'Jihad' sheik to face new police probe

The firebrand cleric who went overseas just days before some of his cohorts were rounded up in the nation's biggest counter-terrorism raid is the subject of a new police investigation, after a call for children to join jihad as holy warriors appeared in a DVD being sold in Australia.

Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohamed's radical sermons - available on the internet and on DVDs and videos - have become popular with Muslims around the world. In one video, running on the hugely popular website YouTube, he admonishes his followers in English for not "sacrificing a drop of blood" as martyrs.

Australian Federal Police said yesterday they had begun inquiries into Sheik Feiz's DVD encouraging jihad, which is believed to be unclassified in Australia and illegal to sell. NSW Premier Morris Iemma accused the cleric yesterday of inciting terrorism. "This DVD goes a lot further than vilification," he said. "The sort of incitement that the DVD encourages is incitement to acts of violence and acts of terror."

Sheik Feiz, a member of Sunni Islam's fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, left Australia for Lebanon in late 2004, just days before federal and state police and ASIO conducted raids in Sydney and Melbourne, arresting 23 people on terror-related charges. The cleric calls two of the accused terrorists close friends and knew all of the Sydney men arrested. He has links to almost every notable member of Australia's Islamic community and continues to direct his Global Islamic Youth Centre - the nerve centre of Islamic youth in Sydney, setting the tone for 4000 youths, their families and fraternities. Along with Sheik Mohammed Omran in Melbourne and Sydney's Sheik Abdul Salem Mohammed Zoud, he is considered one of Australia's leading radical clerics. Unlike Sheik Omran and Sheik Zoud, Sheik Feiz preaches in English with a strong Australian accent rather than Arabic.

In the video running on YouTube, which could not be dated, he criticises Muslims in Australia for not sacrificing their blood as martyrs and for putting lifestyle ahead of action in response to massacres of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. "In our times it is the fear of death, the fear of sacrificing your finger, your toe, a drop of blood that is more honourable than anything else," he says. "Why? Because martyrdom to us is, is not as appealing to us, as it was to those ancestors, the great warriors ... who lived around the best creature that walked the earth, Mohammed."

The YouTube video follows revelations in a British documentary that Sheik Feiz's collection of DVDs - called the Death Series - were being sold by children in the carpark of a mosque in the British city of Birmingham. In that and another series called Signs of the Hour, made about four years ago, Sheik Feiz labelled Jews "pigs" and exhorted children to jihad. "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam," he says. "Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Sheik Feiz said that every one of those remarks could be put in context. "The jihad I speak of is not one of violence," he said. "It is one of personal struggle against things like mischievousness, temptation and personal harm. I have never advocated violence against Australians or anyone embracing the Australian way of life. I have never called for people to be harmed. If anyone fights you for what you are, you defend yourself. "I don't believe in suicide bombing, I don't believe in violence against others. We don't invite that, we don't encourage that. We denounce that. This is not Islamic law and it is not moral."

He said he regretted the remark about Jews being pigs and said this was made in the days following the images of a young Palestinian, Mohammed al-Dura, being pinned down with his father in crossfire in Gaza in 2002. The boy was killed and the images became an enduring propaganda tool for the Palestinians during the intifada years. "That remark was made in the heat of the moment and I regret it," Sheik Feiz said. "It was not something I should have said and is not something I believe."

B'nai B'rith Anti-defamation Commission chairman Michael Lipshutz said the Muslim community had to publicly distance itself from anti-Semitic individuals and organisations.

However, Muslim youth representative Fadi Rahman said the reaction to the four-year-old video that authorities have been aware of for nearly as long was an example of prejudice against the Muslim community. "This is what tells us we will never fit in no matter what we do. "It's telling the kidsthey're always going to be marginalised."

Acting Attorney-General Kevin Andrews said the matter was being investigated by the relevant authorities. "It's offensive to the Australian people, it's reprehensible, it's particularly outrageous that certain groups in Australia, such as the Jewish community, have been highlighted in these comments and we condemn the comments," he said.

Experts believe the DVD material - recorded in 2004 - would escape federal sedition laws, which were passed in 2005 as part of the federal Government's terrorism legislation, but may fall foul of other laws. University of NSW law lecturer Andrew Lynch said NSW racial vilification legislation might apply to Sheik Feiz's description of Jews as pigs, and the videos could be in breach of the federal criminal code, which prohibits incitement to commit an offence. While the Mufti of Australia, Taj Din al-Hilali, sparked national outrage by comparing scantily clad women to uncovered meat, Sheik Feiz once told a meeting at Bankstown, in Sydney's southwest Muslim heartland, that indecently dressed women were setting themselves up for rape.

