Saturday, February 23, 2013

Does Islam pose a threat to the West? - By Chip Le Grand - The Australian

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/does-islam-pose-a-threat-to-the-west/story-e6frg6z6-1226583659219

Does Islam pose a threat to the West?

Geert Wilders
Controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders speaking this week at Craigieburn in Melbourne, where he received standing ovations from the audience. Source: Getty Images
 
IT is hard to imagine a more incongruous place for Geert Wilders to introduce himself to Australia. Beyond the edge of town, at the end of a flat, single-lane road surrounded by damp paddocks, Wilders chose a Dutch-themed wedding and reception venue for his public coming out.

On the walls hung pictures of blonde girls in traditional Dutch headgear. Beyond the dark wooden beams and lead-lined windows of the main reception room, a windmill towered absurdly into an overcast sky. The setting immediately posed a question that has nagged Wilders and his supporters throughout this visit: whether his anti-Islamic message is an ill fit with the reality of modern Australian society.

In the press conference that followed, Wilders spoke about the threat he sees Islam posing to Australia, along with every Western democracy founded on Judaeo-Christian, humanist traditions. Asked why Australia should feel threatened, given fewer than 500,000 Muslims live here among a population of more than 22 million and the nation's 200-year history of absorbing immigrants of all religions and races into a stable liberal democracy, Wilders was emphatic.

"If you think what has happened in Europe will not happen in Australia, then you are totally wrong. I am trying to tell Australian friends what happened to Europe, what the real nature of Islam is - how the Islamisation of society will change society for the worse; and it will cost not only the freedom that we cherish (but) anything that we stand for, our own culture - and how to deal with it."
His best line came in response to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu urging Australians to ignore Wilders. "You can ignore it and sing Kumbaya all day long, but the voters will correct him in due time, I am sure."

Wilders's message here is a marginally embellished version of the stump speech he has delivered in the Dutch parliament, across Europe and in the US, Israel and Canada for the past eight years. 

His evocation of Passchendaele and Gallipoli in calling for Australians to demonstrate the Anzac spirit in standing firm against the threat of Islam was clearly a locally crafted pitch. But, as Dutch journalist Rob van der Wardt tells Inquirer, Wilders said from the outset he did not plan to say anything new in Australia.

Wilders is, in parliamentary terms at least, a politician on the wane. Nearly a million people voted for him in last September's Dutch elections, yet he suffered a 5.4 per cent swing against his Party for Freedom, which lost nine seats. He was able to influence policy in the last parliament as an official supporter of the government. Now he is just another Dutch MP, albeit one whose choice of platforms ensures he remains a formidable political figure.

In Australia, Wilders has been cast as a lone voice determined to tackle a subject shunned by mainstream politicians other than Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who for two years has been encouraging Wilders to visit. With his cartoonish bouffant of peroxide hair and commanding stage presence, Wilders has a charisma lacking in Australian politics. Is there a politician in Canberra who could have drawn more than 500 people to the outer Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn to pay for the privilege of hearing them speak on a bleak Tuesday night?

The crowd was mostly old and white. There were plenty of Dutch expats and a disproportionate number of Jews. The loudest cheer was reserved for his call to stand with Israel, a country "in jihad's frontline". Many had been jostled by protesters on their way in.  

They shook their heads at Wilders's stories of Islamic-controlled no-go zones in European cities, of Muslims armed with Kalashnikovs firing on Belgian police, of lawless Moroccan youths terrorising The Netherlands. "I am not exaggerating," he insisted. "I tell it like it is." He described Islamic immigration as a tool of jihad, Islam as a ruthless political ideology that aimed to impose sharia on everyone. Moderate Muslims, he said, were "captives of Islam". The crowd gave Wilders a standing ovation when he walked to the stage and again when he left.

Yet what, if anything, should Australia take from Wilders's message and his policy prescription to turn back the tide of Islamisation? He calls for three things: an end to immigration from Islamic countries; an end to the construction of new mosques; and deportation of immigrants who commit crimes. The construction of mosques, although an occasionally emotive issue, is not a matter for commonwealth law. Halting immigration from Islamic countries assumes there is a lot of it. Deporting immigrants who commit crimes assumes Muslims are over-represented in crime.

