early 2015.
COMPLAINT
REGARDING APPROVAL TO DEVELOP LAND 138-142 RYANS ROAD, PARAFIELD GARDENS. CT 5849/738 PARENT TITLE 5798/779
To The City of Salisbury
And to The Ombudsman of South Australia.
Email [email protected]
Address: Level 5 East Wing 50 Grenfell Street Adelaide SA 5000
Post: PO Box 3651 Rundle Mall SA 5000
On the 16th December 2014 the Salisbury Council DAP approved the following development. (the approval)
COMMITTEE
DEVELOPMENT ASSESSMENT PANEL
DATE
16 December 2014
APPLICATION NO
361/1326/2014/3B
APPLICANT
Hazara Foundation [of SA Inc]
PROPOSAL
Place of Worship
LOCATION
138-142 Ryans Road, Green Fields
The complainant in this matter understands that at least 75% to 90% of the 476,000 Australians (2011 Australian Census) who identify as Muslim are in the category “ordinary Muslim” as described in evidence given in November 2014 to the Canadian Senate Committee by Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress who said:
This is a rare opportunity for me because nobody wishes to speak to the ordinary Muslim. Ninety per cent of us don't go to a mosque, senator. Ninety per cent of us have no affiliation with any mosque. We are architects, we are cab drivers, we may even be pole dancers, but none of us dresses up in that medieval costume that is in a racist way, imposed on us as an identity.
Do you think after 25 years I need to dress like a Saudi to be believed by you that I'm an authentic Muslim? This is blackface in my face. I am not a joker. I'm a Muslim Canadian. I came here to escape those tyrants,
How do you encourage others who are truly moderate to speak as well?
(complete evidence transcript attached hereto)
On the 16th December 2014 the Salisbury Council DAP gave “the approval”
It is complained that:
- the approval amounts to the Salisbury Council DAP purporting to approve Development of premises upon which, on the balance of probabilities, unlawful acts will occur.
- therefore it was beyond the power of the Development Assessment Panel (DAP) to approve the application.
- the consequence of the approval being beyond power is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable.
- the application contained a statement or statements and or an omission or omissions that were false or materially misleading.
- as a consequence of the application being false or materially misleading Council failed to advertise and notify residents of facts material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
- In any event Council officers had a duty to the residents of Salisbury (and the council a like duty) to make made further and better inquiries into the intended use of the premises and advertise to the public matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
- had residents been notified of matters relevant to the intended uses of the premises, on the balance of probabilities, relevantly numerous public objections to the probable uses of the premises would have been lodged.
- as residents were not notified of matters relevant to the intended uses of the premises, on the balance of probabilities, the Council failed to follow proper public notification processes for the application. As a result the rights of residents to be informed under the Development Act were breached.
- the consequence of the breach is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable
- had the application not been false or materially misleading Council officers may have made further and better inquiries and reported on matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
- in any case Council officers had a duty to the residents of Salisbury (and the Council a like duty) to make made further and better inquiries into the intended use of the premises and report on matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
- Salisbury Council and Salisbury Council DAP has a duty to its residents to ensure that there will be no reasonable likelihood , on the balance of probabilities, of unlawful acts occurring as a result of its planning decisions.
- and the said duty has been breached by the approval of the said Application.
- the consequence of the breach is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable
- Salisbury Council and the Salisbury Council DAP should now take all reasonable steps to reverse the approval, make proper inquiries as to the use of the premises, notify the public properly and re-commence the DAP process.
- the approval amounts to the Salisbury Council DAP purporting to approve Development of premises upon which, on the balance of probabilities, unlawful acts will occur.
BACKGROUND TO AUSTRALIAN CIVIL AND CRIMINAL LAW
Marriage in Australia is controlled by Australian Law The marriageable age was set in the 1961 act at 16 for girls and 18 for boys, raised to 18 for both genders in 1991 by the Sex Discrimination Act 1991. In ‘exceptional circumstances’ the marriage of persons under 18 but over 16 may be authorised by the court
Assault within marriage is unlawful. In South Australia the fact that assault occurs in a marriage makes such an assault a designated “serious offence”
It is a serious criminal offence in Australia to engage in sexual intercourse with another person without their consent. This is also true when the offender is married to the victim. Marriage is not a defence to rape in Australia.
The age of consent to sexual intercourse is set by the Criminal Law at 17 years. Under that age sexual intercourse is unlawful – a criminal offence.
It is an assault in Australia to threaten to strike (battery) a person if that person believes it is likely to happen and there is a real capacity for it to happen.
It is an offence in Australia to aid, abet, counsel, procure, or conceal after the event any of these offences. That is to say actively encouraging or covering up is an offence in itself.
Murder is an offence in Australia
Slavery is an offence is Australia
Assault amounting actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm are offences in Australia.
The Racial discrimination Act prohibits statements that are reasonably likely to make people of the object race offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the conduct; and the sexual discrimination act protects sexual discrimination against gays.
The Commonwealth Crimes Act sets out offences:
Incitement (1) A person who urges the commission of an offence is guilty of the offence of incitement. (3) A person may be found guilty even if committing the offence incited is impossible.
11.5 Conspiracy (1) A person who conspires with another person to commit an offence punishable by imprisonment for more than 12 months, or by a fine of 200 penalty units or more, is guilty of the offence of conspiracy to commit that offence and is punishable as if the offence to which the conspiracy relates had been committed.
A person commits an offence if the person: (a) receives or assists another person who, to his or her knowledge, has committed an offence against this Subdivision (other than this subsection) with the intention of allowing him or her to escape punishment or apprehension; or (b) knowing that another person intends to commit an offence against this Subdivision (other than this subsection), does not inform a constable of it within a reasonable time or use other reasonable endeavours to prevent the commission of the offence.
80.1AA Treason--materially assisting enemies etc. Assisting enemies at war with the Commonwealth Assisting countries etc. engaged in armed hostilities against the ADF (c) the person intends that the conduct will materially assist the country or organisation to engage in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; and (d) the conduct assists the country or organisation to engage in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force;
Urging violence and advocating terrorism 80.2 Urging violence against the Constitution etc. Urging the overthrow of the Constitution or Government by force or violence Urging interference in Parliamentary elections or constitutional referenda by force or violence
80.2A Urging violence against groups the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion; and the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good the first person intentionally urges another person, or a group, to use force or violence against a group (the targeted group ); and 80.2B Urging violence against members of groups
80.2C Advocating terrorism "advocates " : a person advocates the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence if the person counsels, promotes, encourages or urges the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence.
The law of Australia recognises the free right to religious worship. And the Planning law of Australia distinguishes between acts of “worship” and other acts that religious groups may engage in. Approval for one activity is not approval for another.
In McKenzie v Powley and others [1916] SALR 1 at 25
In considering the defendants' rights it is essential to ask in
the first place whether the members of the Salvation .Army have a right to assemble together for religious worship ~ The answer to this question is "Yes."
And the court said ...
singing, unaccompanied by instrumental music,... a usual
and reasonable adjunct to congregational religious
worship, but that it stands upon the firmer ground of being an actually necessary part of such worship
But it did not hold a 9 piece brass band as protected as part of religious worship:
I am not prepared to hold, as I have held with
regard to singing, that instrumental music is an
actually necessary ingredient of congregational religious
worship,
More recently it was held that religious services could not be held on premises that were approved for a community centre, albeit, a religious teaching and gathering centre RAMOTH GILEAD MINISTRIES INC v ALEXANDRINA COUNCIL Judgment of Her Honour Judge Cole, Commissioner Green and Commissioner Lewis 5 April 2005
And the Court cited with approval Justice Wells who said:
In considering the nature of the land use proposed, we bear in mind the words of Wells J in Prestige Car Sales Pty Ltd v Corporation of the Town of Walkerville and Shuttleworth (1979) 20 SASR 514 at 522:-
“It must be borne in mind that although the purpose of the use under examination is always an important, and in some cases a decisive, consideration, the purpose of any given use is determined not only by the genus of use to which it may theoretically be assigned, but also by the balance and structure, viewed reasonably and not unreasonably, of the organised activities that together make up the use of the particular building and land in all the circumstances of the case.”
On page 7 at paragraph 24 the Court clearly stated that Community Centre does not include a place of worship.
We find that aspects of the development applied for come within the definition of a community centre. Social, recreational and educational facilities are to be provided for the local community. ... However, on the evidence before us, the activities proposed go well beyond what would ordinarily be accommodated in a “community centre”. A core activity for the proposed building would be the twice weekly meetings of up to 100 people, principally, we find, for the purpose of Christian worship.
We do not consider that the term “community centre”, as it is used in Principle 5 of the Rural Fringe Zone was meant to include a place of worship.
