- 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.
The Wahhabi variety of Islam is the Exclusive Brethren of the Muslim world and like its Christian equivalent, is a cashed up and aggressive minority.
However I cannot see a Wahhabi centre sitting well with the Muslims around Auburn, who by and large are Turkish, Iraqi or Lebanese and of a far more secular bent.
I can’t help thinking that we have either a considerable Tele beat-up or that someone on the Council may be having his palm greased. The latter is not outside the realm of possibility, since that ghastly complex of units nearby was put up as a result of some very dodgy deals. Basically the community was told if they wanted a Woolies and other retailers then they had to have the units.
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basterd,
Yeah: Wahhabism is the New, Eighteenth Century Kid on the Block, one of umpteen revivalist sects in the history of Islam. In this sense, the comparison with the Exclusive Brethren is apt, but the Wahhabis have killed a shitload more Muslims than the Brethren ever have (or will, presumably) by a factor of many thousands. (Actually, the EB done killed nobody afaik.)
And of course, not every Christian is down with the EB (to put it mildly).
So when Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab began his crazy-talk in Uyayna, he naturally met opposition from other Muslims in the region, who weren’t down with his Back-to-Basics approach. What saved his arse, and what formed the basis of modern, ‘Saudi’ Arabia, was his alliance with Muhammad Ibn Saud (a local despot) by way of one of his (that is, Wahhab’s) daughters what married
WahhabSaud. After committing numerous atrocities against fellow Muslims in the name of their common Go(o)d in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Wahhabis got their arses kicked by the Ottomans, and it wasn’t until they became useful to British Empire a century later that the Wahhabis got their desert groove back. Now Saudi Arabia is a loyal ally of that Great Satan the United States — which is why, after a devilish yoof, an older Saudi billionaire named Osama bin Laden became so angry, upped stumps, and declared a global jihad.As for local politics: dunno. Like any public sphere, money tends to overshadow everything — and everyone — else. ALP hack Laurie Ferguson made some blah blah blah on multiculturalism for the Fabians a coupla years ago. He said:
In conclusion, so do I:
Money talks, bullshit walks.
Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.
Oil’s well that ends well.
The people that oppose it are not being racist.
Before Darwin’s theory became gospel like the, um… Gospels? Tribes ruled (Merriam-Webster: a social group comprising numerous families, clans, or generations together with slaves, dependents, or adopted strangers). It was not by DNA, genetics, or blue eyes and blonde hair. In this pre-Darwin world it was allegiance to the tribe that decided if you were a part of it. Now consider, if you can take in what I just said, how much of the Aussie tribe and its history since, yes yes, British colonialism, do these Muslims support? Are they a part of our tribe or enemies within? No you’re not allowed to phone Gough Whitlam as a friend.
Plenty to take on about my post there. For ready debaters on the other side.
Might makes right? For British colonialism against the failure of the Aboriginal army navy and air force? Must British Isles settlers that support those who oppose our history and military moves also be removed from said tribe? Does hating Vegemite void your citizenship and if so why not replace it with eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon if it tastes better? Should Collingwood supporters be exiled to Tasmania, if so, why not remove Eddie McGuire and put his money into a Swiss bank and claim bank secrecy when his ancestors come to claim and get it as reparations?
To be fair, I think tribes are becoming unnational. They are forming by private ideology that is borderless. I can’t remember right now what my thoughts were, drinking, but the situation that developed tribes of past is becoming borderless for the 21st century.
“The people that oppose it are not being racist.”
Maybe. Dunno. McDougall makes reference to a local petition. He does not republish it, but states that opposition, including that contained in the text of the petition, is based on a desire to prevent the destruction of the local fire station, what is apparently of heritage value (at least as far as some locals are concerned anyway). If so, then no: opposition is not ‘racist’. I suppose the real test would be if the project were halted, and proceeded at another location in Auburn, of no apparent ‘heritage’ value, and opposition then subsided. Of course, one presumes that another option would be for the existant building to be preserved, and the complex built around it. I’ve no idea if this is practicable, but it would, all things considered, be a more expensive option. The other factor to take into account is the extent of opposition to similar projects involving the demolition of local buildings of similar heritage value. That is, if there are or have been projects of a similar nature, and there has not been opposition, why in this instance? This would imply that there may be some particular concern over not just ‘heritage’ values, but possible bigotry (opposition to Islamic institutions). Without knowing the details, it’s impossible to say. What can be said, with some certainty, is that the bottom-feeders are happy to capitalise on local discontent, for their own reasons, about which they are — fairly open. Thus, as far as AF is concerned, the complex is considered as part and parcel of a broader project of deracination. That is, the destruction of ‘White Australia’.
As for the role of tribal formations in human history, that’s a very big subject. I haven’t studied anthropology, for example, in any great detail, but I think Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is useful.
What can be said, with some certainty, is that the bottom-feeders are happy to capitalise on local discontent, for their own reasons, about which they are — fairly open.
No doubt. But this is a nation with certain inclinations and when we read its pioneering history, yeah it’s not what schools want to teach that’s for sure and our culture, once you go overseas, you realise it’s rough and unforgiving on return, something few ethnics here like or respect, and unfairly (to a slight degree) no one warns them before they get here about it.
As for the role of tribal formations in human history, that’s a very big subject.
Before Darwin it was much simpler. Much like global warming science has muddied the waters of our fate by making speculations many people take on faith.
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