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Muslims wary of Howard DVD message

Australian PM not allowed to be Christian?? The court case referred to is an absurdity which was recently thrown out

A new religious row is heating up after it was revealed that Prime Minister John Howard recorded a goodwill message for an Australia Day prayer event organised by a controversial group involved in an anti-Islamic court case. The Prime Minister has appeared in a DVD message for Catch the Fire Ministries, which is sponsoring a multi-denominational gathering in Melbourne on January 26.

Member of the prime minister's Muslim Community Reference Group and former president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Yasser Soliman, said today Mr Howard should have thought twice about making the DVD. "Of course the Prime Minister is free to address anyone he chooses," Mr Soliman said. "But what he says is extremely influential and what he fails to say is also influential. I would hope that he would clearly condemn hate speeches in all their forms, irrespective of who the perpetrators are. "It could be perceived that he might have a different standard for some sectors of the community than he has for other sectors in the Australian community, and that would be sending a very dangerous message here and overseas."

Catch the Fire's Pastor Danny Nalliah, who is organising the event, was one of two Catch the Fire ministers charged under Victoria's vilification laws in 2002 for allegedly saying Muslims were demons. Pastor Nalliah denied he made the controversial statement and said today the Victorian Court of Appeal backed that last month. "There is nowhere (on) record that we ever said Muslims are demons," Pastor Nalliah said on ABC radio. "I would never say that. And secondly we never said all Muslims are violent."

Pastor Nalliah has refused to divulge what Mr Howard has said in his recorded message for fear it will be taken out of context. "I have kept it confidential up until Australia Day," he said. "The best thing is for the media to come and listen to it firsthand on Australia Day, then say what they believed they heard the Prime Minister said."

Pastor Nalliah said the event at Festival Hall next Friday involved a wide range of religious groups including the Salvation Army, Presbyterian and Anglican churches and smaller organisations. It's about coming together to pray for a nation and I think it's a great opportunity," he said. Pastor Nalliah said the prime minister was not the only politician to give their support to Catch the Fire. "In the past we have had our former deputy prime minister John Anderson speak at our meetings. "(Treasurer) Peter Costello did, so did Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile last year."

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Racial taunts claim against police

This crazy guy doesn't realize that the vilification laws are only there to protect Muslims!

A JEWISH man assaulted and racially vilified by footballers last year has lodged a complaint against Victoria Police with the Equal Opportunity Commission. Menachem Vorchheimer has claimed that the racial vilification against him at St Kilda was authorised and assisted by Victoria Police and an off-duty police officer. The off-duty senior-constable was driving the busload of footballers from the Ocean Grove Football Club when Mr Vorchheimer was racially abused by the footballers, who yelled Nazi slogans and made machinegun motions. He also received a black eye when he went to retrieve his traditional Jewish religious hats, which were stolen from him during the incident.

It is the first such complaint lodged against Victoria Police in the Equal Opportunity Commission. Victoria Police confirmed they were aware of the complaint. They said the force's ethical standards department was investigating the incident and would now also consider the complaint to the Equal Opportunity Commission. Detectives were also continuing to investigate the assault, as well as the theft of Mr Vorchheimer's Shabbat hat and yarmulke.

Mr Vorchheimer is unhappy with the way police have investigated the actions of the senior-constable, and lodged the complaint after meetings senior officers. In his submission to the Equal Opportunity Commission, he alleges the off-duty officer encouraged, authorised or assisted people under his control to make racial and religiously offensive remarks. "It was the behaviour that (the officer) encouraged, authorised and assisted that incited the theft of my Shabbat hat and yamulke, and incited the subsequent physical assault that left me with significant injury that required medical attention, and has left me physically and emotionally scarred," Mr Vorchheimer alleged.

He told the Herald Sun he believed the officer should have been suspended while the investigation into his actions was under way. "I fundamentally believe, as I believe all Australians do, that a nation's police force needs to conduct itself in the highest possible moral and social regard," Mr Vorchheimer said. "After all, it is the police force that is charged with enforcing the laws that act to protect the community and provide boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable codes of conduct."

The Equal Opportunities Commission complaint is expected to go to a full hearing.

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Nation must get precedence over ethnicity

Sheik Hilali's outbursts point to what's wrong with multiculturalism, and a policy change is overdue

It looked really good on paper. Immigrants would be encouraged to retain their distinct cultural identities on condition that they subscribed to the tenets of Westminster democracy. But since September 11, multiculturalism has been taking a beating at home and abroad. In Britain the emergence of home-grown Islamic terrorism has caused a serious re-evaluation of that policy.