BACKGROUND TO THE APPLICANT GROUP “HAZARA” (Shia Muslims)
...famous Shia Cleric Mullah Baqir Majilisi in his book 'Haqqul Yaqeen', 2 - 519. He wrote "When Imam Mahdi appears, he will deal with the Sunnis and their Ulema first before dealing with the Kuffar and he will kill and annihilate all of them."
http://www.cifiaonline.com/shiagroupsintheworld.htm
Today Hazaras are easily recognised, because they are distinctly Asian in appearance. They are thought to be the descendants of Genghis Khan. They have been targeted by the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan for a long time, certainly since the time of King Abdurrahman in 1854, but they are especially persecuted under the Taliban.
The Taliban, who are all Pashtun, are Sunni Muslim. The Hazaras converted to Islam a long time ago, but they embraced Shi’a Islam.
By Julian Burnside AO QC. December 2012 and January 2013 focus on Asylum Seekers. (complete transcript attached hereto)
(3) The problem with Shia groups is that they claim to follow Hadhrat Ali (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), but at the same time they denounce and accuse the other three Khulfa-e-Rashideen as wrong doers (Asthaghfiruallah).
They also claim that after Prophet Mohammad (صلى الله عليه و آله وسلم) left this world; only 4 Sahabah were steadfast in Islam. (i) Hadhrat Salman Farsi (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), (ii) Hadhrat Abu Dhar Ghaffari (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), (iii) Hadhrat Miqdad bin Aswad (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), and (iv) Hadhrat Amaar bin Yaasir (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ). This is a disrespectful belief as it questions the integrity and Islamic character of other Sahabah and Khulfa-e-Rashideen (رضئ اللھ تعالی عنہم اجمعین ).
The above shia belief is similar in nature with Salafi beliefs who claim that after the first generation of Sahabah, the entire Muslim community till the birth of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab were apostates. The majority of Salafi groups believe that whoever follows Imams of Fiqh is Mushrik. In the Book of Judgments from Al-Insaaf, Ibn Taymiyyah said - "He who makes it compulsory to follow an Imam, then his repentance is sought and if he does not repent then he is killed." In other words Ibn Taymiyyah has given the fatwa that all Muslims who follow Imams of Fiqh should be asked to repent and if they don't, then they should be killed.
http://www.cifiaonline.com/shiagroupsintheworld.htm
PRESS REPORTS REGARDING HAZARA In AUSTRALIA
Sydney August 2014
...their young men are being lost to extremist ideology and crime.
...Some of the gang are believed to be from the persecuted Afghan Hazara group, whose Shia Islam is targeted in Iraq and Syria by Islamic State militants.
...More than 10,000 Hazaras live in Western Sydney.
...The stabbed teen claims to be a “Hezbollah soldier” and proudly posts quotes from extreme preachers on his Facebook page.
(complete transcript attached hereto)
‘It is the young flesh they want’
- by: Anne Barrowclough
- From: The Australian
...250 cases of under-age marriage over the past 24 months,
...at least 60 child wives living in south-western Sydney alone.
...150 women a week, most of whom come from communities where arranged marriages are practiced. “But what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she says.
...Pakistani Hazara woman who works with Afghan Hazaras in Melbourne, told me: “I would say nearly every Afghan Hazara family in Melbourne is involved in this practice.”
...They are kept prisoners, locked in their husbands’ homes and only allowed out if their mothers-in-law go with them, so they can never seek help.” …
...forced marriage is a breach of human rights and a slavery-like practice.”
(complete transcript attached hereto)
What Goes on in a Mosque – Evidence from America The results of the survey were unambiguous: most mosques offered pro-violence materials, but the mosques most likely to do so were the ones encouraging sharia-adherent behaviour.
51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim;
30 percent had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence like theTafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna;
19 percent had no violent texts at all. [but very few attend such mosques]
And:
The study found a statistically significant association between the severity of violence-positive texts on mosque premises and Shari’a-adherent behaviors.
In addition mosques containing severe material were likely actively to encourage terrorism and the funding of it:
Nearly three quarters of mosque-goers attend ‘severe’ (offering modern materials with a violent political axe to grind) mosques; just over one fifth go to moderate (predominantly worship and ritual with some positive attitudes towards violence) mosques; and 3.5%, or one in thirty, go to mosques with no violent materials in them.
(complete transcript attached hereto)
ARGUMENT TO SUPPORT EACH COMPLAINT:
- The approval amounts to the Salisbury Council DAP purporting to approve Development of premises upon which, on the balance of probabilities, unlawful acts will occur.
Some fundamental aspects of sharia are unlawful according to Australian Civil and Criminal Law. Sexual discrimination against women, Under age engagement and marriage, Lessening of the value of women’s opinion to half that of a mans, the killing of homosexuals, jews, non-muslims, corporal and physical injury, cutting off body parts, female child mutilations.
It is a crime in Australia to do acts which may be considered reasonably to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate by the conduct;
So too is the encouragement and encitement to commit these acts unlawful in Australia.
There are 10,000 Hazara in Western Sydney. Reports show that substantial elements of that community practise Sharia to the extent that it breaches Australian Law.
The approval is for an application by the Hazara Foundation Inc.
In the absence of any inquiry which reveals the contrary it is reasonable to conclude on the balance of probabilities that the approved premises will be used either to promote or conduct breaches of Australian Criminal and Civil Laws.
The Planning Act is predicated on approvals being given to planning for lawful purposes.
- (i) therefore it was beyond the power of the Development Assessment Panel (DAP) to approve the application.
Approval cannot lawfully be given for un-lawful activities to occur.
(a)(ii)the consequence of the approval being beyond power is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable. This is a consequential application of the law.
(b)the application contained a statement or statements and an omission or omissions that were false or materially misleading.
The application is mis-described. On the balance of probabilities, on the record of what mosques are used for the proper application was for a community centre as well as for a place of worship.
It is clearly the case that if the term “community centre”, as it is used in Principle 5 of the Rural Fringe Zone was not meant to include a place of worship. Then Place of Worship cannot include anything more and approval for such use confines the premises to such use.
Such mis-description and lack of detail is consistent with the mandatory Shia practise of dissimulation known as Taqiyya:
Taqiyya is a mandatory Shia practice of concealing the truth for the purposes of misleading unsuspecting people...
It appears that Shia Muslims believe it is perfectly acceptable to lie in the pursuit of the advancement of Shia, and they have a name for it.
The Misdescription, excluding the use of the premises for purposes other than worship can be seen as deliberate. The applicant must take the responsibility for and the consequences of the misdescription.
The application is invalid because it fails to reveal all of the purposes for which the premises will be used. It fails to address or seek planning approval for the activities which occur in, according to survey’s attached, almost all mosques.
The Surveys show that of those Muslims who actually attend mosques 29 attendees out of every 30 attend Mosques which preach or display or provide written material or literature or, audio, or video materials that encourages or promotes or praises:
violent acts of jihad.
engagement in terrorist activity.
the provision of financial support to jihadists
the establishment of a caliphate in [Australia]
acts of terror against the West
symbols or role models of violent jihad;
the use of force, terror, war, or violence to implement the Sharia;
the inferiority of non-Muslim life
hatred or intolerance toward non-Muslims or notional Muslims
inflammatory materials with anti-[Australian] views
The issues of power, economic and temporal power is built in to the idea of Mosques. Two Thirds of the Koran talks about dominating un-believers.
Mohammed's first mosque was his centre of power to create totalitarianism. New Mosques mimic it in style and replicate its political and military purposes. Declaring Jihad, sending out armies. Imposing Sharia, declaring the inferiority of the unbeliever, pronouncing death sentences and violent acts of jihad. engagement in terrorist activity. the provision of financial support to jihadists, the establishment of a caliphate, acts of terror against the West. symbols or role models of violent jihad; the use of force, terror, war, or violence to implement the Sharia; the inferiority of non-Muslim life, hatred or intolerance toward non-Muslims or notional Muslims.
The application is mis-described. On the balance of probabilities, on the record of what mosques are used for. The application did not include the purposes for which the premises will be used and is therefore improper and improperly approved, and invalid, or void or voidable and should be re-commenced on the basis of a complete description of the use to which the Mosque will be put.
(c)as a consequence of the application being false or materially misleading Council failed to advertise and notify residents of facts material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
Had the complete and proper description of the intended use of premises, for more than, mere worship as set out above, and had the premises been advertised by the commonly known word “Mosque” then Council would have advertised accordingly. Because Council did not advertise that the application was for a “Mosque” the proper planning process has been avoided. Residents who may have wished to object to a “Mosque” were denied the opportunity of it having brought to their attention as is the intention of the Planning Laws and procedures of the Development Act and Regulations.
