Rudd's ideology-blinkered uranium policy irks India

OK to sell uranium to Communist China but not to democratic India?

KEVIN Rudd was lashed yesterday by one of India's most influential foreign affairs commentators over the Prime Minister's ditching of his predecessor's pledge to sell uranium to the emerging economic powerhouse. Brahma Chellaney launched a searing denunciation of Mr Rudd's "abstruse, retrograde ideology" over his reversal of a decision made last year by John Howard to sell uranium to India. Mr Chellaney accused Mr Rudd in The Asian Age newspaper of striking "a jarring note amid a growing convergence of strategic interests" between the two countries.

Under the headline "Rudd's rudderless reversal", Mr Chellaney noted that Mr Rudd was the free world's first Mandarin-speaking head of government, saying he "has made plain his intent to cosy up to the world's largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision that his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world's largest democracy."

The stridency of Mr Chellaney's attack reflects the widespread annoyance at high levels in New Delhi over the Rudd Government's reversal on the uranium issue. The Indian Government was irked when, in January, it sent special prime ministerial envoy Shyam Saran to see Foreign Minister Stephen Smith in Perth and found itself being bluntly told - even though it had not asked - there would be no sale of Australian uranium to India. Indian sources insist Mr Saran was taken aback by the minister's forthright stance as he had gone to Perth only to brief Mr Smith on New Delhi's negotiations with Washington over its civilian nuclear deal and specifically not to ask to buy Australian uranium. "Chellaney is saying what many of us feel about the Rudd Government's pathetic hypocrisy on this issue," one highly-placed official told The Australian yesterday.

The criticism of the Rudd Government is in sharp contrast to the significant strides made in Indo-Australian relations in the Howard years, which are praised by Mr Chellaney. But in overturning the decision to sell uranium to India, Mr Chellaney says, Mr Rudd has been "notably regressive". "Driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard's decision, but his Government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if he has not read the Non-Proliferation Treaty text. "In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd Government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states.

"Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook - stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use."

Mr Rudd's office would not be drawn on claims his Government had mishandled Australia's relationship with India. A spokesman for the Prime Minister said only that it remained government policy not to sell uranium to countries who had not signed the NPT. Shadow foreign minister Andrew Robb said the Government's handling of the relationship with India had been "clumsy".

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The master of Islamist doublespeak comes to Brisbane

The Swiss Islamic activist Tariq Ramadan has been invited by Griffith University to be the keynote speaker at its conference opening in Brisbane today. The fact that Australia is allowing Ramadan to enter the country at all will raise eyebrows in security circles elsewhere. Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: the spiritual backers of al-Qa'ida and Hamas and whose goal is to Islamise the world. While it is, of course, unfair to tar someone with his grandfather's views, there is ample reason to think that in the case of Tariq Ramadan the apple has not fallen far from the tree.

Ramadan has been banned from entering the US because of his alleged association with extremists. The Geneva Islamic Centre, with which he is closely associated, has been linked to terrorists of the Algerian FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) and the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). A Spanish police report claimed that Ahmed Brahim, an al-Qa'ida leader jailed in Spain, was "in frequent contact" with Ramadan, a claim he has denied. Yet the Swiss activist has not only been allowed into Britain but is ensconced at St Anthony's College, Oxford as a research fellow and is much lionised by the British establishment, appearing at security seminars on Islamism and even serving as an adviser to the British Government on tackling Islamic extremism.

So how to explain this wild divergence of views about Tariq Ramadan? And does Australia have cause to be concerned? Ramadan's message is highly seductive to a Western world terrified by Islamic radicalism. For Ramadan preaches the comforting message of an unthreatening Islam that can accommodate itself to modernity and to the West. He does so in a charismatic style combining high intellect, a winsome French accent and impossibly hip glamour. To the desperate British establishment, the picture he paints so beguilingly of a way out of the Islamist nightmare has made him into the rock star of the counter-terrorism circuit.

But closer scrutiny of what he actually says - and perhaps even more importantly, does not say - suggests the talented Mr Ramadan is an Islamist wolf in moderniser's clothing. To the Islamic world he says one thing; to credulous Western audiences quite another in language that is slippery, opaque, manipulative and disingenuous. His reputation as a Muslim reformer owes everything to the wishful thinking of those who want so much to believe in him that they fail to grasp what he is really saying.

Partly, this is because much of his work is in French. The writer Caroline Fourest has analysed it and her book, Brother Tariq: the Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan has just been translated from French into English. All who are concerned to halt the spread of radical Islamism should read this book. For it shows without doubt that the poster boy for Islamic reform is in fact one of the most sophisticated proponents of the global jihad.

Ramadan claims he has "no functional connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood. But he was trained at the Leicester Islamic Foundation in England, the controversial institution that propagates the doctrines of the key Islamist ideologues Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb and which aims to promote "an Islamic social order in Great Britain". And Ramadan has repeatedly said that his grandfather's views have "inspired" him and "there is nothing in this heritage that I reject".

