home are going to be different but for the most part, if everyone compromises a little then usually everyone can reasonably get along.

Over the past decade or so this has started to fall apart with the push for people wanting to re-invent their homelands in their new adopted home. The most drastic example of this behaviour is the battle for the creation and adoption of legal systems, customs and societal values that are alien to the country people have settled in.

To silence critics of course, this push comes under the guise of cultural tolerance, never mind the fact that the minority pushing for cultural tolerance is completely crushing that which already exists in the majority. If cultural tolerance doesn’t work, well you can always just sit on your laurels and cry racist, X’ophobe or bigot.

That usually kicks politicians into action pretty quickly.

Over in the west this is something we’re just starting to come to terms with. America’s relatively strong constitution for the most part protects it’s legal framework but over in Europe there are quite a few countries who are now struggling with maintaining balance over the push for local minority legal systems and governments.

In Australia we’ve only experienced the tip of the iceberg and whilst nothing major has been proposed yet, it’s probably only a matter of time.

In the middle east however these tandem legal systems have been running for quite some time now and the reason is that they almost uniformly have majority Muslim populations. When secular and Islam push comes to shove, Islam will nearly always win out due to sheer numbers alone.

And this is when we start to see ridiculous laws introduced that completely clash with a secular legal system. Case in point, our friends over in the United Arab Emirates.

Despite having a National Human Rights Committee, yesterday the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court ruled that ‘a man can beat his wife and young children as long as no marks are left‘. Whilst the official term is ‘discipline’, there’s really no ambiguity as to what we’re talking about here.

What other possible reason could a guy have to discipline his wife other then ‘she disobeyed me’?

So human rights be damned, if your wife disobeys you it’s open season. Just don’t hit her too hard… we don’t want to be seen as a country with battered and bruised women running around.

Curious as to what the National Human Rights Committee’s statement on the judgement might have been, I tried to access their website only to find that their account had been suspended.

Suspended by the government or just their web host for not paying their bills on time I have no idea, but it doesn’t bode well when courts are granting men permission to beat the crap out of their wives and national human rights websites are offline.

In the west it’s rulings like this that only serve to bolster the image the Islam treats women like garbage and that Sharia courts are simply not workable in any secular society.

In the twenty first century beating your wife is simply unacceptable and legally granting husbands permission to do so is simply ridiculous. No doubt there’s a whole bunch of women living in the UAE who felt the need to tighten their burqas and look all the more closely over their shoulders for their husbands as they went about their daily duties.

Personally I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I mean if you’re going to sanction violence against women, why stop at leaving marks. Half the country’s women run around covered from head to toe anyway so it’s a bit hard to argue it’s for the sake of keeping up appearances.

I really don’t see how this is in any way defensible for the followers of Islam who run around preaching that their religion is all about women’s rights. And what’s an even bigger kick in the nuts is that the UAE is seen as a moderate Islamic nation… god knows what kind of crap goes on in the hardcore states.

I know Iran’s pretty keen on stoning their women to death so I can only imagine the domestic living hell some of their less fortunate women go through without any hope of legal recourse.

Despite being labelled racist, bigotted and X’ophobic it’s rulings like this that will be why I forever oppose the modification of the existing or creation of a new legal system on religious grounds.

It’s bad enough this kind of garbage goes on overseas, I’m certainly not going to take it lying down if someone wants to introduce this nonsense, even in a moderate sense, into Australia.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are a global Islamic organisation full of hardline religious nutters hell bent on establishing a ‘trans-national Islamic state’. In short, Hizb ut-Tahrir would like nothing more then for the entire world to come under Sharia law.

The only thing stopping them? Democracy and the majority non-muslim populations currently living in the west.

Ironically the democracy system that Hizb ut-Tahrir fight is what also allows them to preach their religious nonsense. With democracy though comes political correctness and whilst the democratic system should work to shut radical groups like this down, instead it fosters them.

Governmental criticism is something we hold very dear in Australia and often actively engage in. There’s a massive difference however in criticising the current government of the day and attempting to undermine the entire political system that governs a country.

Yesterday Hizb ut-Tahrir flew in some British members of the group and held a anti-democracy conference in Sydney’s west (no surprises on that choice of location).

Burhan Hanif, leader of the British arm of Hizb ut-Tahrir declared democracy to be haram (forbidden).

We must adhere to Islam and Islam alone, we should not be conned or succumb to the disingenuous and flawed narrative that the only way to engage politically is through the secular democratic process. It is prohibited and haram.”

(Hanif) said democracy was incompatible with Islam because the Koran insisted Allah was the sole lawmaker, and Muslim political involvement could not be based on “secular and erroneous concepts such as democracy and freedom”.


Like I said earlier, criticism of a government is one thing, criticism of an entire system of government is another.

According to their draft constitution, under a Hizb ut-Tahrir Sharia ruled nation, here’s what Australians would have to endure.

Defense

Conscription would be introduced for every male muslim aged fifteen years or older ‘in readiness for jihad‘.

One can assume this would mean mass casualties of Australians against Israel and the US as the Sharia government deploys everything we have to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

Democracy

Democracy is obviously out. Muslim Australians would vote for a Caliph as head of state, non-muslims would have no say in the matter.

This Caliph would apparently differ from a president or prime minister in that we’d be seeking his or her (her, hahahah) opinion on policy rather then being governed by them.

Economy

The Australian dollar would be replaced by gold and silver coins. The Sharia state would run ‘utilities, public transport, health care, energy resources such as oil, and unused farm land‘.

“Government” retaining ownership of these services might be a good thing however remember all these utilities, in particular health care would get the Islamic treatment and be different from what we know today.

Non-muslims

Non-muslim Australians would be banned from working in any form of government or government run organisation. In effect they’d be stripped of any say in how the country was run.

Non-muslim Australians would only be able to criticise the government over what they believed to be ‘unjust acts’ carried out on them or the mis-application of Islam applied to them by the government.

Obviously if your objection was Islam itself your protests would most likely fall on deaf ears.

Personal Freedoms

Apostasy (leaving Islam), adultery, alcohol, and certain economic practices (gambling and interest based mortgages etc.) are out.

Apostasy in particular is punishable by death, ie. once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no escape.

Capital punishment would also make a return, along with stonings, hangings and beheading people (apostasy’s punishment).

Oh and we’d all have to learn Islam too as it’d become the official sole language of the state. None of this communicating in English nonsense.


Whilst definitely extreme and not something that’s going to happen overnight, it’s somewhat discomforting that here in Australia we freely allow a platform for this type of movement to exist.

As I keep mentioning, it’s one thing to criticise a government and another to entirely call for an established political system’s upheaval and transition.

I strongly believe in personal freedoms but just as I’m not allowed to engage in personal freedoms that would drastically alter the quality of life of others, why so are groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir allowed to work towards their goals?

