Sorry for quoting you at length Andrew, but your message is important to get out.
But the London bombings, perpetrated by home-grown Muslims, makes our silence on such issues not a sign of civility, but suicide.
So let me admit that the past few days have been terrible for those of us who thought we could count on Muslim leaders for real help against the Muslim extremists who threaten us.
Such setbacks we've had.
Only last week I'd praised Sheik Fehmi as a good man, who'd condemned the London bombings. But a day later he was asked about fellow Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran, a friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who'd claimed September 11 was really the work of a US-based conspiracy.
"He is entitled to his own thinking," Fehmi replied meekly. Then, asked if Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists had committed those attacks, he added: "We cannot say. We do not know these things."
How can Muslim leaders fight terrorism, when the most moderate of them won't condemn even bin Laden, or admit that monster's self-confessed guilt?
Fehmi was not my only disappointment. I checked the IISNA site this week, and among the announcements of classes and prayers found this advice to a reader who'd asked if it was a sin to kill non-Muslims:
"In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says . . . 'Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.' "
If that's advice passed on by a "moderate" Islamic group, what must the radical ones here say?
Well, we know that, too. In a Melbourne bookshop run by Omran a Herald Sun reporter this month found books being sold that command Muslims to ready for war and to hate Jews.
In Sydney last week, the Islamic Bookshop, Australia's largest of the kind, was found (again) selling similar poison near the Lakemba mosque, including a book with tips on how to blow yourself up and kill plenty.
Yes, yes, yes!! Finally, people are waking up! Everything Bolt says here is happening in Britain and all over the world. When will they wake up?
Andrew goes where most fear to tread.
Again and again we're told such things aren't typical. Apologists, too often Muslim converts with little clout among ethnic groups, claim Islam means peace. But again and again we are left feeling like dupes.
The genuinely charming Waleed Aly, of the Islamic Council of Victoria, goes on 3AW to tell us the radical Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly, who has praised suicide bombers as "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors", is not a big worry because he represents no one. Aly says he doesn't even know who made the man a mufti, our highest ranking Islamic cleric.
But the truth, Waleed, is that your own council voted to make Hilaly the Mufti in a decision of the Federation of Islamic Councils of Australia. Why won't you sack him?
Everywhere disappointment. Hilaly's spokesman, Keysar Trad, soothes us with false claims that the Mufti is misquoted and is a proud Australian, but he turns out himself to have been a translator for the Islamic Youth Movement, a pro-bin Laden group whose leader, Bilal Khazal, now faces terrorism-related charges in Sydney.
We also find Trad has written articles with lines such as: "The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country (Australia) and . . . the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us."
Faced with such evidence whichever way I turn, what else can I think about Islam -- or Arab Islam, at least -- but that it is an enemy of our culture, our society? And I ask: How did we come to let in the extremist preachers of such a hostile creed?
Absolutely spot on!
What an unholy recipe: First we build a vulnerable underclass of unassimilated people with a religion of rejection. Then we let loose on them imported radicals preaching a hatred of our society; teachers who instruct them in the shame of our history; and multiculturalists who pay them to keep their distance and retain their much nicer ways.
ALL this always was foolish. Now we see it was dangerous as well, since British-born Muslims bred in a similar stew of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves and Islamist extremism, have gone to war.
If you didn't know Bolt was talking about Australia, you'd think he was describing Britain.
Bolt has some suggestions for Australia but they apply here equally as well.
First, we must be more wary about the dangers of importing cultures that clash with the one that has built this free, rich and democratic society.
Second, we must ban mosques from hiring imams from overseas, or at least those who preach race hate or damn democracy. If Islam does mean peace, let only peace be preached.
And, third, we must show more pride in this country, and switch our multicultural cash from funding division to building unity.
After all, the duty of government is to make one nation out of many tribes -- and not the deadly reverse.
But Islam does not mean peace, it means submission.
I wish Andrew had gone further and called for the reformation of Islam, which is the ultimate answer.
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