How Liberal is Australia’s go-to-guy?
Does Waleed Aly truly stand up for liberal beliefs?
Let’s get started with this:
For those of you who don’t know who Waleed Aly is, he is an Australian Muslim and is considered a champion in Australia’s liberal masses. He’s an academic, musician, media personality, works at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University and above all, he’s an all round good guy.
But…
Aly has committed himself to yet another attempt in trying to play the mediator against the extremism of liberalism and conservatism. As you no doubt have gathered, his segment “Something We Should Talk About” on the channel 10’s program “The Project” was based around the comments made by Sonia Kruger regarding Australia’s safety.
You can view the full clip here:
Lets be very clear. Islam is a religion — it’s a set of ideas that try to answer difficult questions about the world around us as well as attempting to govern the masses by establishing order through rules and regulations. You can’t be racist against a set of ideas. Why? Because many races can latch on to these ideologies.
Sonia Kruger isn’t racist against Islam. What she is racist against are brown people — people from the Middle East — which is absurd. What Sonia Kruger has done is committed a classic logical fallacy known as “Conflation”, which resides under a category known as “Fallacies of Ambiguity”. We should all know what it means to conflate two things but since it seems to me that a majority of people don’t, I will explain anyway.
To ‘conflate’ (not inflate) is to simply get two separate ideas and argue from a stance that views both those ideas as the same thing. The conflation in this circumstance is when Kruger believes that the ideas within Islam are the same as the people of Islam. That’s big a no no. And of course there are repercussions for committing such fallacies.
I could go on and on
Now, on to Mr. Aly
Mr. Aly used to be so good in demonstrating his concerns with religion and in no way should he be linked to these sorts of individuals:
But there is a particular amount of avoidance on the issue of pointing out a certain elephant in the room. His segment, “Something We Should Talk About” has been titled with “Send Forgiveness Viral”. As you would have watched above, Aly attempts to calm the waters that surround the comments that Sonia Kruger made. What Aly does not realise is that his segment to “Send Forgiveness Viral” is just as unproductive as Sonia Kruger’s comment on immigration policy.
How are solutions meant to be created if problems are not talked about?
Let me begin with pointing out that Mr. Aly is a Sunni Muslim, born in Melbourne. He empathises with Mrs. Kruger as he understands what she is fearful of but he does not explicitly announce what that fear is or where that fear comes from. The segment turns into an outline of some of the bigotry spewing out of the mouths of some of Australias conservatives who raise the idea of keeping all Muslims on a ‘list’. But instead of using construction, which was preached before hand, he turns to victimisation with the comment “people like me”, which isn’t destructive but is still incredibly unproductive.
Mr. Aly, I think I can be pretty safe in saying that we know who you are and we know what your intentions are…Relax.
What’s going on right now is a clash between two opposing extremes, neither of which are willing to admit the dangers of their own thoughts. Why should we try and make forgiveness viral when forgiveness won’t solve the problem of bigotry? Why should we forgive those who are racist instead of educating them as to why their prejudice is illogical?
But this mindset works both ways.
How are solutions meant to be created if problems are not talked about?
Aly’s platform on the “The Project” is a chance for him to not simply calm the waters but educate viewers. His basic inference is that we need to have a conversation; achieve understanding. But why does he not want to mention the elephant in the room? Why does he not want to mention the obvious problems that the ideology of Islam has in this current day and age? It could be one of three reasons. The first one being is that he is afraid of the ramifications of openly criticising some aspects of the doctrine of Islam. Secondly, he loves his religion. He is proud of being a Muslim or thirdly, he is simply unable to mention these polemic issues due to the politics of commercial televsion.
It could be just one or it could be all three.
Everyone needs something to hold on to no mater how illogical that may be. Waleed Aly is no way an Islamist, not even a conservative. He is as liberal as you can get and I cannot stress that enough. But he still holds back.
This video, while the title praises the late Christopher Hitchens, captures pretty well the natural disposition of Walled Aly. Because it’s so long, in order to emphasise my argument I will point out the times that you should look out for:
While this clip may be from 2009, it still holds great relevance, the reason being, Mr. Aly’s apologist nature has not changed. At 16:45 Mr. Aly states that religions can be ‘instrumentalised’ to the agenda of individuals depending on intepretation. A classic apologists statement. What really bothers me is the final remark of “just get on with being good and being bad and let people make up their own mind”. I don’t think I need to explain why that bothers me.
But I will.
The whole notion is that people are capable of doing good things and bad things. But what is just as important is where the intentions of creating goodness or badness comes from. If a religion is able to spread goodness — if the ideas held within the doctrines of monotheisms create and spread solidarity — then that is good. But if that same monotheism preaches ideas of hatred, submission and dominance, good people are vulnerable to doing bad things merely because, according to that religion, that is the right thing to do.
This may seem like I am picking on Mr. Aly but when a person holds so much influence over the liberal minds of Australia, it’s important to hold that person accountable for, not only what they do say, but for what they don’t say as well.
I have never heard Mr. Aly condemn, not necessarily the actions of theocratic facsists, but the major principles of Islam. I have never heard him state criticism about his own religion for the sake of helping people understand why Conservatives, Islamists and Jihadists do what they do. It is a constant act of side stepping the main focus of the issue. A constant act of “straw-man fallacies”
One of the main flaws of Islam today is that not only are people outside of the religion unable to critique it’s practises but even members in the religion are unable to critque themselves.
There are very few people…I should clarify, very few well-known people, who are practising Muslims but are very well aware of the flaws of Islam. Individuals like Maajid Nawaz are incredibly vocal about what Islam has the ability to stand for. Things like — homophobia, apostasy, prejudice against Jews, violence against women — are all very real aspects of the religion of Islam.
These are facts.
It Mr. Aly truly wants to change peoples perspectives and truly want to make a difference, he needs to start a real dialogue.
There are a lot of people out there who think that the concept of extremism is simply the act of blowing up a building while there are a vast majority of Muslims who are ‘peace loving’ individuals. But I have yet to see Mr. Aly, or anyone for that mater, to define what ‘extreme’ is.
Such a vast amount of Muslims believe that Sharia should apply to both Muslims and Non-Muslims. That’s pretty extreme.
A huge amount of Muslims think that corporal punishment for crimes like theft should be allowed. That’s pretty extreme.
And there are a lot of Muslims who think that stoning should be a punishment for adultery. That’s pretty extreme.
Mr. Aly says that that we must forgive those who are prejudiced based on the their fear. But the question is, why should I tolerate the intolerance of others? Not just the intolerance of people who are scared but the intolerance of an entire belief system.