Make no mistake, I’m not about to convert to Islam any time soon and living under Sharia law as a non-muslim would have a massive detrimental effect on my quality of life. As it would nearly all non-muslim Australians.

Julia Gillard has recently publicly declared herself an atheist and whilst you don’t need to be an atheist to oppose the political views of Hizb ut-Tahrir, it’d be great to see her do something about them. I mean at the very least deny visa applications for those wanting to travel to Australia who are hell bent on destroying our system of government.

That one should be a no-brainer.

As for the 500 people who attended the Hizb ut-Tahrir convention, shame on you. How dare you try change my country for the worse.

If you want to live under Sharia law then move to Saudi Arabia, leave my Australia the hell alone.

Unless chaperoned it’s generally frowned upon for a female to be in the company of any unrelated male friends or acquaintances. This particular example as you can appreciate presents great difficulty in environments where unrelated males and females are bound to mix.

Take for example the workplace. Despite making up 70% of all university enrolments, women in Saudi Arabia constitute just 5% of the workforce. However with such high enrolment numbers this will no doubt increase over time.

Clerics running the country are thus presented with the dilemma of enforcing Sharia law in an increasingly liberal environment. Well a dilemma until now.

Recently, two Saudi Arabian Islamic clerics issued a fatwa declaring a solution to the problem.

Instead of selling out your religious beliefs and running the risk of irking the local religious police, those working with unrelated females can now rest easy. The solution to sex segregation is to simply establish ‘maternal relations‘ between yourself and any unrelated females you come into contact with.

This is achieved by drinking the breastmilk of any unrelated female you regularly come into contact with.

This consumption thus forms a maternal bond between the drinker and uh… supplier which allows the two people to come into contact with each other freely.

Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘hello sexual repression much?! And at least one cleric agrees with you. Cleric Abi Ishaq Al Huwain openly called on the women of Saudi Arabia ‘to allow the men to suckle the milk directly from their breast‘.

Take away the lactation part and aren’t we just talking basic foreplay here?

Hows that going to work?

‘Hi there, we’ve just hired a new floor manager. Could all lactating female staff who work in sector 7G please report to HR.’

‘Ok ladies, flop them out. Bob, start drinking’.

‘…what?’

‘Sorry mate, company policy. You’re going to be working directly with these women so we need to establish maternal relations.’

‘what on earth for?’

‘well you see under Sharia law unrelated males and females coming into contact with each other is deemed to much of a temptation. By making you suck on the nipples of these women, we hope to prevent any sexual temptation occuring’.

‘…so I get to see a whole bunch of naked breasts, suck on them… and this is supposed to sexually repress any urges I might have towards these women I’m going to regularly be in contact with?’

‘…right.’

‘…’

‘…PRAISE ALLAH!’

Thankfully it seems not everyone has jumped off the deep end. Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, adopted a much more realistic position and suggested the milk not be taken directly from the breast.

Now obviously this removes the physical contact between the drinker and supplier but again how’s it supposed to work?

What, you apply for a job and the boss opens up a fridge containing breast milk samples of all the women who work for the company that you then have to drink?

And that’s just in the workplace. Acquaintance wise I can’t think of anything more awkward then a cultural requirement that I drink the breast milk of any female friends I might have.

For its intended purpose of ensuring the safeguarding of Islamic law, is sucking on the nipples of your female friends and co-workers really the best way to go about it?

I’ve been part of more then my fair share of sexual tension experiences in the workplace. Despite thinking long and hard about it, I can’t think of one situation where throwing some nipples into my mouth would have helped the situation.

And even though it does nothing for me, surely there’s at least one guy in Saudi Arabia who’d get off drinking the breast milk of his female colleagues or friends.

Although I seriously doubt this fatwa will ever come to fruition it’s interesting that it’s been brought up as a viable solution to the religious sex segregation issue present in Saudi Arabia. In what is arguably one of the most sexually repressed countries in the world it’s amusing that their solution to stopping mixing of the unrelated sexes is so grounded in potential eroticism.

Not surprising I guess when you live in a country run by old men who’ve spent most of their lives repressing any sexual urges that ever crossed their mind. What you can’t get out of your system will eventually consume you.

Case in point, stupid fatwas like this.

Here in Australia, commit the illegal act of female genital mutilation (also known as female circumcision), and we’ll not only excuse you – we’ll discuss modifying our laws to try and offer you a government sanctioned legal option.

Female genital mutilation is a practice routinely associated with Islamic cultures despite the practice having no religious significance.

Typically the procedure involves cutting and/or the removal or mutilation of the clitoral area of a woman’s vagina. This ranges from cutting out the clitoris to the extreme act of cutting out anything exterior and sewing up the area leaving only a small hole for urine and menstrual blood to pass through.

Needless to say this practice is banned in Australia however recently an idea to combat illegal ‘backyard’ procedures was set to be floated by the The Royal Australian New Zealand College of Obstetricians in June.

The idea is that female genital mutilation is going to occur in Australia anyway due to rampant immigration from regions where it is widely practiced.

To counter this a ‘ritual nick’ could be offered in a clinical setting to satisfy the cultural requirements of those wanting to engage in the practice.

RANZCOG secretary Gino Pecoraro said the policy would be discussed at next month’s Women’s Health Committee meeting.

“We will need to start to think about [its introduction] but we would have to speak to community leaders from Australia,” Dr Pecoraro said.

“If a nick could meet the cultural needs of a particular woman, then it might save her from going through what can really be drastic surgery.


What gets me is that we already have a method for saving
women from going through this ‘drastic surgery’. It’s called the law.

The motivation behind the proposed discussion of the alternative procedure is that

with the rise in Somali and Sudanese numbers in Australia, doctors are seeing more cases of young girls, and women, needing surgery after illegal operations.


This of course begs the obvious question of why the bloody hell haven’t these girls been placed into state custody and their parents arrested for child abuse?

Female mutilation is illegal in Australia and due to the age of the girls involved, parental permission must be sanctioned in order for the procedure to take place. This is regardless of whether it’s done via a backyard operation or clinical environment.

If parents bring their daughter to an Australian clinic or hospital post botched mutilation procedure then why don’t we have policy in place to deal with the situation legally?

As far as I’m aware nobody in Australia to date has been put up on charges for conducting female genital mutilation yet doctors are seeing more cases of it?

Something doesn’t add up.

Instead of bowing to hazardous unnecessary procedures why don’t we try enforcing our existing laws for a change. Sanctioning female genital mutilation is going to get us nowhere.

Proponents of the practice would argue that by allowing doctors to perform a relatively harmless nick lives would be saved. However we all know what happens once you leave the door to this sort of practice slightly ajar.