(d)In any event Council officers had a duty to the residents of Salisbury (and the council a like duty) to make made further and better inquiries into the intended use of the premises and advertise to the public matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
Even though the application did not contain a complete and proper description of the intended use of premises for more than mere worship as set out above,
Council officers, the DAP and Council had a duty under the provisions of the Development and Planning Laws to properly inform the residents of the community. They had a duty to look at the body of the application which clearly appears in the style of a Mosque and notwithstanding that the application was for “a place of worship” they had a duty to inform in the advertising that the application was in fact for a Mosque
Had the premises been advertised by the commonly known word “Mosque” then the community would have been nominally informed. Because Council did not advertise that the application was for a “Mosque” the proper planning process has been avoided. Residents who may have wished to object to a “Mosque” were denied the opportunity of it having brought to their attention as is the intention of the Planning Laws and procedures of the Development Act and Regulations.
(e)had residents been notified of matters relevant to the intended uses of the premises, on the balance of probabilities, relevantly numerous public objections to the probable uses of the premises would have been lodged.
It is reported that 40 objections were received within the statutory time period. The complainant understands that hundreds of local Salisbury residents are now signing a petition in objection to the approval. It is reasonable to conclude on the balance of probabilities that many many more people would have objected within the statutory time limit had they been informed that the application was for a Mosque rather than merely for “religious worship”
(f)as residents were not notified of matters relevant to the intended uses of the premises, on the balance of probabilities, the Council failed to follow proper public notification processes for the application. As a result the rights of residents to be informed under the Development Act were breached.
- the consequence of the breach is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable
By omission and mis-description the intent of the Legislative scheme has been avoided. The consequence of the avoidance of the intention of the legislation is that it is proper to regard the planning consent as invalid, void or voidable and to remedy that it is necessary to repeat the planning process from the public notification stage.
(g)had the application not been false or materially misleading Council officers may have made further and better inquiries and reported on matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
Even though it is asserted in this complaint that Council Officers, DAP and Council officers had a duty to consider the body of the application and take action as set out in (d) above. It is also asserted that had the application title included the word “Mosque” that may well have alerted them to their further duty to properly inform the community and residents of what was actually proposed.
(h)in any case Council officers had a duty to the residents of Salisbury (and the council a like duty) to make made further and better inquiries into the intended use of the premises and report on matters material and relevant to the intended uses of the premises.
There is sufficient publicly available information regarding the risk of the use of Mosques in Australia for purposes unlawful in Australian Civil and Criminal law for such a risk to be considered a reasonable possibility.
Notwithstanding that Council Officers may have determined to take no action with respect to the results of their inquiries or that such inquiries may have been met with dissimulation there was a duty to inquire as to whether this application was to be used for such purposes. That duty was breached.
It was an easy duty to perform. Checks on the background of the applicant Hazara Foundation Inc. Checks with OCBA, the State record holder for the names of the office bearers of the Applicant. Checks on the articles or rules of association of the Applicant. Checks on the nature of communities the applicant is associated with or interacts with. Checks on mainstream media and press reports are easily made.
(h)Salisbury Council and Salisbury Council DAP has a duty to its residents to ensure that there will be no reasonable likelihood , on the balance of probabilities, of unlawful acts occurring as a result of its planning decisions.
- and the said duty has been breached by the approval of the said Application.
- the consequence of the breach is that the approval is invalid and or void or voidable
The application was for a Mosque, not just a place of worship.
The activities which usually occur in a mosque go beyond activities that are contained within an approval for a place of worship.
Such Mosque activities are on record all over the world and in Australia as being in breach of Australian National, and State of South Australia Civil and Criminal Law.
Simple searches show that significant elements of the Hazara Community of 10,000 in Western Sydney engage in such un-lawful activities. Street Youth Gangs which refer to themselves as “soldiers” related to Islam and whose members fight and injure each other on the streets. Hundreds of Hazara women who are treated like slaves, abused and violated and married unlawfully in the community Mosques which approve of such practises.
On the material provided herein, and such material being reasonably available to reasonable inquiry it can be concluded on the balance of probabilities that some activity, actual acts, or promotion or incitement thereof, which is contrary to Australian Civil and Criminal law will more likely than not occur within the premises that have purportedly been approved for development.
(i)Salisbury Council and the Salisbury Council DAP should now take all reasonable steps to reverse the approval, make proper inquiries as to the use of the premises, notify the public properly and re-commence the DAP process.
The complaint concludes by confirming that he recognises that at least 75% to 90% of the 476,000 Australians (2011 Australian Census) who identify as Muslim are in the category “ordinary Muslim”
The complainant is concerned that the ordinary peaceful Muslims in Australia are often being told that they are the ones who should speak out against the radicals. This may be an unreasonable expectation. They may reasonably fear reprisals from the Radicals, such as ostracisation and exclusion from marriage, wedding and funeral ceremonies in the Mosques.
The complainant re-asserts his support for ordinary Australian Citizens who are Muslim and who want to and intend to abide by Australian Civil and Criminal Law. He respects their rights to seek change according to and within the Australian Democratic process.
This complaint is intended in part to assist them and takes in to account the question asked in November 2014 by the Canadian Senate Committee of Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadians:
How do you encourage other [Muslims] who are truly moderate to speak as well?
This complaint document has not been prepared for public purposes but for the lodgement of a complaint to appropriate authorities. It is not intended to target any group or person on the basis of race or religion and is not intended to defame but to bring to the attention of the planning authority and to the State Ombudsmen the nature and background of the complaint with respect to the particular Planning and Development Approval only and to seek the remedies set out.
Complainant: ...........................................................
ATTACHMENTS
The Commonwealth Crimes Act.
Chapter 5 -- The security of the Commonwealth
Part 5.1 -- Treason, urging violence and advocating terrorism
Division 80 -- Treason, urging violence and advocating terrorism
Subdivision A--Preliminary
80.1A Definition of organisation
In this Division:
"organisation " means:
(a) a body corporate; or
(b) an unincorporated body;
whether or not the body is based outside Australia, consists of persons who are not Australian citizens, or is part of a larger organisation.
Subdivision B--Treason
80.1 Treason
(1) A person commits an offence if the person:
(a) causes the death of the Sovereign, the heir apparent of the Sovereign, the consort of the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or
(b) causes harm to the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister resulting in the death of the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or
(c) causes harm to the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister, or imprisons or restrains the Sovereign, the Governor-General or the Prime Minister; or
(d) levies war, or does any act preparatory to levying war, against the Commonwealth; or
(g) instigates a person who is not an Australian citizen to make an armed invasion of the Commonwealth or a Territory of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for life.
(2) A person commits an offence if the person:
(a) receives or assists another person who, to his or her knowledge, has committed an offence against this Subdivision (other than this subsection) with the intention of allowing him or her to escape punishment or apprehension; or
(b) knowing that another person intends to commit an offence against this Subdivision (other than this subsection), does not inform a constable of it within a reasonable time or use other reasonable endeavours to prevent the commission of the offence.
Penalty: Imprisonment for life.
(8) In this section:
"constable " means a member or special member of the Australian Federal Police or a member of the police force or police service of a State or Territory.
80.1AA Treason--materially assisting enemies etc.
Assisting enemies at war with the Commonwealth
(1) A person commits an offence if:
(a) the Commonwealth is at war with an enemy (whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared); and
(b) the enemy is specified, by Proclamation made for the purpose of this paragraph, to be an enemy at war with the Commonwealth; and
(c) the person engages in conduct; and
(d) the person intends that the conduct will materially assist the enemy to engage in war with the Commonwealth; and
(e) the conduct assists the enemy to engage in war with the Commonwealth; and
(f) when the person engages in the conduct, the person:
(i) is an Australian citizen; or
(ii) is a resident of Australia; or
(iii) has voluntarily put himself or herself under the protection of the Commonwealth; or
(iv) is a body corporate incorporated by or under a law of the Commonwealth or of a State or Territory.
Penalty: Imprisonment for life.
Note: If a body corporate is convicted of an offence against subsection (1), subsection 4B(3) of the Crimes Act 1914 allows a court to impose a fine of up to 10,000 penalty units.
(2) Despite subsection 12(2) of the Legislative Instruments Act 2003 , a Proclamation made for the purpose of paragraph (1)(b) of this section may be expressed to take effect from a day:
(a) before the day on which the Proclamation is registered under the Legislative Instruments Act 2003 ; but
(b) not before the day on which the Proclamation is made.
(3) The fault element for paragraph (1)(f) is intention.
Note: For intention, see subsection 5.2(2).
Assisting countries etc. engaged in armed hostilities against the ADF
(4) A person commits an offence if:
(a) a country or organisation is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; and
(b) the person engages in conduct; and
(c) the person intends that the conduct will materially assist the country or organisation to engage in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; and
(d) the conduct assists the country or organisation to engage in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; and
(e) when the person engages in the conduct, the person:
(i) is an Australian citizen; or
(ii) is a resident of Australia; or
(iii) has voluntarily put himself or herself under the protection of the Commonwealth; or
(iv) is a body corporate incorporated by or under a law of the Commonwealth or of a State or Territory.
