Common Sense Ramblings #1 — The Face of Racism in Australia
Over the past few weeks, sparked by the shooting of police finance veteran Curtis Cheng outside of the New South Wales Police Headquarters in Parramatta, there have been a number of idiots becoming more vocal with their pigheaded, ignorant agendas about Islam.
Some of these groups/individuals include:
Look, you’re allowed your freedom of speech in Australia. That’s fine. Yet it disgusts me that the people that make up these groups have a level of ignorance that far surpasses what the acceptable standard is and should be.
I mean, it’s shown from the name of one group, Reclaim Australia.
What’s there to reclaim?
If anything, the indigenous Australians should be kicking us out. But due to a systematic genocide that has continued over the last two hundred years, they’ve been reduced to a dismal 2.7% of the population of Australia; not even going into the incarceration rate for indigenous people, drug and alcohol problems and the demolition of their spirituality through the government’s occupation of their land.
So — nothing to reclaim there.
Ok…what about from the ‘great evil’ of Islam? Maybe that’s who we’re trying to reclaim from?
Well, people that identify as Islamic in Australia make up 2.2% of the population.
Oh, the horror.
So, that’s not the problem.
Sure, no one likes terrorism. It’s an bug that needs to be squashed out of religion — all religion mind you — but the important thing to note is that it’s a small bug.
Take the case of Islam.
An incredibly small percentage of Muslims are considered to be ‘extreme’.
In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, Princeton University Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis states that Islamic jurisprudence does not allow terrorism. He said:
At no time did the (Muslim) jurist approve of terrorism. Nor indeed is there any evidence of the use of terrorism (in Islamic tradition). Muslims are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged, not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners. The rules and regulations concerning prisoners of war in Islam to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities, and to honor agreements. Similarly, the laws of Jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm non-combatants, women and children, “unless they attack you first.” A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce. What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam.
I don’t just think — I know — that the majority of the umma (the collective Islamic community) are peaceful, law abiding citizens with no intention of beheading the next infidel they see.
They understand that this is fundamentally wrong and by no means a reflection of their religion.
By this same token, these Islamophobic groups need to understand that their point of view is wrong. It doesn’t belong in a modern society.
It doesn’t belong anywhere.
And hey, maybe one day, when we’re hopefully all free of intolerance, and can be free to practise any religion without fear of persecution, we can throw a few lamb chops on the barbie and chill out as real Australians should.
Matt Querzoli was inspired to write this because his common sense was tingling. Follow his writing blog if you liked the post, or even the bloke himself if you were weak at the knees from looking at his profile picture.
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