Does anybody really think that people would be running around completely disfiguring baby girl’s clitoral areas if all that was required to appease their cultural practice was a mere nip of the area?

Offer ritual nicks and it won’t be long before people are demanding government sanctioned legal ‘proper’ mutilation procedures on the grounds of cultural tolerance.

I acknowledge there’s also the potential issue of a crackdown leading to the eventual death of a child because the parents were fearful of legal repercussions of seeking medical attention. In answer to this I say roll out the murder charges.

One or two people being locked away for killing their daughter and the negative publicity this generates should be enough to largely curb the practice.

Part of the problem now is you can rock up to a hospital and despite having clearly performed the practice here in Australia, hide behind cultural sensitivity and have the Australian health system fix your mistakes.

This needs to change.

Present to a hospital with a gunshot wound and the police are called. Present with a female baby or child with severe clitoral trauma and it’s high time some hard hitting questions were asked of the parents.

The Royal Australian New Zealand College of Obstetricians’ proposed discussion on the issue appears to have been prompted by a recent American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement.

The policy statement was released in April and stated that

some physicians should be able to prick or nick a girl’s clitoral skin in order to “satisfy cultural requirements.” The group likened the nick to an ear piercing.


Following criticism from US advocacy groups and survivors of female genital cutting, the policy statement was rescinded on May 27th;

On Thursday the AAP stated the group will not condone doctors to provide any kind of “clitoral nick.”


Shortly after this announcement, the Royal Australian New Zealand College of Obstetricians’ also clarified their position on the matter;

The college for Australia’s obstetricians and gynaecologists says it does not support the “ritual nicking” of young Muslim girls and anyone suspected of performing such genital mutilation should be reported to authorities.

Dr Ted Weaver, president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG), said media reports suggesting the college would review its policy were the result of a misquote.

He said the issue was likely to be discussed at a meeting next month, triggered by recent announcements made by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but a policy shift was not on the agenda.

“The college does not support – does not – support female genital mutilation, full-stop,” Dr Weaver said.


Although I find it hard to misinterpret the quote provided from Mr. Pecoraro above, ‘‘, I’m nonetheless glad to hear that a policy change is off the table.

As far as I’m concerned the only discussion that needs to be held on this topic is why aren’t people being arrested for child abuse?

Of course the answer’s quite simple. With most of the proponents for female genital mutilation in Australia coming from minority cultures in the third world, it’s a PR disaster for any government to uphold the law.

Regardless, cultural tolerance only goes so far. If you want to come to Australia and bring with you cultural practices that have already been established as illegal here, then you deserve wholly any legal repercussions. If this means splitting up families then too bad.

Female genital mutilation is child abuse. Period.

How about we stop ‘discussing‘ the matter and enforcing our laws for a change.

Then, less then 24 hours later over in the UK

a cross-dressing robber wearing a burqa and hijab tricked jewelers into opening their door, only for an armed gang to raid the store.

The man, dressed in traditional Islamic women’s clothes, rang the doorbell at the Capri Jewellers in Bury, in the northern English county of Lancashire on Wednesday afternoon.

But as soon as he was buzzed in, a further three men – including one with a shotgun – stormed the store.

The group stole a large amount of jewelry, including bangles, rings and lockets, before escaping in a waiting car.


In the shadow of a 24 hour burqa clad crime spree, South Australian Senator Cory Bernadi has labelled the burqa as un-Australian and called for its ban.

I for one wholeheartedly agree with him.

On the entry ‘Ban the Burqa’ Senator Bernadi wrote yesterday on his personal blog;

In my mind, the burqa has no place in Australian society. I would go as far as to say it is un-Australian.

To me, the burqa represents the repressive domination of men over women which has no place in our society and compromises some of the most important aspects of human communication.


Despite the recent crimes involving the use of a burqa it’s refreshing to see a public figure willing to enter discussion on the matter from a rational cultural viewpoint.

Religion is left at the door and Bernadi seems to share similar views as I do on non-religious reasons the burqa should be banned.

Put simply, the burqa separates and distances the wearer from the normal interactions with broader society.

Equality of women is one of the key values in our secular society and any culture that believes only women should be covered in such a repressive manner is not consistent with the Australian culture and values.


This is usually when people start to chime in with ‘oh but the burqa is actually massively empowering for women, it’s their choice and such a strong one at that!’

Take for example ‘Assisting Shift in Multicultural Australia’ director Janine Evans’ retort to Senator Bernadi’s comments;

To say it doesn’t fit with our way of life and culture shuts the door to (Muslim) women becoming active members of society.

Sorry but the only thing shutting the door on muslim women becoming active members of Australian society are the burqas they are wearing themselves. If what you wear stops me from communicating properly with you then I have no time for you.

By completely veiling yourself you’re also sending out a strong cultural message that you are clearly not interested in being a integrated part of Australian society.

Keysar Trad from the Islamic Friendship Association puts up an equally flimsy argument;

Wearing the burqa actually encouraged women to integrate into Australian society, whereas a ban would only force them indoors where they’d “miss out on the vitamin D”.

It’s tantamount to denying them the right to drive, the right to enjoy all the services of society as well as equal opportunity


Firstly how are women dressed from head to toe in cloth getting any vitamin D anyway? And secondly a ban wouldn’t force them indoors, their religion would.

As for equal opportunity, one only needs to look at the recent case in Italy where Amel Marmouri was fined for wearing a burqa in public.

In response to the fine Marmouri’s husband Ben Salah Braim stated

We knew about the law and I know that (the law) is not against my religion but now Amel will have to stay indoors. I can’t have other men looking at her.If the law says she can’t wear one then she will have to stay inside night and day. There is nothing I can do.


Is he talking about another human being or a pet dog?! Clearly Salah Braim sees his wife as nothing more then property to be dictated to.

It’s no secret that the burqa is widely seen as a tool of female oppression, given that it’s religious requirement is not mentioned anywhere explicitly in the Quran. Salah Braim’s comments above clearly shatter the illusion that these women have any choice in the matter.

Every time I see a woman in a burqa I know that she’s in it because her husband believes as a male I’m unable to control any urges and at the very sight of her unclothed flesh of course want nothing else then to rape his wife.

How utterly insulting.

For me face to face interaction is a pretty important part of day to day communication. Whether I’m living in Australia, Taiwan or anywhere else in the world it doesn’t matter. Facial expression is a core component of subconscious communication and if I can avoid it, I’d rather not engage in people so self righteous they choose to exclude themselves from this cultural practice.

It’s on these grounds I’d love to see the burqa banned. Sadly I fear that if there’s a continued rise in burqa crime however, that these valid communication and cultural concerns will take a back seat to fear mongering and bigotry as primary reasons to ban the burqa.

Some might argue that it’s already too late.