The British Government for many years adopted a hands-off multicultural policy that allowed Muslim extremism to flourish throughout England without impediment. Until his arrest in 2004, Abu Hamza al-Masri openly preached holy war against the West from the pulpit of north London's Finsbury Park Mosque. And this official attitude of anything goes facilitated an influx of fugitive jihadis into Britain that caused its capital city to become known in intelligence circles as Londonistan.

At Finsbury Park, Scotland Yard was astonished to find a clear links between word and deed. In addition to thousands of jihadi propaganda videos, police found a cache of weapons and forged passports in the mosque basement. The BBC reported that intelligence agencies believed al-Masri and his acolytes were "linked to dozens of terrorist plots around Europe and beyond".

Over here it was all supposed to be different. The Australian brand of multiculturalism intended to maintain a fine balance between sectarian rights and mainstream responsibilities. Minority groups would be free to follow their creeds as long as they did not contravene the values of democracy. And in the event of such a conflict, the tenets of Australian multiculturalism mandated that individual rights, gender equality and religious freedom would always reign supreme. However, in practice this principle has gradually been eroded by the sordid abrasives of political correctness and calculation. Case in point: Islamic firebrand cleric Taj Din al-Hilali, who once again made the news by claiming on Egyptian television that by rights Australia should be a Muslim country.

But because ALP heavies thought that Hilali could deliver votes in Sydney's southwest, they pressured the Department of Immigration and Multicultural And Indigenous Affairs to overlook his history of incitement to racial hatred. Needless to say, Hilali got his permanent residency and citizenship. And Osama bin Laden groupie Mohammed Omran has suffered no repercussions for selling jihadi literature at his Melbourne bookstore or teaching that 9/11 was a US conspiracy against Islam.

Such policy mishaps, foreign and domestic, have inflicted a major haemorrhage on popular support for Australian multiculturalism. There is a wide public sense that this policy is losing the battle for Muslim hearts and minds to the siren song of radicalism and resentment. And the sight of establishment Islamic leaders last year convening in Canberra to petition the Prime Minister on behalf of Hezbollah only served to reinforce that belief.

It is said that in politics perception is reality. And the key to the clarity of any political program is the words that are used to describe it. And herein lies the problem. At its core, the word multiculturalism implicitly elevates ethnic tribalism over national commonality. The term makes express reference to factionalism without specific mention of the unifying factors that are supposed to be the pride of this policy. It sends the message that diversity is an end in itself, rather than merely a means to the end of a better Australia.

Having never read the fine print of government policy statements, most Australians base their outlook on the impression created by the nomenclature of the program. And this ambiguity between what the word multiculturalism purports to mean and what it really does signify is a recipe for confusion and disharmony. Similarly unsatisfactory are the amorphous references to the rule of law that feature in government policy statements on multiculturalism. The real question facing Western democracies is not rule of law but, rather, which law is to rule.

In several European nations, Muslim leaders have begun to press for the application of sharia law to their communities. And because sharia constitutes a distinct legal code, there is nothing in the strict definition of Australian multiculturalism that would preclude such a demand in Brunswick or Lakemba. In fact, that is precisely what the radical Muslim Hizb ut-Tahrir movement is doing when it calls for a Taliban-style Islamic caliphate in Australia.

But I categorically reject such moral relativism. I make no apologies for my belief that one wife is better than four, or that the amputation of limbs for petty theft is pure barbarism. Australian democracy is the direct ideological descendant of the English common law system, and I contend that Westminsterism is ethically superior to Wahabism.

At times ideas can have real-world consequences. And the conceptual shortcomings that mar the core of Australian multiculturalism have spawned hesitancy and confusion in its application. In the popular mind, this policy has bungled one of the pre-eminent social challenges of our era: the rise of radical Islam in our midst. If there is any chance of salvaging the positive elements of this program, then it must be comprehensively repackaged and rebranded.

We must set aside the terminology of multiculturalism that has been compromised by fecklessness and ineptitude. And in its stead we should adopt a national compact whose title explicitly emphasises the primacy of national obligations over separatist privileges. An Australian Compact would achieve this end by clarifying the standards of behaviour that are mandated by our democratic polity. Rather than nebulous generalities, the compact should employ specific language that will establish detailed behavioural expectations as well as penalties for their violation. Properly conceived, an Australian Compact will constitute an important tool in our effort to avoid the sort of inter-ethnic strife that is now engulfing parts of Europe. It is the cultural imperative of our time.

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