Penalty: Imprisonment for life.
Note: If a body corporate is convicted of an offence against subsection (4), subsection 4B(3) of the Crimes Act 1914 allows a court to impose a fine of up to 10,000 penalty units.
(5) The fault element for paragraph (4)(e) is intention.
Note: For intention, see subsection 5.2(2).
Humanitarian aid
(6) Subsections (1) and (4) do not apply to engagement in conduct solely by way of, or for the purposes of, the provision of aid of a humanitarian nature.
Note 1: A defendant bears an evidential burden in relation to the matter in subsection (6). See subsection 13.3(3).
Note 2: There is a defence in section 80.3 for acts done in good faith.
Subdivision C--Urging violence and advocating terrorism
80.2 Urging violence against the Constitution etc.
Urging the overthrow of the Constitution or Government by force or violence
(1) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person to overthrow by force or violence:
(i) the Constitution; or
(ii) the Government of the Commonwealth, of a State or of a Territory; or
(iii) the lawful authority of the Government of the Commonwealth; and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(2) Recklessness applies to the element of the offence under subsection (1) that it is:
(a) the Constitution; or
(b) the Government of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory; or
(c) the lawful authority of the Government of the Commonwealth;
that the first person urges the other person to overthrow.
Urging interference in Parliamentary elections or constitutional referenda by force or violence
(3) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person to interfere, by force or violence, with lawful processes for:
(i) an election of a member or members of a House of the Parliament; or
(ii) a referendum; and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(4) Recklessness applies to the element of the offence under subsection (3) that it is lawful processes for an election of a member or members of a House of the Parliament, or for a referendum, that the first person urges the other person to interfere with.
Note: There is a defence in section 80.3 for acts done in good faith.
80.2A Urging violence against groups
Offences
(1) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person, or a group, to use force or violence against a group (the targeted group ); and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur; and
(c) the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion; and
(d) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(2) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person, or a group, to use force or violence against a group (the targeted group ); and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur; and
(c) the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(3) The fault element for paragraphs (1)(c) and (2)(c) is recklessness.
Note: For recklessness, see section 5.4.
Alternative verdict
(4) Subsection (5) applies if, in a prosecution for an offence (the prosecuted offence ) against subsection (1), the trier of fact:
(a) is not satisfied that the defendant is guilty of the offence; but
(b) is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of an offence (the alternative offence ) against subsection (2).
(5) The trier of fact may find the defendant not guilty of the prosecuted offence but guilty of the alternative offence, so long as the defendant has been accorded procedural fairness in relation to that finding of guilt.
Note: There is a defence in section 80.3 for acts done in good faith.
80.2B Urging violence against members of groups
Offences
(1) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person, or a group, to use force or violence against a person (the targeted person ); and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur; and
(c) the first person does so because of his or her belief that the targeted person is a member of a group (the targeted group ); and
(d) the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion; and
(e) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(2) A person (the first person ) commits an offence if:
(a) the first person intentionally urges another person, or a group, to use force or violence against a person (the targeted person ); and
(b) the first person does so intending that force or violence will occur; and
(c) the first person does so because of his or her belief that the targeted person is a member of a group (the targeted group ); and
(d) the targeted group is distinguished by race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years.
Note: For intention, see section 5.2.
(3) For the purposes of paragraphs (1)(c) and (2)(c), it is immaterial whether the targeted person actually is a member of the targeted group.
(4) The fault element for paragraphs (1)(d) and (2)(d) is recklessness.
Note: For recklessness, see section 5.4.
Alternative verdict
(5) Subsection (6) applies if, in a prosecution for an offence (the prosecuted offence ) against subsection (1), the trier of fact:
(a) is not satisfied that the defendant is guilty of the offence; but
(b) is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of an offence (the alternative offence ) against subsection (2).
(6) The trier of fact may find the defendant not guilty of the prosecuted offence but guilty of the alternative offence, so long as the defendant has been accorded procedural fairness in relation to that finding of guilt.
Note: There is a defence in section 80.3 for acts done in good faith.
80.2C Advocating terrorism
(1) A person commits an offence if:
(a) the person advocates:
(i) the doing of a terrorist act; or
(ii) the commission of a terrorism offence referred to in subsection (2); and
(b) the person engages in that conduct reckless as to whether another person will:
(i) engage in a terrorist act; or
(ii) commit a terrorism offence referred to in subsection (2).
Note: There is a defence in section 80.3 for acts done in good faith.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years.
(2) A terrorism offence is referred to in this subsection if:
(a) the offence is punishable on conviction by imprisonment for 5 years or more; and
(b) the offence is not:
(i) an offence against section 11.1 (attempt), 11.4 (incitement) or 11.5 (conspiracy) to the extent that it relates to a terrorism offence; or
(ii) a terrorism offence that a person is taken to have committed because of section 11.2 (complicity and common purpose), 11.2A (joint commission) or 11.3 (commission by proxy).
Definitions
(3) In this section:
"advocates " : a person advocates the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence if the person counsels, promotes, encourages or urges the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence.
"terrorism offence " has the same meaning as in subsection 3(1) of the Crimes Act 1914 .
"terrorist act " has the same meaning as in section 100.1.
(4) A reference in this section to advocating the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence includes a reference to:
(a) advocating the doing of a terrorist act or the commission of a terrorism offence, even if a terrorist act or terrorism offence does not occur; and
(b) advocating the doing of a specific terrorist act or the commission of a specific terrorism offence; and
(c) advocating the doing of more than one terrorist act or the commission of more than one terrorism offence.
In November 2014 Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress made submissions to the Canadian Senate Committee
Western civilization today faces a transcontinental challenge to its very existence.
It is 14 years since Islamism launched its war on the West by the forces of international jihad.
The problem of radicalization in the Muslim community depends on which Muslim community you're talking about in some the problem of radicalization is very widespread, deeply entrenched, embedded and framed in terms of an Islam-versus-the-infidel scenario leading up to an end-of-time Armageddon.
The support structure that exists for Islam-based terrorism or radicalization, or Islamism, which is a starting point of someone being a jihadist, is multi-faceted.
At its base are the Islamist organizations and mosque-based groups who lay the seeds of radicalization not necessarily in the recruitment of terrorists but in the politicization of the sermons that whip up a sense of victimhood of Muslims while cultivating a hatred of non-Muslims and other groups such as gays and women who demand equality and who refuse to wear head wraps or be encased in burkas.
Most mosques around the world start their Friday congregation with a prayer that asks Allah to give victory to the Muslims over the Kuffar, or the infidels — that is, people like you. The glorification and radicalization is endemic and ubiquitous in the sermons and teachings to very young adults, as can be verified from incidents in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Every Islamic hero in the last 1,400 years has been a jihadist who is celebrated for his — there are no her — exploits in defeating Christians, Jews, Hindus or pagans.
There's no such thing as de-radicalization.
What Goes on in a Mosque – Evidence from America By Lawman • on June 7, 2011
Do you want a mosque near you? You may say you don’t mind, so long as it isn’t run by the small minority of extremists.
If so, think again.
Please subscribe to Middle East Quarterly for a copy of the report “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques“, by Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi. Its surgical logic is matched by its unflinching conclusions.
The study is relevant to British people because Islamic integration is assumed to work better in America than in Europe.
Messrs Kedar and Yerushalmi ask two basic questions: first, whether there is a link between sharia-adherent behaviour in American mosques and the making available of books and videos sanctioning violence; and second, whether there is a link between violent materials in a mosque and that mosque’s leaders advocating violent or supremacist behaviour?
The researchers appear to have been sampled cautiously and impartially. Data came from a random, representative sample of 100 US mosques in 14 states, plus the District of Columbia:
A surveyor visited a subject mosque in order: (a) to observe and record 12 Sharia-adherent behaviors of the worshipers and the imam (or lay leader); (b) to observe whether the mosque contained the selected materials rated as moderate and severe; (c) to observe whether the mosque contained materials promoting, praising, or supporting violence or violent jihad; and (d) to observe whether the mosque contained materials indicating the mosque had invited guestspeakers known to have promoted violent jihad.
The Sharia-adherent behaviour was selected for its significance according to “Reliance of the Traveller”, “Fiqh as-Sunna”, and other standard – if unsavoury – sharia discourses:
Among the behaviors observed at the mosques and scored as Shari’a-adherent were: (a) women wearing the hijab (head covering) or niqab(full-length shift covering the entire female form except for the eyes); (b) gender segregation during mosque prayers; and (c) enforcement of straight prayer lines. Behaviors that were not scored as Shari’a-adherent included: (a) women wearing just a modern hijab, a scarf-like covering that does not cover all of the hair, or no covering; (b) men and women praying together in the same room; and (c) no enforcement by the imam, lay leader, or worshipers of straight prayer lines.