So what is the heritage of Hassan al-Banna? He did not just promote the most reactionary and oppressive Islamic fundamentalism. He also devised a strategy of "graduated conquest" - pursued by the Muslim Brotherhood around the world - by which not only the countries of the former medieval Islamic caliphate, but all countries where Muslims live, are to be gradually Islamised and then taken over by an Islamic government under sharia law. This is the "heritage" Ramadan endorses. The only difference is that he has developed a particularly subtle strategy for seducing the West into embracing Islamist thinking without realising what is happening.

On the issue of terror, he is particularly slippery. Professing to oppose terrorism, he denies that his grandfather had anything to do with jihadi violence. Yet al-Banna explicitly supported the armed jihad which he considered to be the highest and "most sacred" form of holy war. Ramadan claims his grandfather limited this to "legitimate defence" or "resistance in the face of injustice". But this is precisely the weaselly formulation by which Islamists justify the "resistance" of human bomb terrorism in Israel or Iraq.

Behind the honeyed words about reform and tolerance which have entranced his Western fan club, Ramadan has consistently lined himself up with the forces of obscurantism, intolerance, hatred and violence. The first association he set up in 1994, the Muslim Men and Women of Switzerland, promoted confrontation and stirred up tension. He wrote the preface for a compilation of fatwas by the European Council for Fatwa whose president, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has said human bomb operations in Israel and Iraq are a religious duty.

Through his stronghold in the Union of Young Muslims in Lyon, he radicalised thousands of young French Muslims. In 1993, he was involved in a successful attempt in Geneva to stop production of a play by Voltaire on the grounds that it insulted Islam. In a telling exchange with the future French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he refused to condemn stoning to death for adultery, calling merely for a moratorium on this barbaric practice. And all those who oppose him he labels Islamophobes, Jews or Zionists. The desperation to embrace this most devious "reformer" is gravely misplaced. Truly moderate Muslims are undermined and indeed endangered by Ramadan at every turn.

Far from offering a way to modernise Islam, he proposes instead to Islamise modernity. And he is all the more dangerous precisely because his weapon is not a bomb-belt but his tongue. Some may say that, even if his thinking is reactionary, that is no reason to refuse to let him into the country. This naive view ignores the fact that the Islamists' war of civilisation is being conducted principally on the battleground of ideas.

Terrorism merely backs up the Muslim Brotherhood's fundamental strategy of cultural infiltration, incitement, demoralisation and conquest. As Fourest has written, the strategy of Ramadan is to globalise the Islamic awakening that is part of that strategy. In May 2003, the Appeal Court of Lyon agreed that language employed by preachers such as Ramadan "can influence young Muslims and can serve as a factor inciting them to join up with those engaged in violent acts". Wherever he goes, Ramadan is a pied piper leading the young to jihad by his mesmeric tunes. Through his appeal, he is probably the most dangerous Islamist in the Western world.

Thanks to the short-sightedness of the British Government, brother Tariq has been given a platform to radicalise innumerable young Muslims. Does Australia really want to follow suit?

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MP warns Islamist on racist messages

A FEDERAL Labor backbencher has warned Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan, who is banned from entering the US, against advocating Islamic extremism, violence and preaching a duplicitous message while in Australia. Member for Melbourne Ports Michael Danby urged people attending Professor Ramadan's Brisbane conference today - including the Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, Laurie Ferguson - to emphasise Australia's rejection of terrorism. "I just expect that the laws of Australia will be followed and that there will be no breaches of them, which will include racial and religious vilification," Mr Danby said.

He also responded to allegations made by Muslim leader Ameer Ali in The Weekend Australian that it was common among scholars such as Professor Ramadan to alter their messages for different audiences. "We don't accept in this country people saying one thing to please the authorities and another thing privately, or to a segment of the population," Mr Danby said.

Mr Ferguson [a prominent labor unionist and member of the Federal government], who will introduce Professor Ramadan at the Queensland Government-backed Islamic conference, has played down the US ban as an "over the top" measure. The US found the professor donated $940 to humanitarian foundations in Europe which provided money to Hamas. Professor Ramadan said he was not aware of Hamas's terror affiliations [What a crock!] because they were not proscribed at the time.

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An inconvenient truth about rising immigration

The article below is from Australian economist Ross Gittins -- who generally leans Left if economic rationality permits. As you see, however, he does more than his fair share of pointing out unpopular truths

JOHN HOWARD never wanted to talk about his booming immigration program. It seems Kevin Rudd's lot doesn't want to either. Why not? Because it just doesn't fit. For Mr Howard, it didn't fit politically. Didn't fit with the xenophobic rhetoric he used to win votes back from Pauline Hanson and to wedge Labor. For Mr Rudd, it doesn't fit with any of his professed economic concerns - about inflation, about mortgage stress and about climate change.

