For Muslims, More Pillars of Wisdom

There’s been an awful lot of noise on the ABC, and other sources of correct thinking, about the terrible backlash currently happening in Australia against innocent Muslims. (Apparently Rebecca Kay got pushed in the back or something while she was out shopping, and someone has spray-painted graffiti on a mosque in Brisbane. Well, Campbell Newman did encourage people to visit mosques. He didn’t specify what people should do there.)

It does seem a tad disproportionate to have a backlash against Muslims living in Australia – the ones who refer to us as ‘non-Muslims’, or kuffar, which is a term of abuse. How unreasonable for the kuffar to feel a tad peeved, just because Australian citizens, openly and piously Muslims by profession, some of them refugees or children of refugees, have flown overseas to take part in a foreign conflict.

And how foolish of us to feel let down because these Australian citizens have been beheading people and swearing to kill anyone who disagrees with them, even back here in Australia. And being a tad put out, because some local Muslims decided that it would be a totally amazing prank to grab some individual kafir on the street in an Australian capital and behead them, and put it on YouTube. And because some Muslim boy tried to kill a couple of police officers.

You know the best way to stop a backlash? I’m going to share this knowledge now with the vibrant Australian Islamic community.

1. At the first sign of ISIS activity,  local Muslims should have taken to the streets in every capital city and protested, holding up large signs saying ‘We disassociate ourselves from all this’, ‘We love Australia’, and ‘We will weed these people out and hand them over’. It’s still not too late to do that. I look forward to the Patriotic Australian Lakemba Gathering any day now. Large numbers, and not an ISIS flag in sight, please.
2. Local Muslims should be organising across the country to have every single mosque and congregation identify potential terrorists and their associates and all persons of interest, and hand them over to the authorities. After all, if it’s just a few bad apples, it should be relatively easy to weed them out and hand them over. And then you can go back to being ‘the religion of peace’.
3. Local Islamic leaders of all stripes should be making constant, public statements dissociating their congregations from terrorism of all forms. They should be backing this up with actions, like leaning on families to hand over suspects, destroying violent and racially hateful literature in public bonfires, and shutting the bookshops and pop-up market stalls that propagate this stuff.
4. Shut up about Israel. No one is fooled; we know it’s the Sunni-Shia thing that’s causing the problem, not Israel.

Until the Islamic community is seen to be policing its own homegrown problem people – and not policing us for our so-called backlash — Australians will continue to be suspicious. The more Islamic apologists who appear in utterly tainted news sources such as the ABC, the more suspicious everyone will become.

I hate to break it to you, guys, but ordinary Australians aren’t fooled by taqiyya, the lies that Muslims are permitted to tell the kuffar. This level of idiocy is limited to a small collective of uneducated journalists and some nervous politicians in marginal seats. That leaves around 24 million of us who aren’t buying it.

I don’t like the thought of anyone in this country being frightened to live here or to do their job, including police officers. But if there’s a backlash – which is questionable, to start with — you have no one but yourselves and your leaders to blame. Prompt and unambiguous statements, and an active policy of public disassociation, would have worked wonders. But you chose not to do that. No wonder people are suspicious.

Philippa Martyr blogs at Transverse City. She’s not buying it either.