Violent materials – mainly books and videos – were divided into ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’.
The moderate-rated literature was authored by respected Shari’a religious and/or legal authorities; while expressing positive attitudes toward violence, it was predominantly concerned with the more mundane aspects of religious worship and ritual. The severe material, by contrast, largely consists of relatively recent texts written by ideologues, rather than Shari’a scholars, such as Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb. These, as well as materials published and disseminated by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, are primarily, if not exclusively, aimed at using Islam to advance a violent political agenda.
This choice of materials seem to have been chosen because they “are not Islamic legal texts per se but rather are polemical works seeking to advance a politicized Islam through violence, if necessary. Nor are these authors recognized Shari’a scholars.”
The results of the survey were unambiguous: most mosques offered pro-violence materials, but the mosques most likely to do so were the ones encouraging sharia-adherent behaviour.
The survey’s findings, explored in depth below, were that 51 percent of mosques had texts that either advocated the use of violence in the pursuit of a Shari’a-based political order or advocated violent jihad as a duty that should be of paramount importance to a Muslim; 30 percent had only texts that were moderately supportive of violence like theTafsir Ibn Kathir and Fiqh as-Sunna; 19 percent had no violent texts at all.
And:
The study found a statistically significant association between the severity of violence-positive texts on mosque premises and Shari’a-adherent behaviors.
In addition mosques containing severe material were likely actively to encourage terrorism and the funding of it:
The survey found a strong correlation between the presence of severe violence-promoting literature and mosques featuring written, audio, and video materials that actually promoted such acts. By promotion of jihad, the study included literature encouraging worshipers to engage in terrorist activity, to provide financial support to jihadists, and to promote the establishment of a caliphate in the United States. These materials also explicitly praised acts of terror against the West; praised symbols or role models of violent jihad; promoted the use of force, terror, war, and violence to implement the Sharia; emphasized the inferiority of non-Muslim life; promoted hatred and intolerance toward non-Muslims or notional Muslims; and endorsed inflammatory materials with anti-U.S. views… [O]f the 51 mosques that contained severe materials, 100 percent were led by imams who recommended that worshipers study texts that promote violence.
And there doesn’t seem to be much difference between moderate and severe mosques when it comes to violence against the infidel.
[M]osques containing violence positive materials were substantially more likely to include materials promoting financial support of terror than mosques that did not contain such texts. A disturbing 98 percent of mosques with severe texts included materials promoting financial support of terror. Those with only moderate rated materials on site were not markedly different, with 97 percent providing such materials.
These results were comparable when using other indicators of jihad promotion. Thus, 98 percent of mosques that contained severe-rated literature included materials promoting establishing an Islamic caliphate in the United States as did 97 percent of mosques containing only moderate rated materials.
Remember this if you thought that you would only be concerned about a mosque in your neighbourhood if it was run by members of the small minority of unrepresentative extremists. The moderate mosque may not attract violence, but it’s just as likely to encourage it.
Depressing stuff. But what makes the picture even worse is the number of people coming to hardline mosques compared to moderate ones:
Mosques that contained written materials in the severe category were the best attended, followed by those with only moderate-rated materials, trailed in turn by those lacking such texts. Mosques with severe materials had a mean attendance of 118 worshipers while mosques containing only moderate materials had a mean attendance of 60 worshipers; mosques that contained no violence-positive literature had a mean attendance of 15 worshipers.
Read that last paragraph again. Do the arithmetic. Nearly three quarters of mosque-goers attend ‘severe’ (offering modern materials with a violent political axe to grind) mosques; just over one fifth go to moderate (predominantly worship and ritual with some positive attitudes towards violence) mosques; and 3.5%, or one in thirty, go to mosques with no violent materials in them.
‘It is the young flesh they want’
- by: Anne Barrowclough
- From: The Australian
- June 14, 2014 12:00AM
Dr Eman Sharobeem, from the Immigrant Women’s Health Service, speaks with a former child bride. Picture: Robert Pozo Source: Supplied
Girls as young as 12 are being forced into marriage in Australia or sent overseas to wed. Picture: Getty Source: Supplied
ON a hot summer’s day earlier this year, a beautiful young Pakistani girl named Amina stood in the living room of her western Sydney home, listening in horror as her father explained how he planned to murder her.
“I am going to kill you now, right here!” he shouted at the 16-year-old. “And no one will say anything about what I do to you. I am too powerful in the community.” Amina’s parents had promised her to a man 13 years her senior and she had made the mistake of refusing to marry him. Her arguments would not sway her father and even when her husband-to-be beat her in front of him, her dad remained resolute, telling her: “He is already your husband in front of God.”
“She adored her father but he believed that by refusing to marry this man, she was damaging the honour of the family,” says Eman Sharobeem, manager of the Immigrant Women’s Health Service in Fairfield, Sydney. “I have no doubt that he would have killed her if I hadn’t intervened.” Amina might have been raised in Australia, adopting the attitude and dress of her teenage friends, but to her father she was “just a good sale item, a stunningly beautiful girl who would bring a good dowry”.
The child’s father eventually agreed to spare his daughter’s life — not out of any sense of mercy, Sharobeem says, but because he realised it would be difficult to kill the girl and get away with it. So he packed Amina off to Pakistan, where she has been held in his family’s home for the past two months. “She texted me the other day,” says Sharobeem. “She said, ‘They won’t kill me because they know you know. But they will keep me here until I agree to marry that man.” Her last text said: “I might give in.”
For years, child marriage in this country has been hidden under layers of culture and tradition in tight-knit communities — a fringe issue that’s been difficult to gauge and hard to investigate. Then came news of a 12-year-old girl who was “married” in January to a 26-year-old Lebanese university student in an Islamic ceremony at the girl’s home in NSW’s Hunter Valley, and the layers of secrecy began to peel away. On best estimates, the number of girls in Australia being forced into marriage here or overseas is in the hundreds every year. Girls as young as 12 or 13 are disappearing from schoolyards, packed off to the countries of their parents’ birth to wed men they have never met, while others are taken from their homes in southern Asia and the Middle East and brought into Australia to marry.
The National Children’s and Youth Law Centre has identified 250 cases of under-age marriage over the past 24 months, while Sharobeem, who was herself married to a cousin at the age of 14, says there are at least 60 child wives living in south-western Sydney alone. In Melbourne, Melba Marginson, executive director of the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Coalition (VIRWC), says her women’s friendship network sees 150 women a week, most of whom come from communities where arranged marriages are practiced. “But what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she says.
Those within the communities say the problem is greater than even these campaigners believe it to be. Alia Sultana, a Pakistani Hazara woman who works with Afghan Hazaras in Melbourne, told me: “I would say nearly every Afghan Hazara family in Melbourne is involved in this practice.” Sultana, who fled the Taliban two years ago with her family, added: “I only know about these girls because I am also a Hazara, and the other women tell me about them. They are kept prisoners, locked in their husbands’ homes and only allowed out if their mothers-in-law go with them, so they can never seek help.”
I am in a shopping mall in Dandenong, Melbourne, a vibrant area with a mix of migrant communities. With me is Badria, a pretty young Afghan woman who has lived in Australia almost all her life. One evening when she was just 15 years old, Badria was cooking with her mother in their Dandenong home when her father came in and hugged her. “Congratulations,” he told her. “You are engaged!” The man to whom she was promised was a friend of her 28-year-old brother, who had promised to help his mate leave Afghanistan and move to Australia. “My brother used me to get his friend an Australian visa,” says Badria. “But I didn’t know that at the time. I was so young I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I knew was that I didn’t want to get married yet.
“I wanted to make something of my life,” she says. “But in our culture you obey your father. I would not have thought of saying no to the marriage. On the day of the wedding, standing there marrying this guy, I felt helpless, trapped and scared. But I remember thinking, ‘If I say anything against this, I will shame the family’s name.’ ” Badria, who regarded herself as Australian, had hoped to finish school before she was married but she’d known her chances were slim: her mother was 14 and still playing with dolls on her wedding day. With two older sisters, Badria had expected to have more time to enjoy her teen years. “I knew my brother wanted his friend to marry one of us sisters; I had heard my parents discussing it,” she says. “But I was third in the [marriage] queue so I thought it would be one of the older girls.”
So why was she chosen? “That’s what I asked my mother. Why me? And my mother said because I was still so young and naive. She said, ‘You are a good girl, you are very quiet and sabore [patient]’. In our community, men like to marry very young girls because they can induct the girl into their lifestyle. Because she’s so young, she will soon forget her childhood and she will never question her husband. She is taken into her husband’s family and is told, ‘This is where your real life starts.’”
