UNIVERSITIES justify their billion dollar budgets by claiming they are a public good essential to the health of liberal democracy, but how well have they defended the public against the illiberal ideology of Islamic State? “Fear Allah Alone.” During orientation week this year, the traditional welcome to university was replaced with the Koranic command to monotheism on the University of Melbourne Islamic Society’s Facebook page. The Sydney University Muslim Students’ Association planned to celebrate September 11, the memorial day for the 2996 victims of al-Qa’ida’s attack on the World Trade Centre, with an event featuring the Islamist terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The University of Western Australia’s Muslim Students Association invited the same Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman, Utham Badar, to speak on campus this year. Muslim student associations have emerged as a central pivot for the dissemination of radical Islam across the West. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s advice to federal parliament that countering jihadism demands a battle against Islamist ideology is a message he should take home. The newly released report Learning Jihad documents Islamists’ extensive use of English universities to propagate jihadist ideology. There has not been an in-depth investigation of Islamic extremism in Australian universities. The silence should not be taken as proof that all is quiet on the Western front. Sheik Shady Alsuleiman, a popular Islamic preacher in Sydney, appeared recently at the University of Sydney Law School and the University of Melbourne’s National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies Australia. Alsuleiman is the founder of Sydney Islamic College, which provides diplomas in Shariah (Islamic Studies). He is also a prominent community leader, serving as the Imam of United Muslims of Australia. The Daily Telegraph reports that the UMA has raised over $3 million for a new mosque which will feature educational facilities. In his capacity as secretary to the Australian National Imams Council, the sheik met with Attorney-General George Brandis in July to discuss proposed anti-terror legislation. Alsuleiman is, by formal education and popular demand, one of the most highly regarded scholars and religious leaders of Islam in Australia. In a series of lectures available through Islamic networks online, Sheikh Alsuleiman engages in questionable preaching. During a podcast entitled “A Path to Knowledge”, he praises jihadists, shouting: “If you’re going to struggle or sacrifice or go in the jihad, make sure this is for the sake of Allah! … Don’t you ever think, don’t you ever imagine, that the ones that fight and die in the path of Allah are dead! They are with Allah, alive … They are so happy with what Allah has granted them”. Alsuleiman then describes in detail the Paradise that awaits jihadists. The promise of Paradise is a stock standard lure to jihadists, which entices them to enact suicide and homicide without guilt and often, with enthusiasm for the utopia that awaits. The four brothers who recently left Australia to enlist in Islamic State sent their distraught mother a text message: “We will see you in Paradise.” In another lecture, “Extremism in Jihad”, Alsuleiman proffers a conspiratorial analysis of Islamist terrorist attacks in the West. Apparently, we enjoy being victims of violence: “You know these attacks that take place in the Western world? Walahi, I believe that our enemies love it so much because it gives them an excuse to attack Islam … They want us to do this … They want this to happen. Believe me, they want it to happen …. They are dying for you to do these actions … they can’t wait for the moment that so-called terrorist attacks take place in a country like this.” Motion to dissent.No one loves to be a victim of violence and if Islamic State’s genocidal jihadists have a post-mortem destination, it won’t be Paradise. For decades, Western university leaders have indulged the ideology of Islamism, censoring speech that offends its advocates, turning a blind eye to the barbarity of life in Islamist states, and entertaining the vastly destructive fiction that the West is to blame for its violently inhumane rule of law. In fact, it is the ideology of neo-Marxism, whose latter-day prophets espouse postcolonialism and critical race theory, that has produced fertile ground for Islamism on campus. The academic hard Left and Islamists share a voracious hatred of Western civilisation, her culture, creed and citizens. A report on jihadism commissioned by the Danish Ministry of Justice recognised the similitude: “typical European left-wing terrorists in the 1970-80s were males who had a higher education or were dropouts from university … analysts find that the concept of Umma (caliphate) now plays a similar role to that of the proletariat for leftist groups in the 1960s”. Victim-blaming or blame-shifting is one of the most common tactics used to deflect critical analysis of Islamist ideology on campus. There is no better weapon in the blame-shifting game than the term “Islamophobia”. When the Sydney University board intervened to prevent Hizb ut-Tahrir speaking on campus, the Muslims Students’ Association penned a letter dropping the I-bomb repeatedly. Several Muslim community organisations have claimed anti-terror legislation causes Islamophobia. Humanities academics regularly research the supposed prevalence of Islamophobia as a corollary of 21st century thought crimes such as patriotism. Former president of the Muslim Student Association of Victoria and public commentator Yassir Morsi remarked on Channel 10’s The Project that Islamophobia causes jihadists to join Islamic State. In a Guardian article criticising the cancellation of Utham Badar’s talk at the University of Sydney, Morsi wrote: “Islamophobia is not just bigotry or fear. It’s a frenzy that fills the gaps in our social imagination.” Like most devotees of post-colonialism and critical race theory, Morsi finds no friend in empirical reality. His theory that Islamophobia drives Western Muslims to jihad is undone by the fact that between 90-96 per cent of foreign jihadists in Islamic State are from Muslim countries, where Islamophilia is all the rage. Thomas Hegghammer, director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, has exposed the harm produced by the Islamophobia narrative in the West. He explains that following 9/11, Western intelligence on militant Islam was undermined because “Middle East scholars on both sides of the Atlantic had long shunned the study of Islamist militancy for fear of promoting Islamophobia”. Islamophobia is the first line of defence for jihadist ideology in the West — not by chance, but by design. The term was invented in the 1990s by The International Institute for Islamic Thought, a front group for the terrorist organisation Muslim Brotherhood. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of the Islamic Institute, witnessed the invention of the word Islamophobia and later described it as a “loathsome term … nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics”. I cannot think of two word pairs less well suited to marriage than Western university and political Islam. But for decades, universities have played host to purveyors of Islamism on campus while academics have defended the illiberal ideology that commands the conscience of genocidal groups such as Islamic State. If universities want to be recognised as a public good, it is time they made good on the promise. theaustralian.au/higher-education/universities-prove-fertile-ground-for-islamist-propaganda/story-e6frgcjx-1227134648036
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 03:19:00 +0000
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