If you’re walking down the street in one nobody has any idea who you are. Even if the police stop you and they’re unlucky enough to be male they have to wait for a female officer to rock up to carry out any identity checks.

On the religious front this is innocent enough. However when people use the burqa for criminal activity, such action highlights the fact that if you cannot be spot identified there’s a good chance you’ll get away with it.

Would banning the burqa however actually stop people committing crimes whilst wearing one?

The main fear about not being able to publicly spot identify someone is that in the event of a crime, witnesses and CCTV aren’t able to reveal much.

Case in point the ‘burqa bandit’ photo I used above. This man (or woman) robbed a North Carolina bank in the US at gunpoint. If you witnessed the robbery what would you tell police?

The burqa bandit was never apprehended and the police still don’t even know if it was a male or female under the veil.

More recently in Miranda, Sydney, two men stalked a third man who’d just withdrawn a large amount of cash from an ATM.

Police say the 35-year-old was delivering cash to jewellery retailers at a shopping centre in Miranda at about 5:00pm when two men started following him.

He became suspicious and drove off after they told him his tyre was going flat.


The man then drove 10km to another shopping centre, got out of the car and was then robbed at gunpoint by “by a man wearing a burka and sunglasses over the eye opening, who pointed a pistol at him.”

I’m assuming the victim knew it was a man because the robber spoke. Otherwise there’d be no way of telling.

Naturally the police are looking for the two men who first approached the victim. Until they’ve been questioned there’s no way of knowing if the two encounters with the victim are related, despite the strong gut feeling they obviously were.

Like the North Carolina burqa bandit case, don’t expect any CCTV footage of the Sydney robbery or any police portraits of the robber. If you’ve seen one black burqa you’ve seen them all, there’s no unique identifiable characteristics… which is kind of the point.

Now the irrational part of me would love to cry out about how this Sydney burqa robbery is proof that we in Australia need to get on the burqa ban bandwagon.

Surely if we banned the public wearing of one that’d solve any and all future potential crime problems we might have involving the wearing of a burqa right?

How well has this worked for other instruments that have been banned due to their use in crime? Guns are quite strictly regulated but we still read about people being shot every second day. Carrying around knives and machetes is also illegal but that doesn’t stop people getting stabbed either.

Would banning the burqa to stop potential burqa crime have any real effect?

Think about it. You’re a criminal and at most you know you’re going to spend less then ten minutes out in the open wearing a burqa whilst you commit your crime. Do you really think a burqa ban is going to stop you?

Typically whatever crime you’re about to carry out, whether it be robbery, assault, rape or whatever whilst wearing a burqa is going to be more serious then then the illegal act of wearing the burqa itself.

Criminal activity, such as the Miranda burqa robbery, only strengthen people’s fears of the unknown under the burqa. If crime featuring the burqa rises it won’t take long for a widespread paranoid culture against burqa wearers to develop. This then leads to a massive public push to ban the burqa but for the totally wrong reasons.

I fear two or three burqa crimes is all it would take to get some serious debate and discussion in Australia over banning the burqa outright. Whilst I support a burqa ban (but struggle with the personal freedom conundrum) I only do so for what I believe to be neutral and practical reasons.

Preventing crime isn’t one of them. The last thing we need is fear and prejudice on our streets because people are overly paranoid that every burqa person is a potential walking crime scene waiting to happen.

As a country we’re better then that.

FRANCE’S top administrative body has advised the government against slapping a complete ban on the full Islamic veil but says outlawing the burqa in some places was justified for security reasons.


Last week Belgium became the first European country to ban the burqa;

“We’re the first country to spring the locks that have made a good number of women slaves, and we hope to be followed by France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands; countries that think,” said Liberal Deputy Denis Ducarme.

In the lower house of the federal parliament yesterday, 136 deputies supported a nationwide ban on clothes or veils that do not allow the wearer to be fully identified, including the full-face niqab and burqa.


And Italy has seemingly had a burqa ban since 1975;

ITALIAN police have fined a woman 500 euros ($A712) for wearing a full Islamic veil.

While there is no specific legislation on the burqa, covering the face in public – even with a motorcycle helmet – has been banned in Italy since 1975.


It’s worth noting that in each of these cases the main reason cited for the banning the burqa are related to security and identification. Critics of burqa bans will almost inadvertently revert to protesting against the infringement of their religious  beliefs.

After all, prove an action has religious significance and all of a sudden the religious vilification defense overshadows anything else.

Personally I don’t see the burqa as a religious artifact. From my understanding the Quran urges Islamic followers to dress modestly, it mentions nothing about running around covered from head to toe and completely obliterating any sense of personal identity in public.

However this is largely put down to interpretation and translation differences. Still it’s enough for Muslims who endorse the burqa to cry religious vilification and label anyone who supports a burqa ban as attacking Islam and religious freedom.

What about the arguments for a burqa ban that have nothing to do with religion though? I’m strongly opposed to the wearing of the burqa in public and it’s got nothing to do with religion.

Here’s 5 reasons I believe the burqa should not only be banned in Europe but in any country that isn’t ruled by Islamic fundamentalist crazies.

1. Eye Contact

One of the strongest tenants of personal intracommunication between humans is eye contact. The Burqa by nature obscures this.

When I’m talking to someone primarily I’m looking into their eyes and secondarily I’m reading their face. This isn’t something that happens consciously, it’s a subconscious element to human interaction.

Mind you it’s not limited to humans either, my pet cats were able to tell what mood I was in off my facial expressions alone. If they were doing something they shouldn’t be often a frown and ‘angry eyes’ was all it took for them to have second thoughts.

The absence of these secondary forms of communication (the primary being speech) are definitely noticeable when absent. Try have a conversation with someone who completely covers their face, for me it’s extremely frustrating. I want to read their reactions to what I’m saying and gauge how the conversation is going.

There’s a lot more to communication then simply hearing a voice. Talking to an emotionless brick wall is largely unsatisfying and downright frustrating at times. If you’re wearing a burqa (or any other type of face covering clothing) I don’t want to talk to you.

In my personal life this is fine enough but it’s caused me problems in previous jobs where I’ve had to interact with burqa clad women. The frustration was even more compounded here as often English wasn’t a strong point. This in itself wasn’t a negative but often I had no way of gauging if I was being understood or not.

If you’re explaining something to someone and they don’t understand you can usually tell by their facial expression. Here I found myself dealing with a blank slate. Directly asking if they understood often led to silence or a slow ‘not-quite-sure’ nod. In these situations I just had to hope for the best.

2. Burqas make me feel like a predator

The whole concept of being modest in Islam appears to be to remove all physical temptation, from men.

If Islam attracts guys who can’t keep it in their pants then fair enough, but what about the rest of us?