The Australian experience, according to the most recent, comprehensive figures from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, is immigrants from Islamic countries represent only 11 per cent of new settlers. In 2010-11, more than half our 127,458 arrivals came from New Zealand, China, Britain, India and South Africa. The only Islamic countries (defined as those where the official religion is Islam or legislation is based on sharia law) in Australia's top 10 were Iraq, with 2988 arrivals, and Malaysia, with 2737. Altogether 13,910 people arrived from Islamic countries, including 1027 Afghans, 271 Iranians and 190 Somalis who came as refugees. Wilders provides an exemption for refugees from Islamic countries, as many belong to minorities that don't follow Islam.

So now they are here, whom should we send home? Useful crime statistics in this context are difficult to obtain. The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics says police data is too unreliable. In Victoria, accurate reporting of the violence against Indian students in 2009-10 was hampered by police arrest records that made no distinction between victims and perpetrators of "South Asian appearance".

The Australian Bureau of Statistics offers something of a guide in its Prisoners in Australia report, which records jail populations according to country of origin. According to the latest one, published in December, Indonesians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Sudanese and Nigerians are overrepresented in our jails. So are Vietnamese, Samoans, Papua New Guineans, Romanians and Tongans. All of them, including the 791 New Zealanders and 741 Britons jailed at the time of the survey, would be deported under Wilders's policy.

The most overrepresented group in Australian jails is Aborigines - the only lot here when Wilders's early ancestors first sailed down the West Australian coast nearly 400 years ago.

Yet even if the numbers don't add up for him, there is agreement among Muslims and non-Muslims that the issues he raises should be debated in Australia. Conservative economist Des Moore says Wilders has "brought into the public arena an issue that has not hitherto been seriously addressed at a political level. Amazingly, it has taken a leading Dutch politician ... to do this."

Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Mohamad Tabbaa says: "Absolutely, it is a discussion which needs to be had on a proper level." He is concerned, though, that Wilders is too offensive to Muslims to lead the debate, while our federal politicians are not capable of carrying it on. "Unfortunately politics in this country is not at a standard where we can have such discussions," he says.

The Q Society, which worked to bring Wilders here, believes an Australian politician will emerge who is willing to join the Dutchman's crusade. "I think we have started a discussion," says spokesman Andrew Horwood. "It will happen, it is just a matter of when. We are not the only people who are concerned."

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India’s ruling party abetted communal carnage in Gujarat - By Keith Jones - WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/03/ind-m05.html



India’s ruling party abetted communal carnage in Gujarat

By Keith Jone
5 March 2002
There is compelling evidence that leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the dominant force in India’s coalition government, abetted the anti-Muslim riots that convulsed the western state of Gujarat last week.

Not only do local activists from the BJP and the BJP-allied Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or World Hindu Council) figure prominently among those named by police as orchestrators of the communal violence, there have been numerous reports from journalists and Muslim victims that police stood by and watched as mobs mobilized by BJP and VHP activists attacked Muslim neighborhoods and villages. Ostensibly many of these mobs had formed to voice their support for a bandh or general strike called by the VHP and backed by the state BJP to protest an earlier atrocity in the Gujarat district town of Godhra allegedly perpetrated by Muslims.

India’s National Human Rights Commission has demanded that the BJP-controlled Gujarat government explain what it has done to suppress communal violence in the state, adding that reports “suggest inaction by the police force and the highest authorities in the State to deal with this situation.”


The major opposition parties, including the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have issued a statement condemning the Gujarat government for its “abject” failure to protect human life and property. “We are of the view that without the criminal negligence, if not connivance of the State Government, such dastardly events could not have happened.”


Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has all but publicly defended the anti-Muslim violence. First he noted that “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Then, in a second reference to the Godhra attack, Modi commended the state’s population for their “remarkable restraint under grave provocation.” Needless to say, Modi is rejecting all calls for an inquiry into the police and state government’s handling of the crisis.

A report in the London Daily Telegraph suggests that India’s central government, which is controlled by the BJP-dominated National Democratic Alliance, also played an important role in allowing the anti-Muslim violence to continue.