Later, I ask Sharobeem why children are so desirable as wives. She says her own husband had told her: “I take you as young clay so I can shape you the way I want. But really,” she adds, “it is the young flesh that they want.”
Badria’s marriage was brutishly violent. While her father persuaded his son-in-law to let Badria continue her education, she missed many days at school because of black eyes and bleeding lips. “I used to tell the teachers I had to stay home because I had a fever. They never thought I was married because I was so young, but I’m sure my friends knew. It was probably happening to them, too, but none of us talked about it. There is so much happening in our community that no one talks about. There are girls like me in every school in Dandenong. There are a lot of stories like mine, but it is a hidden thing.”
When Badria was four months pregnant, her husband beat her so badly — kicking her in the stomach with his metal-tipped work boots — that she lay in a corner, unable to move for a day and a night. The baby was born with severe heart problems and Badria is convinced it was the beating that did that damage. Soon after, she sought safety in a refuge with her baby. The little girl died, aged just eight months.
Badria shows me a picture of the infant, with her huge dark eyes and long curly hair, and sobs as she talks about her loss. She says the only thing that saved her from suicide was her parents’ decision to take her back to live with them. Badria insists they knew nothing about her husband’s violence until these last sad months. “So many times my father has kissed my hands and said, ‘I’m so sorry, my daughter, for putting you through this.’ But my brother never apologised. He didn’t think any of it was his fault. He only ever said: ‘I found you a husband.’ ”
Badria’s decision to leave her marriage makes her an exception in a community where the sense of duty is so strong that most girls would not refuse their parents’ wishes, and where the fear of fathers and husbands is so great that they will not flee even the most violent of marriages. The fear is very real; Amina is not the only girl whom Sharobeem has saved from a potential honour killing.
Recently, she was contacted by a mother whose 17-year-old daughter had shamed the family by having a boyfriend. The mother had heard her husband and son discussing whether to kill the girl or marry her off overseas. “This mother said, ‘I’m afraid she will run away and they will definitely kill her if she does.’” When Sharobeem went to visit the family, the girl’s father told her: “It would be better for everyone if she dies.” His son said, vehemently, “If it was up to me I would kill her right now. Either we throw her away [marry her off overseas to whoever would take her] or we kill her.”
This young man, who had been educated in Australia and knows Australian laws and values, explained: “She has shamed me and my family. I will be the joke of my peers — they will be laughing at me for the rest of my life. She has not only shamed me, she has shamed my future. No one will come near us now.”
The concept of honour underlines all areas of life in these strongly patriarchal communities. “It is important to protect their creed, their family, their honour and that’s why honour killings occur,” says Sarita Kulkarni, from the VIRWC. Panditji Abhay Awasthi, chairman of the Hindu Foundation of Australia, told me: “I am sure there are honour killings happening in Melbourne and in Sydney.” Awasthi, who counsels hundreds of young Melbourne women trapped in violent marriages, says he has become suspicious of a number of deaths and apparent suicides in the community.
“Honour killings happen in India and people have brought this culture here to Australia,” he says. “It is also going on in the Pakistan Punjab community. Last year I was told that families were taking their daughters back to Pakistan, and no one ever heard from them again. We are sure they’ve been killed, but it’s very hard to prove this is happening. Even those who are being tortured by their families don’t talk because that will only put them at further risk.”
Sharobeen says: “I have already saved two girls and failed to save one woman from murder. The violent enforcement against women in some of these communities is well known, and it is accepted. People don’t believe it is wrong.”
The woman Sharobeem was unable to save was a Coptic Christian who went to her mother for help after suffering daily beatings from her husband. But the girl’s mother brushed her concerns aside, telling her: “So what? Your father beats me.” The woman left her husband, but was persuaded to return to him by the family priest. Days later, the husband took her to a motel, drugged her, had sex with her and then murdered her.
This is the atmosphere in which young girls are growing up, only a few kilometres from the sophisticated centres of our major cities. “We are not in the suburbs of Kabul or Baghdad, but in Sydney,” says Sharobeem, but to all intents and purposes many of her clients could be living back in the cities of their parents’ birth.
The practice of underage marriage crosses cultural and religious lines. It is prevalent in western and sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia; for example, it’s estimated more than half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before the age of 18. One in nine girls will be under the age of 15.
Many of the women and girls Sharobeem deals with speak little or no English and the suppression of women is so inculcated that in many cases they themselves see nothing wrong with it. “I’ve heard men telling new arrivals, ‘It is our duty to keep the women away from the bad influences here and not let them learn English’,” says Sharobeem. “And both men and women believe they must treat their children harshly and marry them off early to keep them safe in a society where everything is loose.”
Many of those I spoke to, in Indian, Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani communities, stressed the difference between “arranged” marriages, where the girls’ consent was sought before an engagement could take place, and “forced” marriage. Many, including teenage girls, spoke eloquently of the advantage of arranged marriages over the Western version. One Hazara girl told me: “My friend’s sister is 15 and has just become engaged. But there is nothing wrong with that. She has given her consent and she probably won’t actually be married for a few years.”
However, others point out there is a fine line between the two. “There is a lot of manipulation,” says Manjula O’Connor, director of the Australasian Centre for Human Rights and Health. “Mothers tell their children that they will kill themselves unless the child agrees to the marriage. Some arranged marriages are done well but in others, the young people have no choice. They are effectively forced into the marriage.”
In February last year parliament passed the Slavery Act, which introduced the new offence of forced marriage; by its very nature child marriage was always illegal. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that even under-age marriages are planned with malevolence. Most parents genuinely want the best for their children and marry them to men whom they believe will be good husbands. Sharobeem’s father married her to an older cousin because he thought the cousin would keep her safe; Badria’s parents, too, believed that she would be cared for by her brother’s friend. Others marry off their girls to save them from what they see as the much worse fate of having a relationship outside of marriage, in the mistaken belief that as soon as a girl menstruates she is ready for sex.
Both Sharobeem and Marginson told me of being berated by men and women who accused them of encouraging children into sin by their campaigns against child brides. Instead, these people argued, once a girl was menstruating, she had to be married off quickly to protect her and her family’s honour. “One day when I was on the radio, a man rang to say: ‘You want our girls to have sex without getting married, and that makes you a sinner’,” says Sharobeem. “I had to tell him, ‘Having your period doesn’t mean you’re ready to have children’.”
In the Hunter Valley case involving the 12-year-old girl, court documents allege the father (an Australian man described as a Muslim convert) told police his main concern was that his daughter might commit “a sin against God” by having sex outside marriage. He allegedly consented to the marriage — even providing her with sexual advice — because she was beginning to “become excited around boys” and he didn’t want her to live “a sinful life”.
The father, and the girl’s “husband” — who has been charged with 25 counts of sexual intercourse with a child — are due to appear in court again on June 18. The imam who conducted the ceremony was fined $500 and is awaiting deportation.
Some families marry their girls off for mercenary reasons; they’re “sold” to men who will pay a large dowry for a young bride with an Australian visa. Hundreds of girls are brought into the country at the age of 17 under the Prospective Spouse Visa program, whose rules insist that a marriage must take place within nine months.
In a case reported in 2011, a Year 10 Lebanese girl brought to Australia was told by her family she would be “slaughtered and killed” if she didn’t marry her husband-to-be, although he was a violent drunk who already had another wife and three children.
Some brave girls stand up for themselves: in 2011, a 16-year-old Sydney girl applied successfully to be put on the Airport Watch List to prevent her parents from taking her to Lebanon to be married. A 13-year-old who told teachers at her Melbourne school that she was to be married was also put on the Watch List.
But girls who go against their parents’ wishes not only face rejection by their family but by their communities, who collude to keep them suppressed and silent. When I asked why girls did not leave violent, abusive husbands, I was told repeatedly, “The community will throw her away.”
Leyla, an Iraqi woman who at the age of 12 was taken off the street where she was playing, dusted down and taken into her engagement ceremony, is still with her brutal husband despite years of cruelty. Days after her wedding, furious that his child bride was refusing to have sex with him, and frustrated at his family’s demands to see blood on their sheets to prove her virginity, Leyla’s husband took a knife and slashed her vagina to provide his family with the all-important blood token. She was just 13 when she bore the first of her five sons.
Today, her face and body are disfigured: her broken jaw makes her face lopsided, and a dislocated shoulder hangs lower than the other. She is scarred inside and out by her husband’s brutality and her own self-harm. She weeps throughout our interview, and swears to me that she will leave her husband once her youngest son is married. But if she does, the community will turn on her. “I will never be able to marry again. It is impossible,” she whispers.