Every time I see a burqa I’m subconsciously reminded that the reason she’s dressed like that is so that I don’t instantly turn into a slobbering uncontrollable animal and try to mate with her.

I mean that’s what it comes down to doesn’t it?

How about taking back the notion of self control and placing the burden of responsibility where it belongs, on the potential offender – not the potential victim.

3. I can’t hear you

This one probably again relates to my interactions with women wearing burqas. Not all women who wear a burqa are softly spoken but a hell of a lot of them are.

I’d have trouble understanding these women without a burqa, wearing one just makes me want to go bang my head against a wall.

Not because the women are softly spoken but because there’s no viable solution. Some random guy asking a woman to remove a burqa is punishable by beheading, or I won’t get into virgin heaven… or something.

‘mfphhhfphhhmmm’.

‘Hi there , sorry I can’t hear you. Can you speak up?’

‘MFPHHFPHHMMM!’

‘Hmm, yeah this isn’t really working. I’ll be right back.’

At this point I’d go and disappear for a half hour or so until they’d hopefully gone. Admittedly this didn’t happen often but when it did, after the first few games of me asking them to speak louder and getting nowhere, I really didn’t know what to do.

In any other circumstance I’d just ask them to remove whatever was making them difficult to hear. But it’s the almighty burqa and we can’t ask that.

4. Body Odor

For anyone who thought Indians smelt bad, wait until you’re in the vicinity of a burqa clad women in summer. I’ve read that deodorant and Islam might come into opposition due to the alcohol content of some deodorants but by and large I believe it’s just laziness.

I mean if you’re going to run around invisible all day who cares what people think about your smell or looks.

For the rest of the us this is a nightmare. Australian summers aren’t cold and dressing head to toe in black cannot by any stretch of the imagination be comfortable. Hell even if you wore deodorant, five minutes outside and you’d still be wading through your very own swimming pool.

Sorry but I don’t want to smell your body odor because you choose to wear climatalogically inappropriate clothing.

5. woman’s rights

Now this is a tricky one. There’s plenty of women out there who will go on about how it’s a personal choice and they like wearing a burqa.

To this I say fair enough. You were born into this culture and have had it repeatedly re-enforced throughout your life. Nothing is going to change that. In most middle eastern and African countries were the burqa is prevalent often it’s not even a choice, the laws of the land forbid you from not wearing a burqa in public.

Now it’s certainly not up to me to tell women what they can and can’t wear but I believe the choice to wear or not wear one is important. Of course this contradicts my support for banning the burqa but I’m struggling with that.

I believe the choice to wear a burqa or not is important for future generations. The problem with the west is with immigration we’re getting immigrants from hardline Muslim countries where there is no choice.

This generation of women are mostly a lost cause, it’s become a way of life for them. I see the next generation of immigrant female children as being hard pressed to burqa up, infact I just don’t see it happening as a majority at all. Not if they’ve grown up in western society.

I guess what it comes down to is if we can wait that long. My own prejudices against communicating with someone who masks their identity aren’t going to change anytime soon. I’ll forever see restricting the basic tenants of communication as a sign of disrespect, dishonesty and just being downright rude.


On one hand I’d love to see the burqa banned but the issue of personal freedoms is quite a strong argument. Then again, it’s not like we don’t already ban some forms of clothing, or lack thereof. Try walking down the street in some budgie smugglers, or wearing a motorcycle helmet into a bank, or wearing shorts and a tshirt into a club and see what happens.

If as a society we’ve already content to have the above examples of clothing restrictions in place, is it really that much of a big step to legislate it?


I’m not exactly certain of what happens if an Australian of Asian background who is Muslim applies, but I’m pretty sure the entire universe explodes.

Far be it from me to tell Pauline Hanson who and who she can’t sell her house to but it does raise some interesting questions about Hanson’s recent decision to relocate to the UK.

Aside from the irony of famously complaining about immigrants and then becoming on yourself, for someone who claims that she believes Muslims are incompatible with the Australian way of live, is moving to the UK that smart a move?

The Muslim population of Britain according to their 2001 census was 1,536,015, or 3% of the population. The British newspaper ‘The Times’ put the British Muslim population at 2.9 million as of January 2009.

Plus it’s no state secret that Britain has been heavily Islamicised over the past decade. Britain even set up its own muslim friendly Sharia court system.

Comparatively the Australian Muslim population sat at 340,392 or 1.3% of the population in 2006 according to our own census.

This of course doesn’t take into account that 99.99% of Muslims living in Australia live in the western suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. Pauline Hanson however lives up in Coleyville in Queensland.

I’m sure the one muslim who lives up in Queensland is absolutely outraged they won’t be able to purchase Pauine Hanson’s house.

Statistically Pauline Hanson’s got more chance of moving into a house in the UK that has had Muslims live in it then selling her Queensland home to a Muslim in Australia.

Unfortunately we won’t know for a while as due to the negative backlash over her comments, Hanson has removed her property from the market.

Her LJ Hooker real estate agent, Keith Edwards, said he’d received an onslaught of emails and calls following the controversial comments.

“Some of (the emails) have been pretty upsetting… I got the abusive and threatening phone calls last night (Wednesday night), I didn’t sleep.

I got swags of abusive emails, with non-returnable addresses, just cowards.”


I’m not sure if this is code for death threats and crazy jihads ala South Park but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it was.

As for Hanson’s comments themselves, I somewhat agree with her. Whilst my scope isn’t as broad as to cover all Muslims, I firmly believe there should be no place in Australia for crazy nutjobs Muslim extremists.

I’d like to pretend I wouldn’t but I know that if I was selling a house and a self styled cleric rocked up with his Burqa clad wife complaining about my pork sausages in the fridge after an inspection, I’d be feeling slightly uneasy.

An interesting comment from Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner  Neroli Holmes was thrown in at the end of the news.com.au article;

Ms Hanson’s latest stance against Muslims and foreign investors puts her at risk of breaching the state’s discrimination laws.


Yeah, I’d love to see the government try that one on. The real estate industry has been discriminating against people for years. Try renting some property as a pet owner or as a single mum with kids some time.

…welcome to the Australian real estate industry boys.

On the other, you have crazies like the people over at Revolution Muslim.

Last week’s South Park episode was a 200th blockbuster that featured a mish mash of some of the more prominent storylines that have appeared on the show. One such storyline was the depiction of Muhammad in a visual form.

South Park first depicted Muhammad in visual form back in 2001 in the episode Super Best Friends.

Muhammad being the guy to the left of Jesus.

I watched the 200th episode of South Park when it came out last week and like most of the rest of the world had a giggle and then got on with life.

Unfortunately if you’re a religious nutjob things aren’t as simple.

Revolution Muslim appear to be your stereotypical band of Islamic nutjobs headed by website creator Yousef al-Khattab who interestingly lives in New York and runs a bicycle taxi.

