Refute Deborah Stone

Deborah Stone wrote:

It’s true the Muslim community contains a small section that support fundamentalism, and an even smaller group of potential terrorists. It’s also true that there are bubbles of underworld activity and paedophilia and other terrible crimes within certain groups for complex historical and sociological reasons. But people are innocent until proven guilty.

The second sentence above is not at all relevant to the argument. Not only that, it completely exposes Stone's agenda which is to deny the dangers of Muslim fundamentalism and extremism by subsuming them within other societal problems. As to her last sentence: ask yourself what she'd say if the opposition to the application was founded on concerns of paedophilia. Would she so blithely say that "people are innocent until proven guilty"?

It's not the "small section [within the Muslim community] that support fundamentalism" which concerns us. 

We see this whole situation here re Islamic terrorism not as a few unrepresentative extremists, but as a continuum of extremism which acts as a sort of "conveyor belt" for terror. This means that even those who don't overtly support violence - and the vast majority of Australian Muslims do NOT support violence - nevertheless they may endorse the kind of ideas which are the drivers of terror. Ideas such as "within the West there is a conspiracy to destroy Islam", "the Jews are the puppetmasters of the West", "Australia should be governed by Sharia law", and many other such examples.

If these ideas are propagated even by people who don't endorse violence, they certainly have the power to ignite and propagate terror and violence. We'd hate to think that these "drivers of terrorism" as we have referred to them are being disseminated from the centre in St Kilda.

We'd like the ADC to promote tolerance by facilitating a dialogue between the Muslim group behind the planning application and the Jewish groups opposing it, on the three issues above.If the muslim group is prepared to eschew such views there is no need for debate, and the planning permit would have our full support.

Anon wrote:

We give a free pass far too often to the very very blunt racism that emanates specifically from Muslim quarters. There is no need to play the game of saying it's "Islamism", or "Islamicism", "Islamic fundamentalism" or any oher subdivision of Islam. What you see time and again is that where there are concentrations of Muslims throughout a particular country - and that includes Australia - that you find that in the public discourse a tremendous resort to racist imagery to hate and villify the Jews, and because it is expressed in a political context it is somehow a free pass to the people expressing these things; as if to say "it doesn't really come down to racism and hate language. It's really politics." Well it's not! We do ourselves a disservice by not resorting moreto civil remedies under existing law.