O’Connor describes the societal pressure on young girls as “the super-eye of the culture”. She explains: “You are not allowed to move too far out of it. If you do, or if you disobey their rules, not only are you excluded from your own society but so are your parents and family. No one will want to marry your sisters, and your brothers will be laughed at. The pressure on the girls is so enormous that they tend to behave themselves and don’t leave the family tradition.”
The power of the communities is so strong that Sharobeem, Marginson and the professionals who refer cases to them have to keep much of their work clandestine. When I ask Sharobeem to put me in touch with a doctor who has sent a number of child brides to her centre, she shakes her head. “He would never work in the community again,” she says. When I argue that his name would not be printed, she shakes her head again. “But the community will know.”
What makes it even harder is that so many women still accept it. There’s a saying they use for the wedding night: “Kill the cat to slaughter the cat.” Says Sharobeem: “The cat is the young bride and the saying means she must have her self-esteem slaughtered from day one so she will never raise her voice or have her say.”
Sarah, an 18-year-old Pakistani, tells me: “Girls know the first five years of marriage are a struggle. They are under so much pressure to make their marriage work that they don’t even think that what is happening to them is wrong. They think [violence] is just what happens.”
All those fighting for the rights of migrant women believe education is the key: not just a Western education, but teaching them that they don’t have to endure violent marriages. “These women feel very isolated,” says Nga Hosking, community development officer of the VIRWC. “They don’t realise they have the right to come out and ask for help. If they try to knock on one door and that shuts on them, they will not try again. It’s our job to teach them that they will get help if they knock.”
But it’s never an easy task. One woman told O’Connor: “Learning about my rights has made it harder for me because I still can’t leave. It was easier when I thought this was just what happened — I could stick my head in the sand and put up with it.
“It is critical that initiatives to address child marriage and forced marriage are developed in consultation with communities and with community leaders,” says Jennifer Burn of Anti-Slavery Australia.
“We need all community leaders, including religious leaders, to work with their communities to raise awareness about the new Commonwealth offence of forced marriage, to contextualise discussion within international law frameworks against child marriage and to recognise that forced marriage is a breach of human rights and a slavery-like practice.”
There have been advances; some imams have begun to preach against underage marriage and teachers are now more aware of the issue. In the Hindu community, Panditji Awasthi and his colleagues try to convince women that it is not wrong to leave violent marriages. Thanks to programs run by organisations such as the VIRWC and the Immigrant Women’s Health Service, young girls are learning that they don’t have to agree to be married before they are ready and their parents are also being taught that the practice is cruel.
But there is still a very steep path to climb. One afternoon I find myself in Dandenong drinking tea and eating traditional Hazara cakes with the women of the Sultana family as they explain to me why the young girls brought from Afghanistan and married to men far older than themselves won’t seek help. Alia Sultana makes the most devastating point.
“These girls are just happy that they don’t have to get up at 5am to clean the house and work in the fields anymore,” she says. “In Australia they have a bed to sleep in; they have a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner. They don’t mind if their husband is violent and they will never try to get help because they are just happy to be out of Afghanistan.”
Teen terror threat: ‘Dangerous sons’ of Islamic refugees involved in Merrylands stabbing
- by: Ben McClellan and Leigh van den Broeke
- From: The Daily Telegraph
- August 26, 2014 12:00AM
- Sydney’s Muslim teens embrace extreme violence
- ‘420’ gang members boast of being ‘Hezbollah soldiers’
- Gang named after Afghan slang for ‘people who are no good’
- Police say stabbed boy probably knew his attacker
With a combination of teenage bravado, US crime culture swagger and extreme Islamic ideology, the “Fourtwozero (420)” gang is Hezbollah meets Hollywood.
Nearly a dozen sons of refugees who fled war-torn countries such as Afghanistan have embraced the violent culture of their homeland through a modern silver-screen lens to roam Parramatta’s streets as “soldiers”.
The number 420 is a nationally recognised “bad” number in Afghanistan, used to describe someone who is dangerous and dishonest.
TEEN STABBED AS POLICE BREAK UP MASSIVE BRAWL
One of the gang members arrested last week / Picture: Facebook. Source: DailyTelegraph
The gang, one of whose teen members was stabbed during a Merrylands brawl on Friday, even have their own symbol: an AK-47 rifle set against the Afghan flag with the words “Bachems 420”, which roughly translates to “dangerous sons”.
The flag was posted on Facebook by another member as a tribute to the self-described wounded “Shia soldier”.
The 17-year-old, who goes by the title “Sayed Fourtwozero” on social media, is lucky to be alive after suffering a single stab wound very close to his heart. The teenager was still in Westmead Hospital last night, and has regained consciousness.
A police source said the teenager would have died had police not managed to fight through a sea of drunken, violent teenagers to render first aid in the Merrylands Oval car park.
Police have made no arrests over the stabbing and The Daily Telegraph understands the teenager may have been attacked by someone he knew.
Stabbing victim ‘Sayed’ calls himself a Hezbollah soldier / Picture: facebook Source: Supplied
While local police said the gang of teenage boys was not yet on their radar, the Afghan community is worried their young men are being lost to extremist ideology and crime.
One community leader said “420” was well-known Afghan slang for people who “do not care about anything and are not good”.
“They are copying other groups like the bikies,” he said. “For all the community it’s a very, very big warning. These people don’t practise Islamic norms. They are just street boys.”
Some of the gang are believed to be from the persecuted Afghan Hazara group, whose Shia Islam is targeted in Iraq and Syria by Islamic State militants.
More than 10,000 Hazaras live in Western Sydney.
The stabbed teen claims to be a “Hezbollah soldier” and proudly posts quotes from extreme preachers on his Facebook page.
The Facebook pages of other “420” gang members paint a picture of angry, young men posing with batons and machetes, searching for identity both in extremist ideology — with material from groups such as Hezbollah — or US crime culture with references to gangster rap.
Many use the online name “Montana”, after Al Pacino’s drug kingpin character Tony Montana in the film Scarface.
Published January 21, 2013
The Hazaras
15
Articles / Asylum Seekers
© Hazara Times
By Julian Burnside AO QC. This article is part of our December 2012 and January 2013 focus on Asylum Seekers.
Since about 1998, a significant proportion of boat people coming to Australia have been Hazaras from Afghanistan or Pakistan.
On 26 August 2001, the Norwegian cargo ship MV Tampa rescued the passengers of a small boat called the Palapa. The Palapa was breaking up in moderate seas in the Indian Ocean. The captain of the Tampa reckoned there might be 50 or 60 people on the Palapa. As it happened, there were 438 of them, most of whom were Hazaras from Afghanistan. The Tampa was denied entry into Australian waters; but in defiance of then Prime Minister John Howard, the Tampa sailed into the waters off Christmas Island and into Australia’s legal and political history. In response, the Howard Government set up the Pacific Solution.
It is mute testimony to their fear of the Taliban that a number of Hazaras have tried a number of times to get here by boat, despite the dangers of the voyage
After the allied invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, and the overthrow of the Taliban, the Howard Government forced a number of Hazaras to return from Nauru to Afghanistan. Most fled immediately to Pakistan. Some returned to their villages in Afghanistan. Some of them have since been killed by the Taliban who, though no longer in government, nevertheless have substantial power in Afghanistan. The fate of Hazaras returned to Afghanistan from Nauru has been well documented by the Edmund Rice Centre, in their compelling report Deported to Danger.
In recent times, Hazaras from Afghanistan still form one of the major groups of boat arrivals in Australia seeking asylum. It is mute testimony to their fear of the Taliban that a number of Hazaras have tried a number of times to get here by boat, despite the dangers of the voyage. (Presumably, the Expert Panel and the Gillard Government think that Australia can so mistreat boat people as to make coming to Australia look more alarming than staying home and facing the Taliban).
The Hazaras arrived in Afghanistan seven or eight hundred years ago. Most people remember that in February of 2001 the Taliban demolished the great Bamiyan Buddhas. These two enormous Buddhas were hewn into the cliff face by Hazaras six or seven hundred years ago, because when the Hazaras arrived in Afghanistan they were Buddhist.
Today Hazaras are easily recognised, because they are distinctly Asian in appearance. They are thought to be the descendants of Genghis Khan. They have been targeted by the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan for a long time, certainly since the time of King Abdurrahman in 1854, but they are especially persecuted under the Taliban.
The Taliban, who are all Pashtun, are Sunni Muslim. The Hazaras converted to Islam a long time ago, but they embraced Shi’a Islam. The divide between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims has an unhappy similarity to the divide between Catholic and Protestant Christians. In Afghanistan, and increasingly in lawless areas of Pakistan, relations between the two Muslim groups bring to mind the oppression of Roman Catholics in late 16th and early 17th century England, or more recently in Northern Ireland.
