Opinion: Where’s Waleed Aly? Does he not want to condemn Sheik Shady Al-Suleiman?
WALEED Aly seems to have gone missing since the homophobic statements of an imam were reported. Doesn’t he want to condemn the comments?
Opinion
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WHERE’S Waleed? Where is Waleed Aly, our most prominent Muslim apologist, now that Islam in Australia is in crisis?
Last week Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull held a dinner at Kirribilli House to mark the end of Ramadan.
He did this to win over Muslim voters and show the rest of us there’s nothing to fear from Islam.
In fact, it is now clear from Turnbull’s dinner there is indeed something to fear.
Look at the iconic photograph from Turnbull’s dinner — of the Prime Minister at the top table, flanked by his most prized guests.
From the left, there was Waleed Aly, the Channel 10 TV host, Gold Logie winner, Monash University terrorism lecturer, Australia Council board member and ABC star.
Next to him was his wife, academic Susan Carland, also an occasional ABC presenter. Then, on Turnbull’s right, sat Yassmin Abdel-Magied, self-declared Islamic youth advocate and yet another ABC favourite.
These were the people Turnbull wanted to showcase as the authentic and reassuring face of Muslim Australia.
Now, also at the dinner, but out of shot, was Sheik Shady Al-Suleiman, national president of the National Council of Imams. This man — not Turnbull’s top table guests — represents Islam as it is actually taught here by many imams.
But as it turned out, the sheik has in his sermons vilified Jews, called on God to help “destroy the enemies of Islam”, declared the punishment for adulterers “is stoning to death”, damned Christmas parties as “worship of Satan” and accused gays of “spreading all these diseases” through “evil actions that bring evil outcomes to our society”.
Those are not the views of some lone preacher, as the embarrassed Turnbull later claimed. These are the views of the head of the council representing Muslim preachers in Australia.
What’s more, other members of the imam’s council have defended them. No senior Muslim leader has criticised the sheik.
But nor has the sheik been criticised by Turnbull’s two celebrity guests — Waleed Aly and Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
Abdel-Magied, for instance, in a long article praising the dinner made only one passing reference to Sheik Shady, saying Turnbull should not be lambasted for what she dismissed as merely the sheik’s “former statements”.
That evasion is typical. When Abdel-Magied was on the ABC to discuss the slaughter by a Muslim radical of gays in Orlando two weeks ago, she again minimised the role of Islam, claiming the killer was just another young man who had been rejected by the West.
But where’s Waleed?
No Muslim in Australia has a bigger media voice than Waleed Aly, and he uses it to promote global warming, refugees and other causes that please the Left.
He also uses it to deflect criticism from Islam after Islamist attacks.
When Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of a Christian girls and turned them into sex slaves, in accordance with quoted scripture, Aly on Channel 10 dismissed these jihadists as just “vigilantes” and never mentioned they were Muslims with an Islamist agenda.
After last year’s Paris massacre, Aly warned against blaming Islam because that’s what the Islamic State wanted — which seems to me to be Aly telling us to moderate our behaviour to avoid provoking Islamic State.
There was something similar after the mass murder in Orlando by an Islamic State supporter, the son of an Afghan immigrant and Taliban supporter.
This time Aly went on the ABC to explain the slaughter, and in a long lecture not only failed to mention Islam, but appeared to blame the West for this alleged fruit of its “freedom”.
Here’s some of Aly’s stunningly verbose sermon: “Our world is now one that is an increasingly polarised and polarising contest between new frontiers of cosmopolitism on the one hand and quite responsive and symbiotically related frontiers of atavism on the other.
“And within that lie all of the political narratives that have sustained us through the 20th century that simply don’t work anymore — narratives like freedom, right, which, you know, expresses its own contradictions in America every time there is a mass shooting….
“This freedom just kind of ends up consuming itself in a very strange, dark sort of a way.”
Yes, the West is killing itself with its freedom. Don’t blame the faith of a terrorist who does the killing.
So here’s the critical issue. We have top Muslim clerics preaching intolerance — hatred of gays, stonings.
And we have our most prominent Muslims refusing to criticise them.
In fact, they excuse Islam even when Islamic terrorists kill in Islam’s name, quoting Islamic texts. They instead blame the West and its “freedoms”.
So what must we conclude about the teachings of Islam?
WE MUST CALL OUT THE REAL SEXISTS
IF Eddie McGuire’s critics really want to savage a sexist, why pick on the Collingwood president? Why aren’t they going for Emirates, his club’s big sponsor?
See, McGuire may be a bully, but he’s in no way a woman hater who dismisses violence against women.
No, the outrage machine — the likes of Rosie Batty, the huff-puffing Age and the mummy bloggers — are making far too much of McGuire’s joke that he’d pay $50,000 at a charity dunk to hold poison-pen football writer Caroline Wilson under water.
It was nasty and cheap, yes, but I completely accept McGuire’s argument that he saw Wilson not as a woman but simply a journalist, a formidable equal in football punditry who gives as good as she gets.
In fact, it strikes me that those trying to turn Wilson into a symbol of female victimhood rather than a gladiator are the real sexists here.
Oops. But there I go, nearly making the same mistake as McGuire’s persecutors of missing the real sexists here.
Emirates is one of Collingwood’s four chief sponsors and has also been the marquee sponsor of the Melbourne Cup.
Emirates is fully owned by the government of Dubai, which has extraordinary laws against not just gays but women who are the victim of rape.
For instance, it jails gays for having sex and even has the death penalty for sodomy on its books. Three years ago, a Belgian man was sentenced to a year in prison for having had a gay relationship with a Filipino.
Even more extraordinary is that Dubai jails women who have been raped, on the grounds that they had sex outside marriage — forbidden under sharia law.
Under that law, Dubai has jailed not just raped maids of no consequence to Western journalists, but also Western women — even an Australian, Alicia Gali.
Gali reported being raped by co-workers at the Meridien Al Aqah resort but was herself jailed for eight months for having sex outside marriage.
Three years ago a Norwegian woman who complained to Dubai police of being raped was sentenced to 16 months in jail.
Isn’t that rank sexism and blaming of rape victims — not to mention homophobia — far more serious than any McGuire “joke”?
So why has the outrage brigade attacked the Collingwood president and not the Collingwood sponsor? Why is Emirates off limits?
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