Sekaleshfar has previously said having the death penalty for homosexuals in Islamic societies “is nothing to be embarrassed about”. Sekaleshfar came as a guest of the Imam Husain Islamic Centre in Sydney’s Earlwood. The departure of Sheik Farrokh Sekaleshfar from Australia on Tuesday night raises questions for us to consider. In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull begrudgingly manages to mention “radical Islamists” and there the real conversation stops before it’s even started. Refreshingly, in July last year British Prime Minister David Cameron said: “It’s dangerous to deny the link with Islam because when you do that you neuter the important voices challenging the religious basis which terrorists use for their own warped purposes.”Īlas, one good speech is not a conversation.
#Sheiks bevy free
If the leader of the free world cannot speak honestly about this, who can? Not once this week has he engaged on the great challenge facing the West: the relationship between Islam and terrorism. “Not once has an adviser of mine said, ‘Man, if we really use that phrase (radical Islam) we’re going to turn this thing around’,” he said as he criticised the term as just a talking point.Įxcept that Obama hasn’t managed to talk about this talking point. He built a straw man that he could easily tear down. This week, Obama confected outrage over this analysis of his presidency. Time and again, he has shied away from even mentioning the root cause of modern terrorism: radical Islamic ideology. US President Barack Obama has come to symbolise the political failure. The explosion of feelings-based claims, legal or otherwise, distracts us from confronting those who incite others to violence and, most critically, it fuels a modern veneration of victimhood that stifles critical debates about the values and future of Western liberal democracies. There is a direct relationship between each of these societal failures. Culturally, we have created a system of competitive victimhood, where people vie for victimhood status, become infantilised by a bevy of laws and concomitant social diktats about what can and cannot be said. Legally, we have laws that fail to prosecute those who incite murderous violence. Politically, we fail to discuss the critical issue of the relationship between Islam and terrorism. Three fundamental failures rooted in politics, law and culture have led the West to a dangerous inflexion point in relation to the way we use words in the terrorism space. And that leads to the challenge raised by Niemoller: does silence equal complicity when it allows evil to continue? We say plenty each time Islamic terrorists strike. Every Western country is on high alert to prevent further murder at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Then, on Sunday at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, they came for the gays, murdering 49 people.
Men advocating the same Islamist terrorist cause came for customers in a Sydney cafe, a Sydney police worker. French policemen were slaughtered on the street. They gunned down iconoclastic French cartoonists in Paris, young Parisians in a nightclub too, others in a restaurant, a cafe. They came for the gays in Syria and Iraq, tossing them off rooftops. Others came to murder Yazidi boys and men they came for the Yazidi girls too, selling and raping them. Then other Islamist terrorists, using different names but infused with a similar religious ideology, came for prepubescent Nigerian schoolgirls. Then they came for the Americans on 9/11, then the British people on buses and walking along London streets. Islamist terrorists, under different names, from al-Qa’ida to Hezbollah to Islamic State and others, came for the Jews first. Martin Niemoller’s lesson about political apathy, first delivered in Europe’s postwar years, has ramifications in the 21st century. That history often repeats itself imperfectly shouldn’t discourage us from learning from the past. Protestant pastor who, for being an outspoken critic of Hitler, spent the final seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out. This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jby Janet Albrechtsenįirst they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out.
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