Naturally Revolution Muslim is hell bent on the destruction of the west. The website’s mission statement proclaims

Revolution Muslim’s purpose is to invite people to proper Islam (Aqeedah (creed) + Shariah (path)) and command the good (justice and peace), while forbidding the falsehood (lies and deceptions) of society.

Our mission is to one day see the Muslims united under one Khalifah and under the commands of Allah (SWT).

We focus on educating Muslims and Non-Muslims alike about the actuality of the religion and thereby work to preserve traditional Islamic values for Muslims across the globe.

We pray that we may witness the dismantlement of western, secular dominance across the world as we hold it to be pagan and idolatrous in the majority of its presumptions.

We seek a resurrection of the just example set forth by centuries of Islamic rule throughout the ages and we hold it to be self evident for the objective soul and mind that Allah is One and that Muhammad ibn Abdullah is His Prophet and that the religion offers the solution to all of the world’s ills and afflictions.

Sounds wonderful and everything but no thanks.

Recently an article featured on Revolution Muslim threatening the creators of South Park, Mat Stone and Trey Parker with assassination. The article opens with a post mortem photo of Theo Van Gogh, a dutch film maker assassinated in 2004 after releasing ‘Submission’. Submission is a film critical of the treatment of women in Islam.

The article states;

The episode went beyond just showing him, but it outright insulted him, salaa Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, by showing him in a bear suit and making fun of our beloved Nabi, salaa Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam.

We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them. Maybe they have not listened to this lecture before:

Following these threats (which let’s call a spade a spade, they are) is an embedded Youtube video of shiek Ahmad Jibril calling on people to chop the head off the author of a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

In an article posted a few days later on the 18th April further threatens

Here are the authors boasting of their insults and celebrating their complete disregard for what anyone considers sacred: Are you afraid that you would be bombed, she asks?

Perhaps they are not, perhaps they should be, only time will tell.

Reader commentary on the article isn’t much better.

I wish i could slit their throats with a rusty knife,so it be more painful….May curse them and may Allah give me the strength to do that honour.

How dare they insult our prohphets,they won’t get away this time Inshallah.

There’s no doubt our Mujjahid Brother’s from among the state itself will rise & kill them – InshahAllah… There should & will never be any forgiveness for them ever or for that matter with all the enemies of Allah. The will all suffer the wrath of Allah through the Hands of his Lions – Ameen.

These kaafirs are the filthiest people. May Allah never guide them until they taste the fire of hell. Inshallah. American society has gone against the fitrah in which Allah created Man.
By the way here is a good chance for somebody to imitate the blind companion of the messenger of Allah (pbuh) whol killed his wife who used to insult the prophet(pbuh).

Our Shaykhs, may Allah reward and Protect them have given us from Qur’an and Sunnah the best actions to take and finish off the like of these two kafirs.

So the options we have to deal with these two kafirs and anyone who follow them in their blasphemous actions are:

1. Killing and annihilating them either by gunning them down, bombing them, or striking their necks with swords or knives

2. Crucifying them, i.e. nailing them on a tree or a pole, and let them die a slow excruciating death

3. Cutting off from opposite sides their hands and feet with axes, swords or guns, and let them wander off until death comes to them.

4. Exiling them from the land

May Allah Azza wa Jall destroy and punish them in this world and in the everlasting painful punishment in the Fire of Hell.

Thankfully there is some level headedness amongst the rabble. Two out of the seven readers who’ve commented actually urge restraint from violence against Matt and Trey.

One comment however did seem to miss an important point;

All in all it was a stupid cartoon – but I was also offended by this, and not just the depiction, but the content – inferring that all Muslims are crazy violent terrorists. This is a good example of how we have been marginalized.

Are shows like South Park who set out to prove a point marginalizing Muslims or are websites like Revolution Muslim who openly threaten criticisers of the religion with violence doing so?

If you’re thin skinned enough to take a ‘stupid cartoon‘ seriously and offer up a congregation of Islamic nutjobs only willing to unsheathe their rusty blades in revenge, other then being ‘crazy violent terrorists‘, how else are the rest of the world supposed to take you?

‘People who can be reasoned with’ wasn’t among the first impressions I got whilst reading Revolution Muslim.


Footnote: Currently Revolution Muslim is offline and returning a ’500 Internal Sever Error’ code. I’m not sure if the site has been pulled or if it’s struggling due to bandwidth problems. I’d originally provided Google cache links which were working at the time of publication but they too are now dead.

I revisited this article in early 2012 and noticed that the Revolution Muslim domain is now pointing to the website ‘Islam Policy’. There is no record of the original Revolution Muslim articles (and comments) on this new website so I’ve removed the now dead Google cache links altogether.

Gad Amr is also Muslim.

Usually the stories in the media regarding Muslims take on a sharply negative tone. The religion itself seems to carry an abundance of nutjobs self styled clerics who every few months seem to feel the need to remind Australia just how outspoken they can be.

In the face of extreme provocation, it is refreshing to see that not all Muslims give in to the violent sociopath stereotype.

The following is a report from the ABC’s Media Watch program. The two main players in the video are Simon Fuller, a (now ex) Channel Nine camera man and Gad Amr, father of Omar Amr.

Omar Amr is up for charges in relation to riots that occured at a Bob Jane Tmart store in Oakleigh after an Easternats. For those of you not familiar with Easternats thing a crowd of bogans standing around cheering cars doing doughnuts (yes it’s as exciting as it sounds).


Now I’m not in any way suggesting that the disgraceful behaviour of Simon Fuller in anyway absolves Omar Amr of his alleged involvement in the Easternat riots. Omar does look like your typical meathead who’d get involved in riots at a bogan car event and if found guilty he’ll get what he deserves.

Instead I want to draw attention to how his father, Gad Amr, handled himself. In the face of such direct provocation it’s nothing short of admirable that Gad kept a cool head and maintained overly polite requests that Simon Fuller and co. leave him and his son alone.

Personally I hate it when we hear about some crime and the only shots the media get are of criminals hiding behind clothes but in this case they clearly got the shots they were after. What seems to follow is then inexplicable vindictiveness on Fuller’s behalf.

Gad Amr seems completely wise to this and even stops his son Omar from engaging Fuller knowing full well they are only there for a reaction. When this fails out comes Fuller with the terrorist remark and even then, despite the Muslim stereotype Gad goes off to find police rather then directly confront Fuller.

This shows an incredible amount of self restraint and willpower. I’m a big believer of earning respect and in my eyes Gad Amr has definitely earned it. This, ladies and gentlemen is how you handle yourself with dignity.

Take note Muslims of Australia it’s people like Amr that we should be hearing more about. Instead of putting up crazy fundamentalist posterboys, why not take some time to promote people like Gad Amr.