You'd hardly know it, but we're in the biggest immigration surge in our history. According to Rory Robertson of Macquarie Bank, net immigration has exceeded 100,000 a year in 12 of the past 20 years, having exceeded 100,000 only 12 times in the previous two centuries. The Howard government planned for an immigration program of up to 153,000 this financial year, to which you can add a planned intake of 13,000 for humanitarian reasons, and maybe 20,000 New Zealanders. That doesn't count an increase in the number of skilled workers on class 457 "temporary long-stay" visas, nor the growing number of young people on working holiday visas. In his first 100 days, Labor's Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, announced an increase of 6000 in the skilled immigration program for this year, a liberalising of the working holiday visa scheme and a committee to propose ways of making the 457 visa scheme more effective.

The third point in Mr Rudd's five-point plan to fight inflation is to "tackle chronic skills shortages", and part of this is to do so through the immigration program. Clearly, the Government believes high levels of skilled migration will help fill vacancies and thus reduce upward pressure on wages. That's true as far as it goes. But it overlooks an inconvenient truth: immigration adds more to the demand for labour than to its supply. That's because migrant families add to demand, but only the individuals who work add to supply.

Migrant families need food, clothing, shelter and all the other necessities. They also add to the need for social and economic infrastructure: roads, schools, health care and all the rest. Another factor is that their addition to demand comes earlier than their addition to labour supply. Unemployment among recent immigrants is significantly higher than for the labour force generally. Admittedly, the continuing emphasis on skilled immigration - and on the ability to speak English - plus the fact that many immigrants are sponsored by particular employers, should shorten the delay before they start working.

Even so, we still have about a third of the basic immigration program accounted for by people in the family reunion category. You'd expect the proportion of workers in this group to be much lower. So though skilled migration helps reduce upward pressure on wages at a time of widespread labour shortages, immigration's overall effect is to exacerbate our problem that demand is growing faster than supply.

The Rudd Government professes to great concern over worsening housing affordability. First we had a boom in house prices that greatly reduced affordability, and now we have steadily rising mortgage interest rates. The wonder of it is that, despite the deterioration in affordability, house prices are continuing to rise strongly almost everywhere except Sydney's western suburbs.

Why is this happening? Probably because immigrants are adding to the demand for housing, particularly in the capital cities, where they tend to end up. They need somewhere to live and, whether they buy or rent, they're helping to tighten demand relative to supply. It's likely that the greater emphasis on skilled immigrants means more of them are capable of outbidding younger locals. In other words, winding back the immigration program would be an easy way to reduce the upward pressure on house prices.

Finally, there's the effect on climate change. Emissions of greenhouse gases are caused by economic activity, but the bigger your population, the more activity. So the faster your population is growing the faster your emissions grow. Our immigration program is so big it now accounts for more than half the rate of growth in our population. It's obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the growth in our emissions - and make our efforts to cut emissions more effective overall - would be to reduce immigration.

Of course, you could argue that, were we to leave more of our immigrants where they were, they'd still be contributing to the emissions of their home country. True. But because people migrate to better their economic circumstances, it's a safe bet they'd be emitting more in prosperous Australia than they were before.

My point is not that all immigration should cease forthwith but, leaving aside the foreigner-fearing prejudices of the great unwashed, the case against immigration is stronger than the rest of us realise - and stronger than it suits any Government to draw attention to.

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How queer can you get?

These guys make the Catholics look puritanical

Brisbane's Holy Trinity Anglican Church has been dubbed the "Unholy Trinity" after it was revealed a pedophile, an alleged pedophile and a practising priest with his own seedy past are leading its Sunday services. Following revelations in The Courier-Mail this week that convicted pedophile priest Robert Sharwood, who was released from jail only three months ago, has been allowed to sing in the choir with children, it has now been discovered that Canon Barry Greaves, who will stand trial on child sex charges in August, participates in bible readings.

Their role in the Fortitude Valley church has been approved by the Parish Council, headed by rector Trevor Bulled, who was convicted of indecent behaviour in a public toilet almost 20 years ago. Fr Bulled was stood aside by the Anglican Church in 2001 during an unrelated police investigation after his bluecard was confiscated, but was cleared and reinstated three years later.

When asked to comment this week on the church's decision to allow a convicted pedophile to sing in its choir, Fr Bulled replied: "Most certainly not". He then added that Sharwood was a suitable distance from children. But he refused to respond to ongoing attempts to contact him regarding his own criminal history.

Brisbane Anglican Church Bishop John Parkes defended Holy Trinity this week, claiming the ministry had done an extraordinary job helping the most vulnerable and damaged people in our society. "They're caring for . . . damaged people. I would hate to see the church ever turning its back on anybody, however grievously they've offended," he said. He said there were appropriate safeguards in place to protect the rest of the congregation. Bishop Parkes said he had confidence in Fr Bulled and referred to his past conviction as an "old matter", although conceded it was unfortunate.

But Bravehearts executive director Hetty Johnson said she was "appalled" the three men all had active roles in the church. "It's the 'Unholy Trinity' and a window of what's been going on for generations - they're afforded more time and compassion and forgiveness than the victims," she said. A hearing of the church's professional standards association today will determine whether Sharwood should be defrocked.

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