slackbastard

Update : Bias denied as Swan Valley mosque rejected, Nicolas Perpitch, The Australian, December 18, 2009.

Two new mosques have been announced for the suburbs of Auburn in Sydney and Newport in Melbourne.

In Auburn, some residents are not. happy. Bruce.

RESIDENTS are fighting a mosque and cultural centre they believe will become a headquarters for the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam in Sydney.

Auburn Council, in Sydney’s west, has outraged residents by approving the three-storey mosque with dome and minarets on a site occupied by a Depression-era Art Deco fire station.

The Australian Islamic Cultural Centre, which has links to Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, plans to demolish existing buildings – including the fire station – and construct a mosque for up to 1000 worshippers, a library and a youth cultural centre with two levels of basement.

A petition demanding the council reverse its decision and preserve the heritage fire station in Harrow Rd is circulating in the suburb.

Activities planned for the complex include cultural and religious lectures, weddings, prayers, cultural, religious and language classes, fundraising, public speaking, Ramadan festivities and counselling, welfare and rehabilitation services…

~ Fears grow over ‘hardline’ mosque in western Sydney, Bruce McDougall, The Daily Telegraph, December 10, 2009.

The construction of the new complex is supposedly being spearheaded by Shafiq Khan by way of the ‘Australian Islamic Cultural Centre’. Shafiq (R. Abdullah) Khan is the Managing Director of the nearby Al Faisal College, an Islamic skool established in 1998. As reported by Marian Wilkinson (Revealed: the Saudis’ paymaster in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 10, 2005), Khan “stands with John HoWARd and Saudi royals, but his million-dollar dealings have angered many Muslims”.

Whatever.

If you like state-sanctioned violence — and let’s face it, only anarcholocos have a principled objection — Saudi Arabia kicks arse, and is a most excellent place for whippings and beheadings (especially of those bloody foreigners what commit all the crimes). 2007 was a record year for executions, but hopes are high for 2010 — and entry to “chop-chop square” is free!

Saudi Arabia uses public beheading as the punishment for murder, rape, drug trafficking, sodomy, armed robbery, apostasy and certain other offences. 2007 was the record year for executions with 153 men and three women executed. Forty five men and two women were beheaded in 2002, a further 52 men and 1 woman in 2003 and 35 men and a woman in 2004. Executions rose in 2005 with 88 men and 2 women being beheaded and then reduced to 35 men and four women in 2006. 102 people were executed in Saudi Arabia during 2008 but it is thought that two of these were by shooting in Asir Province.

The condemned of both sexes are typically given tranquillisers and then taken by police van to a public square or a car park after midday prayers. Their eyes are covered and they are blindfolded. The police clear the square of traffic and a sheet of plastic sheet about 16 feet square is laid out on the ground.

Dressed in either a white robe or their own clothes, barefoot, with shackled feet and hands cuffed behind their back, the prisoner is led by a police officer to the centre of the sheet where they are made to kneel facing Mecca. An Interior Ministry official reads out the prisoner’s name and crime to the crowd.

Saudi Arabia uses a traditional Arab scimitar which is 1100-1200 mm long. The executioner is handed the sword by a policeman and raises the gleaming scimitar, often swinging it two or three times in the air to warm up his arm muscles, before approaching the prisoner from behind and jabbing him in the back with the tip of the blade, causing the person to raise their head. Then with a single swing of the sword the prisoner is decapitated.

Normally it takes just one swing of the sword to sever the head, often sending it flying some two or three feet. Paramedics bring the head to a doctor, who uses a gloved hand to stop the fountain of blood spurting from the neck. The doctor sews the head back on, and the body is wrapped in the blue plastic sheet and taken away in an ambulance. Burial takes place in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.

Beheadings of women did not start until the early 1990s, previously they were shot. Forty three women have been publicly beheaded up to the end of 2007.

Most executions take place in the three major cities of Riyadh, Jeddah and Dahran. Saudi executioners take great pride in their work and the post tends to be handed down from one generation to the next.

How sweet.

As for Newport:

Hobsons Bay will become home to Australia’s largest Islamic community centre by late 2010, with plans in progress to build a $12 million complex including a mosque, education centre and library at Blenheim Rd Newport. Construction is expected to start in February.

~ Cop visits Newport mosque, James Twining and Nisa Terzi, Hobsons Bay Leader, December 15, 2009.

In both cases, fascist bottom-feeders have attached themselves — or attempted to attach themselves — to local campaigns against the mosques. In Sydney, the ‘Australia First Party’ has issued an amusing call-to-arms, while in Melbourne, new kid on the block ‘Nationalist Alternative’ has formed an alliance with a local residents’ association.