With Islamic crazies in Somalia recently banning music, movies, musical ringtones and bras (seriously wtf?), it’s easy to see how tipped the scales are in terms of irrational, violent and violent Islam vs. the calm, rational and very sensible image portrayed by people like Gad Amr.

There clearly are decent muslims out there, so how about letting your voices heard every once in a while?

Obviously not happy that they’d be stuck in limbo for the next three to six months some Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers, currently being detained in Sydney, have begun a hunger strike.

The catch?

These clowns have already had their asylum applications refused.

The asylum visa suspension handed down applies to all new asylum applications and this includes new appeals. As I mentioned in my earlier article the end result is that all new arrivals are stuck in limbo and housed at the taxpayer’s expense.

Additionally with the news of this hunger strike it’s now also clear that any Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers who were waiting to lodge appeals are also now stuck in limbo too, again at the taxpayer’s expense.

Whilst I can’t even begin to imagine why the hell we moved asylum seekers to the Australian mainland after their claims were initially rejected, the question now is just what are the government going to do.

Filled with a sense of self importance the striking asylum seekers have announced that they are

refusing to eat until their appeals are set in motion (and) are also demanding to meet with Immigration Minister Chris Evans.


Right because y’know, that’s how you get your way in a foreign country. Let me tell you now if I tried to pull this crap in Taiwan I’d be on the national news as a laughing stock before being promptly deported.

As if trying to bully the Australian government into submission wasn’t enough the news article also states that many of the group are “mentally unstable“.

Oh yes please. If it’s one thing Australia doesn’t have enough of it’s mentally unstable people!

Soltan Ahmad Azizi married his wife Marzieh Rahimi in Afghanistan back in 1995. In 2005 they came to Australia as refugees. In 2007 Azizi strangled Rahimi with her veil in front of their two children because he thought she had “become too Australian” and asked for a divorce.

After murdering his wife Azizi called up police, informed them he’d murdered his wife and told them “I’m ready for the handcuffs“.

Azizi claimed the couple’s marriage was “a happy one“.

Up until now Australia’s police on asylum seekers has been seemingly dictated to us by those seeking asylum. With the news of this latest hunger strike it seems that trend is set to continue.

I for one can’t wait to see how Kevin ‘pass the lube’ Rudd handles this one.

Operating on the slippery slope between free speech and hate speech whilst I don’t agree with everything Wilders has ever said I do appreciate the man for speaking his mind.

These days it’s not easy to criticize a religion and rise above the insta-defense calls of racism despite no religion on earth being an actual race.

Last week an appeals court in Amsterdam ordered Wilders to stand trial for making “anti-Islamic” statements. Should Wilders be found guilty it appears that being able to criticize a religion (as opposed to it’s followers) will become a jailable offence.

I can criticize politicians, I can criticize a movie and I can criticize a product I don’t like;

But god forbid I criticize a religion.

Wilders shot to international fame after the release of his 2008 film Fitna. Rallying against the Islamification of the Netherlands and greater Europe Wilders accused the Islamic religion of inciting violence and hate through its very doctrine.

Ironically following the release of the film the death threats started to roll in. Fitna was released on Liveleak and shortly after the movie was uploaded it had to be taken down whilst Liveleak upgraded the security at their offices.

This was done following a series of death threats and calls of violence towards the staff at Liveleak.

Wilder’s himself has endured, amongst other things a tirade of death threats and threats of violence made against him. In 2004 two terrorists were captured after an hour long siege and were accused of planning to murder Wilder. In 2007 a woman was sentenced to a year in prison after writing over 100 threatening emails to Wilders.

Due to the nature and frequency of the threats Wilders is under constant security watch and is permitted to see his wife on average once a week. His accommodation is also routinely changed nightly.

All this because Wilder openly criticized a religion.

The irony of being physically threatened and then being charged for claiming that a religion encourages this very sort of behaviour in its followers appears to be lost on the Dutch legal system.

As someone who values being able to openly criticize anything I find it disturbing that in a democracy a person is able to be charged under hate speech towards individuals without having actually done so.

Wilders has always gone after religion itself rather then it’s followers and for this I respect him. It’s not an easy route to take and certainly commands a deep understanding of the subject matter being criticized.

I’m not exactly sure how long a case like this goes for but it’s definitely one to follow. Should the prosecution succeed I imagine it won’t be long before advocates of Islam (and other religion) start to get ideas in other countries.

I hear a lot of talk these days about people complaining about the loss of civil liberty in western societies. Post 9/11 there has been a massive shift towards curtailing civil liberties in the name of national security. Be it no-fly lists, xray machines that outline your genitals, racial profiling or the fact that my bicycle lock is classified as a weapon at the airport, as a global population it feels like there’s less and less we can’t do.

One of the main problems with complaining about your loss of rights though is that by the time you do so it’s usually too late. Cases like the Wilder one are where it all starts.

The case will quietly proceed and in five years time someone will say something that is now illegal and the general public will be asking why they can’t say anything bad about religion anymore.

Should the case succeed you can be guaranteed there will be wider implications firstly in European parliament and then eventually the rest of the world. Wilder’s current credibility falls on the fact that he’s just gone after the religion, a conviction like this is brought about solely with the intention of discrediting him.

Should it succeed I feel we’ll have lost the openness that is needed on both sides of the religious debate. When people have to look over their shoulder or worry about whether or not their criticism of a religion (not its followers) constitutes hate speech then the public sphere of healthy debate is all the poorer.

Great for followers of religion, not so great for the rest of us.

Indians complain about getting bashed every second day, Jewish societies claim Kyle Sandilands concentration camp comments were the worst thing to happen to Jewish people since the holocaust and there’s always the Aboriginals who just complain about everything given any opportunity.

Just over a week ago now, the latest whinge came from ‘leading Muslim spokesperson’ Keysar Trad. I can’t help but wonder if ‘leading Muslim spokesperson’ is the new politically correct term for sheik but in any case, Trad believes Australia should observe the two most important Muslim public holidays.

Initially my reaction was to dismiss Trad’s remarks as yet another attempt to inroad Muslim culture into mainstream Australian society. After some thought I figured well fair enough. Australia isn’t really a Christian nation so why not entertain the idea of different religious holidays?

Not knowing what the two most important Muslim public holidays were (the news.com.au article conveniently leaves them out), I hit up Wikipedia.

Seriously, instead of the stereotypical dismissive ‘go live in some country that celebrates Muslim holidays this is Australia’, has anyone actually bothered to look at their religious holidays?

I still have no idea which are the main public holidays in Islam but I’m going to assume Wikipedia lists them in order of importance.

