Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Getting in bed with the Muslims

Janet Albrechtsen has posted a very interesting article about the recent conference on understanding Muslims.


"The gig, aimed at polling attitudes and sponsored by The Australian, kicked off with much sweet talk about chatting to your Muslim neighbour and getting together for a barbecue or friendly game of AFL. Not a great start, I thought. Two of the London suicide bombers loved cricket. In fact, 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer played a congenial game of cricket the day before he blew himself up. Each panellist seemed to be competing for a nice, warm round of applause. And they got it."

There is a relevant point raised by Janet, and that is, what is a "moderate Muslim"? What does a moderate believe in besides the label of being "moderate". Do moderates for example support terrorism? This is a valid question and remains unanswered amongst all the hype surrounding the efforts to understand the Muslim community. Or do moderated refrain from criticizing terrorism whilst not openly supporting it?

It seems that there is a lot of circumventing of the difficult questions in our desperate attempts to reassure ourselves that Muslims aren't really a threat, if we only learn to understand them better.

My attempts to understand Muslims hasn't been all that reassuring and I'm definitely not comfortable with the idea of them exercising influence on public policy and changing our society to meet their religious needs.
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2 comments:

Lexcen said...

Kirsten, calm down, think rationally about this. We can call anyone a terrorist and abuse the term. That is wrong. Terrorism is clearly the targeting of innocent civilians to kill without any reason or purpose. Don't muddy the waters with obscure references to acts of war as terrorism. War is terrible and usually unjustified and I don't want to get into an argument about which war is or isn't justified.
You are not a terrorist as far as I know. Or are you planning to kill anonymously anybody that just happens to get in your way?

Don't confuse rebellion against establishment with terrorism.
Don't confuse sedition against the state with terrorism.
Don't confuse rebellion in the name of freedom against a dictator with terrorism.
We aren't that simple or stupid to allow others with secret agendas to muddy the waters and confuse our thinking about what terrorism is.

9:40 pm
Lexcen said...

hammer, the only threat that would motivate Australians into action would be the threat that sport would no longer be televised.

7:07 am

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