Subject: Disappointment With The Commissioners Emphases In SMH Article. Dear Commissioner/s I was very disappointed with Dr Tim Southphommasanes piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. In my opinion, the emphases were entirely in the wrong place. There was, towards the end of it, some nod to the need for migrants to accept democratic principles and responsibilities, but the whole tenor of the piece was largely a reprimand to the non-Muslims of Australia. I met Dr Southpommasane and felt he was an outstanding young man but having read this article Im starting to wonder if he truly is an impartial adjudicator in matters of race relations. Rather than chiding non-Muslims for their suspicions, fears (and on occasions, bigotry), a Race Relations Commissioner would be surely better advised to address those Muslims in our community who bear a lethal hatred and contempt towards all of us non-Muslims and tell them this will not be tolerated. Facebook pages and Twitter comments from a number of these supremacists carry levels of hatred and threats of violence towards the Australian community that have never been seen in this country. We are witnessing the shocking horror of this intolerance in Iraq and Syria where as well as massacring co-religionists who arent sufficiently Islamic, the jihadis of the Islamic State have vowed to kill --and are carrying out their massacres with evil joy-- all Christians, Kurds, Yazidis and any other human beings who dont comform to their measure. The Jews, Zoroastrians and Buhddists of these regions were all purged long ago. Currently in Australia, twenty two Muslim men are in gaol for plotting to mass-murder non-Muslims and just recently the world witnessed the knife attack on two policemen in Melbourne by a Muslim teenager, raised in Australia, in a beautiful house, educated in a school with a diverse and contented student body, a young man who drove an expensive car and had been given all the advantages of our liberal democracy. A young man who could have availed himself of all the possibilities open to him in our liberal democracy. But at eighteen he is dead, shot while attempting a double murder of non-Muslim police, because he wanted a supremacist caliphate. All over the world, militant Islam is on the march, in the Middle East, in Gaza, in Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and other African states, in the Philippines, Thailand, the USA, Indonesia, India, Bali, China, Burma, the UK, and now sadly, in Australia. In the interest of social harmony, it would be far better to advise Australian Muslims of the need for self-reflection and self-criticism so that they might be better equipped to examine without denial what it is in their doctrines and behaviour that inspires some of their young folk to violence, and thereby arouses the suspicions, the fears (and the unfortunate bigotry) in non-Muslims. These negative responses dont arise because Australians are nasty people who hate those who are different; the fears of the non-Muslim Australians are grounded in the often-voiced and acted-out hostility of certain sections of the Muslim population. Rather than complaining about being picked on (which makes them sound like Third Graders), Muslims might start to recognise the fact that the threat of murderous violence emanates from their own Islamic communities and not those of the Buddhist, the Greek, the Sikh, the Vietnamese, the Christian nor the Jewish communities. Western civilisation may not be perfect, but it has evolved the rule of law, separation of church and State, gender equality, protection of property, the rights of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of and from religion, and a parliamentary system of government which serves the people. These are the protections Australia offers all its citizens, Muslims and non-Muslim alike -- and anyone or any group attempting to enforce a supremacist, totalitarian theocracy cannot not be tolerated. A diplomatic and skilled Commissioner such as Dr Southpommasane surely would have the grace to gently insist on this. Kind regards, Gabrielle
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 06:44:32 +0000