Ashura

Ashura is commemorated by Shi’a Muslims on the ninth and tenth day of Muharram on the Islamic Calendar. Ashura is an Arabic word meaning “ten”, and according to Sunni schools of thought it is a day of optional fasting. Jews in the city of Madina fasted only one day, (on Yom Kippur the 10th of Tishrei) so the Prophet Muhammad would fast too.

For Shi’a Muslims this is a day of mourning.


An optional day of fasting that is also a day of mourning.

No offense guys but a public holiday isn’t something I want to waste sitting around not eating and being sad over. Sure most people don’t celebrate the religious side of Christmas and Easter etc. but Islam doesn’t exactly have the best track record for not taking itself seriously.

I don’t particularly want to be that guy who’s running around all happy stuffing my face with pork hotdogs getting greasy looks from all the fasting mourners out there. Suburban effigies and flag burning anyone?

With Easter there’s chocolate and Christmas has it’s presents. Exactly what are we supposed to be sharing or celebrating in a non-religious way during Ashura?

Laylat al-Qadr

Laylat al-Qadr is Arabic for “The Night of Power”. It falls on one of the last ten days of Ramadan on an odd numbered day. It is considered the holiest night of the year, since it is the night in which the Qur’an was first revealed. It is also considered better than a thousand months [Qur'an 97:1-3].

It is said that if a person performs voluntary worship on this night, that worship is equal to a thousand months or approximately 80 years.


Whilst a nighttime public holiday might sound like a novel idea, most people already have the night off so why the need for a daytime holiday? I appreciate if you’re working in a carpark or stocking shelves at Woolies but cmon really, there’s enough people who work overnight that we need to declare a holiday over it?

What the are us non religious types supposed to do? Typically we’d have a family lunch or dinner but Laylat al-Qadr falls during Ramadan, which is a month of no food between dawn and dusk.

Again with the suburban effigies and flag burning.

It seems every Islamic public holiday involves lots of praying and not eating food. Sorry guys but as far as spending my public holiday goes, sitting around being thankful for all the food I’m not eating just doesn’t cut it.

No offense, but take out the religious symbolism and Islam has some pretty crappy public holidays. They just don’t translate well into a secular setting.

Trad’s comments came after the New South Wales government passed laws prohibiting employers to demand that employees work on Australian public holidays. Presumably this is because some Muslims wanted to trade in their holidays for their much more significant Islamic holy days (or nights).

In theory this sounds all good and fair but the reality? What are you going to do, rock up on Christmas day to work and twiddle your thumbs because the rest of the country is off enjoying themselves?


Whatever we decide as a nation it should be uniform across the country. People are still free to take time off to celebrate their religious holidays but at a loss of holiday entitlement (annual leave).

Meanwhile if you want to entertain the idea that the nation should observe your religious holiday at least offer us some activity we can participate in without feeling like we’ve trampled on the meaning of the day.

Christmas and Easter can be safely celebrated without all the religious nonsense by sharing a good meal together and catching up. With fasting and prayer the centre point of Islamic holidays, I simply don’t see what muslims in Australia expect the rest of us will be doing with our newfound spare time on these days.

Anyone?

Presumably muslims are getting finance from independent third party operators in what must be a pretty controlled niche industry. Think about it, you offer loans to muslims who can’t go anywhere else but still need to finance essentials like a car or house. You don’t need to be muslim yourself to offer the loans, you just need to make sure the loan is halal by complying with the no-interest rule.

Where else are they going to go?

It has already been noted that the Islamic finance industry is booming in Asia and Latrobe University already offer an Islamic Banking and Finance degree, pre-empting Islamic finance as a future growth industry in Australia.

If we as a country want to exploit tap into this ludicrous market (religious people tend to have limited options when it comes loans), then logically the first step would be to test home grown products on Australian muslims.

Enter the National Bank of Australia.

This morning the National Bank of Australia (NAB) has announced plans to bring muslim-friendly loans into into mainstream finance by offering national muslim-friendly loans. From discrimination to public perception to actually turning over a profit there’s a seemingly large minefield in a national company announcing such an initiative.

On the surface though, the NAB seem to be doing it right.

The whole premise behind a muslim-friendly loan is that no interest is allowed to be charged on repayments. To get around this the bank simply purchase what it is you were after and then sell it back to you with a profit margin.

ie. I want a $1000 bicycle and go approach the bank. After some prayers and the sacrifice of a kitten the bank approves my loan and goes out and buys the bicycle for me. They then sell it back to me at say $1200. I still make repayments but the loan counts as being muslim approved because I’m not paying interest on the loan itself.

In the case of home loans, companies seem to get around the interest rates by charging ‘rent’ with the renter eventually acquiring a 100% financial stake in the property.

I know, talk about your religious technicalities.

As the Daily Telegraph points out, these type of loans have “the advantage of making the loan immune from future interest rate rises.” What isn’t disclosed though is the percentage increase on the cost of the item.

What could really make these loans appealing is if the increase in the selling price the banks put on the item they are reselling back to you is less then the variable interest rate on loans, or might be less in the near future.

For example say a bank offers you a $1000 loan at 5% variable interest and the interest rate has jumped twice in the last 6 months, if the muslim loan profit increase was at 5% or even less you could easily come out on top and as a bonus protect yourself from unstable interest rate rises.

Currently we’re starting to see this already happen in our financial sector with the Commonwealth bank deciding to “selfishly” start bumping up interest rates because you know, the recession is over. The bank were so slow to drop the rates but even at the slightest whiff of bounce back up they go.

In these cases a muslim style loan makes sense for the consumer, again providing the profit margin percentage is appealing. Given no facts and figures have been released other then the first round of loans will be $1000 or so capped to fifteen million of initial investment in the scheme I’m assuming the NAB is poised to take advantage and screw consumers.

If the model is sustainable on a small scale trial I guess it won’t be long before we see national fully fledged Australian bank backed muslim friendly mortgages.

Realistically all the NAB has to do is charge slightly less then the private operators who offer muslim loans do and they’ll be guaranteed a market share of the muslim loan industry. Given that anything more financially attractive then the standard ‘we charge you interest’ model would make the bulk of their currently loan models redundant (why pay more when you don’t have to?), there is no incentive to make muslim loans more appealing.

What is most likely going to happen is that these loans are heavily marketed to predominantly muslim areas but are offered to all members of the community. Naturally if you’re not bound by silly religious laws you’re not going to sign up to a loan that will cost you more then a normal interest loan, so that leaves only the ‘we have no other choice’ muslims left to be screwed over.

This way the banks appear to be offering non-discriminatory loans, are able to legally screw over a certain demographic who have no other choice due to silly religious laws and the ludicrous Sharia Advisory Board is kept afloat providing clerics to bless wads of loan money (or hard drives given finance is mostly all electronic these days).

Sounds like it’s win-win all round, well… except for muslim wallets.