The Telegraph cited an unnamed senior military officer as saying that early last Thursday evening the military had 13 transport aircraft fuelled and ready to fly troops to Ahmedabad from Jodhpur in neighboring Rajasthan, “But for an inexplicable reason, even though it was apparent the state police were proving incapable, 1,000 troops were flown out only the next morning.”

Furthermore, when the troops did arrive, they were not provided with proper transport or intelligence. “When the army was eventually deployed on Friday evening, it was not taken to the trouble spots,” says a second officer, described by theTelegraph as an intelligence official . The army was “merely asked to display itself in areas from which the Muslims had already fled. It was a calculated decision by the state’s Hindu nationalist government.”

The violence in Gujarat is India’s worst communal bloodletting since the wave of rioting set off by the December 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya. Although the BJP leadership, in deference to its coalition partners, has backed off from its previous commitment to build a Hindu temple on the Ayodhya site, the party is inextricably connected to the Ayodhya issue, since it was the BJP’s main rallying cry in the early 1990s.

Gruesome violence
 
On Monday, the Gujarat police reported that the death toll in six days of gruesome violence had reached 572. The communal carnage was precipitated by the February 27 attack at Godhra on several railway cars carrying Hindu fundamentalist activists back to Gujarat from Ayodhya, where they had gone to support the scheme to erect a Hindu temple on the site of the razed mosque. Allegedly carried out by a mob of Muslims, the Godhra attack left 58 dead.

In the ensuing 48 hours, communal violence erupted in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat, Baroda and Gujarat’s other major urban centers and in many Gujarat villages. In harrowing scenes, Muslim men, women and children were bludgeoned to death, set ablaze after being doused with gasoline or burned alive in their homes. Muslim-owned tea-stalls, shops and businesses were systematically looted and torched. Only after the mobilization of army personnel and repeated firings on riotous crowds—the police report 97 deaths due to police firing—did the violence abate.

Significantly, outside of Gujarat, India’s only major state still governed by the BJP, there were only isolated instances of violence. And the VHP’s call for a nationwide general strike Friday, March 1 was completely ignored.

In a nationally-televised address Saturday, India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called the communal violence in Gujarat a “black mark on the nation’s forehead,” adding that it had “lowered India’s prestige in the world.”

However, the leader of the BJP said nothing about the actions of the Gujarat state government, nor the hostility against Muslims which has been whipped up over the Ayodhya issue by Hindu activists aligned with his own party and echoed in his own anti-Pakistan war-mongering.

Vajpayee’s immediate fear is that the events in Gujarat could cause the NDA coalition to collapse. Several coalition partners, including the National Conference of Jammu and Kashmir and the Telugu Desam Party, draw considerable Muslim support. They have justified their alliance with the Hindu chauvinist BJP on the grounds that they can keep its communalism in check. The Gujarat events come in the aftermath of the BJP’s rout in last month’s state elections, a rout that has changed the national political equation and caused all of India’s political players to reassess their position.

While trying to keep the NDA coalition in tact, Vajpayee also faces the problem of conciliating his party’s increasingly restless Hindu nationalist base. Vajpayee cancelled his trip to last weekend’s Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Australia to deal with the crisis in Gujarat. But he has spent much, if not most, of his time, consulting with BJP officials, Hindu religious leaders and leaders of the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on how to persuade the VHP not to proceed with its plan to defy India’s Supreme Court and begin constructing a temple on the Ayodhya site on March 15.

A third concern for the BJP leadership is that the communal violence has shattered the government’s attempts to gain international backing in its conflict with Pakistan by contrasting a purportedly democratic and tolerant India with a military-ruled Pakistan that is allied with Islamic terrorism. The truth is both the Indian and Pakistani elites have tried to defect social discontent by fanning communalism and religious fundamentalism.

In a strong indication that the BJP intends to try to weather the current crisis by continuing, if not intensifying, its belligerence against Pakistan, senior BJP officials have claimed that the attack on the Hindu activists at Godhra was organized by Pakistani intelligence with the aim of provoking anti-Muslim riots and sullying India’s reputation. This claim has a double-purpose: to fan hostility to Pakistan and cover up the BJP’s responsibility for the communal carnage in Gujarat.