Miranda Devine: We cannot be paying for junkets for sharia law apologists
MUSLIM activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s taxpayer-funded book tour to the Middle East is proof the government is not serious about cutting wasteful spending, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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MUSLIM activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s taxpayer-funded book tour to repressive regimes in the Middle East is proof the government is not serious about cutting its own wasteful spending.
There’s no credibility in attacking the incomes of superannuants and pensioners without running the red pen through non-essential government expenditure such as politically correct junkets for a sharia apologist. When quizzed in the Senate by One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts last week, George Brandis didn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s funding of such questionable “public diplomacy” excursions.
“I can advise you that Yassmin Abdel-Magied visited a number of countries in the Middle East to promote Australia as an open, tolerant and multicultural society … (Her trip) was funded from the public diplomacy budgets of Middle East posts and cost an estimated $11,485 comprising travel allowance and flights … There was no personal fee or profit ... to her.”
Why on Earth would we want to present an alluring image of Australia to repressive Islamic regimes, where little girls are circumcised, women are stoned for adultery, gay people are executed, and where our idea of “an open, tolerant” society is decried as Western decadence?
“Yassmin’s Middle East speaking tour,” as Magied describes it on her Facebook page, to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Sudan in November coincided with the publication of her book, Yassmin’s Story, billed as the memoir of a Sudanese-Egyptian-Australian Muslim woman who wears the hijab, as The Australian reported last week.
Judging by her appearance on the taxpayer-funded ABC’s Q&A last week, her promotional activities also extend back home, to misrepresenting the oppressive misogyny of sharia law.
She said sharia law is simply “me praying five times day”, that it required Muslims to “follow the law of the land on which you are on”, and “Islam is the most feminist religion”, which prompted guffaws even from Q&A’s partisan audience.
Fellow panellist Senator Jacqui Lambie wasn’t buying this soft-soaping of sharia. “The fact is we have one law in this country and it is the Australian law not sharia law, not in this country,” Lambie said, before telling Magied to “stop playing the victim”.
Predictably, a group of 49 Muslim activists are demanding an apology from the ABC for not giving Magied, who actually is employed by the ABC as a TV host, a “safe” space to promote sharia.
As Prof Clive Kessler points out, Magied is correct that sharia, or Islamic law, does say “one must obey the law of the land”. But only where the “law of the land” is sharia. And as Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is calling for a reform of Islam, points out: “As a moral and legal code, sharia law is among the most dehumanising, demeaning and degrading for women ever devised by man.”
Under sharia, women are not equal to men: husbands are allowed to beat their wives for disobedience; sex with prepubescent girls and having female sex slaves is allowed.
And, as at least three imams on the Australian National Imams Council have declared, under sharia, homosexuals should be put to death. In other words there’s a lot more to sharia than praying five times a day.
Being a tolerant society does not mean we have to defend intolerant attitudes of sharia.
Lambie’s style might be abrasive but it’s not Islamophobic to insist everyone in this country should abide by Australian law. A lot of Muslims in Australia escaped repressive cruel Islamist regimes. It’s not in their interests for sharia apologists to be promoted by the government and taxpayer-funded ABC as the face of moderate Islam.
Miranda Devine is a Sunday Herald Sun columnist
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