And so we have the unfortunate spectacle of a religious minority who are hated by the religious majority, who look physically different and, adding a historical resonance, Hazara men are circumcised.
Pashtun animosity of the Hazaras increased during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Hazaras had traditionally been excluded from higher education (girls were not allowed to be educated at all), but the Soviets thought all people should be entitled to an education. The Hazaras welcomed this and sided with the Soviets.
The Americans, in pursuit of their goal of ousting the Soviets, set up a fighting force and armed them. They were the Taliban, drawn from the Pashtun majority. The Taliban thus have historical, political and religious reasons for hating the Hazaras, and they have been peculiarly brutal in their assault. On 8 August 1998 the Taliban occupied Mazar-e Sharif. They conducted a murderous spree which lasted three days and killed at least 2000 Hazaras.
In the years since, there have been many reported instances of attacks by Taliban on Hazaras, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, especially Quetta.
© Times of Pakistan (tinyurl.com/am887l7)
The city of Quetta lies just over the border which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan. It is part of the territory (the Hazarajat) which was traditionally occupied by Hazaras before English cartographers created Afghanistan and, later, Pakistan. It is natural therefore that many Hazaras move from Afghanistan to Quetta. One part of Quetta is largely a Hazara ghetto. But the Taliban are increasingly uncontrolled in Pakistan, and Hazaras who live in Quetta face the daily risk of being killed by a suicide bomber or shot by a Taliban sniper.
Three Hazara friends of mine (who came here as boat people but are now Australian citizens) recently went to Quetta to visit family members. They returned to Australia shocked by what they had seen: they could scarcely go outside, for fear of snipers; when they ventured out to the market, they saw small posters on every power pole identifying Hazaras who had recently been killed by snipers. They saw taxi drivers refuse to pick up Hazaras, for fear of being caught in an ambush.
Recent news reports tell a consistent story. In June 2010, at least nine Hazara men were killed in an ambush in a remote area of central Afghanistan that is largely controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack. According to Afghan security officials, the attack occurred in a mountainous part of south-eastern Uruzguan Province that is not under government control, and it was reportedly motivated by the perception that Hazaras act as spies and informants to the international military forces in the area. Just this year, on 10 January 2013, there were murderous attacks on Hazaras in Quetta.
Recently the Taliban have declared it their duty to kill Hazaras. The Taliban are engaged in ethnic cleansing of the Hazara people. As a result, many Hazaras have left Afghanistan; north to Iran, east into Pakistan, or (using people smugglers) to Europe, America or Australia.
It has been estimated that the Hazara population in Afghanistan has reduced from 20 per cent to less than 10 per cent over the past 15 years.
Allied forces have announced that they will withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. It is a certainty that Taliban attacks on Hazaras will increase uncontrollably when that happens.
It is equally tragic to see our national character being damaged by a Labor Government which does not have the political spine to tell it as it is: to point out to voters that there is a better way
What can we do? Australia receives very few refugees: even an annual arrival rate of 20,000 boat people would be a low number by international standards. As it happens, the last time we got as many as 20,000 boat people in a year was in the late 1970s, when the Fraser Government received between 20,000 and 25,000 Indo-Chinese boat people each year for a few years. It is a measure of recent politics that the arrival of the Indo-Chinese boat people caused virtually no fuss back then, when Australia’s population was smaller and Australia was less rich, but our political standards were higher. Of course, these numbers need to be assessed against the vast size of our continent; against our permanent migration figures of 200,000 plus per year; and against our great wealth. And perhaps we should assess ourselves against Greece, which has a population about half of Australia’s, is in great economic trouble, and has just offered to receive 20,000 Syrian refugees.
When boat people survive the perils of the sea and arrive on our shores, the great question for Australia is: how should we respond? In the past decade or so, our answer to that question has been: detain them, send them somewhere remote, frighten them off. This response has positioned us as selfish and cruel.
Despite its populist rhetoric about boat people, the Labor Government has found itself in a bind recently: the new Pacific Solution, with its cynical “no advantage” component, has failed. Numbers of boat arrivals have not fallen; detention centres are full, and the present capacity of Manus Island and Nauru makes it impractical to send more boat people there. So a number have been released into the community on bridging visas. At present there are more boat people in the community on bridging visas than there are in detention. This has not caused society to break down; it has not resulted in any discernible problems. In this there may be a clue to a sensible – and decent – way of dealing with boat people.
If I could re-design the system, it would look something like this:
- Boat arrivals would be detained initially for one month, for preliminary health and security checks, subject to extension if a court was persuaded that a particular individual should be detained longer;
- after initial detention, they would be released into the community, with the right to work, as well as Centrelink and Medicare benefits. Even if none of them got a job, it would be cheaper than keeping them locked up;
- the asylum seekers would be released into the community on terms calculated to make sure they remained available for the balance of their visa processing;
- during the time their visa applications were being processed, they would be required to live in rural or regional areas of Australia. Any government benefits they received would thus work for the benefit of the rural and regional economy. There are plenty of towns around the country that would welcome an increase in their population.
It should not be too hard to persuade the community that we can do better than we are doing now. The present system is supported by lies. Of course criminals should be treated as criminals. But when you see that boat people are not criminals it is more difficult to understand, much less accept, our treatment of them.
I believe most Australians are decent, generous people. Our record in both world wars stands as a tribute to our national character; our response to the Asian tsunami is another. It was tragic to see our national character brought down by the Howard Government’s deceptive rhetoric about boat people (most of it calculated to win back voters who had drifted to One Nation). It is equally tragic to see our national character being damaged by a Labor Government which does not have the political spine to tell it as it is: to point out to voters that there is a better way; that we are better than this.
Julian Burnside AO QC is an Australian Barrister and an advocate for the human rights and fair treatment of asylum seekers.
In November 2014 Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress made submissions to the Canadian Senate Committee
This is the official transcript from the Canadian Senate.
Tarek Fatah, Founder, Muslim Canadian Congress: Good afternoon, senators, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to address an issue that concerns not only Canada and the rest of the world but, above all, the community of my faith that seems to be lost in the sands of Sinai with no Moses to lead us out.
No matter how we couch our words in the language of political correctness or post-modernism, the fact of the matter is that Western civilization today faces a transcontinental challenge to its very existence.
It's not as if we haven't faced this challenge before. In the Second World War, we and our allies defeated the largest armies the world had ever seen and saved the world from Hitler and Nazis at a cost of over 30 million people. Subsequently, we won the Cold War, but today, 14 years after Islamism launched its war on the West, we cannot stall, let alone defeat, the forces of international jihad.
As a Muslim, it gives me no pleasure in washing my dirty laundry either in public or in these august chambers, but I believe if we Muslims do not step forward and speak the truth, we will suffocate in the stench of our own making while trying to blame others for creating the mess in which we find ourselves firmly stuck.
I understand the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence has a mandate to study and report on security threats facing Canada and is presently focusing on the issue of preventing radicalization. Allow me to answer some specific areas that may be of help to your committee and offer some recommendations at the end.
First is the problem in my community or in the Muslim community. The problem of radicalization in the Muslim community depends on which Muslim community you're talking about. If you are speaking about Muslim Kurds or Muslim Baloch or Muslim Darfuris, the problem is non-existent. The same can be said of most Iranian Muslims. However, within the White and Black converts to Islam, the Somali, Bangladeshi and Attar Muslim communities, and more specifically, the Pakistani-Canadian Muslim community, the problem of radicalization is very widespread, deeply entrenched, embedded and framed in terms of an Islam-versus-the-infidel scenario leading up to an end-of-time Armageddon.
Second is the support infrastructure for terrorism and radicalization. The support structure that exists for Islam-based terrorism or radicalization, all Islamism, which is a starting point to the end part of someone being a jihadist, is multi-faceted. At its base are the Islamist organizations and mosque-based groups who lay the seeds of radicalization not necessarily in the recruitment of terrorists but in the politicization of the sermons that whip up a sense of victimhood of Muslims while cultivating a hatred of non-Muslims and other groups such as gays and women who demand equality and who refuse to wear head wraps or be encased in burkas.
To give you a specific example, which most of you would not know about, most mosques in Canada and around the world start their Friday congregation with a prayer that asks Allah to give victory to the Muslims over the Kuffar, or the infidels — that is, people like you. The glorification and radicalization is endemic and ubiquitous in the sermons and teachings to very young adults, as can be verified from incidents in the United Kingdom and even here in Canada.
Every Islamic hero in the last 1,400 years has been a jihadist who is celebrated for his — there are no her — exploits in defeating Christians, Jews, Hindus or pagans.
It is with shock that I learned on Saturday that an RCMP de-radicalization partner, a White convert to Islam by the name of Muhammad Robert Heft, had a lengthy meeting with the Taliban leadership in the ISIS-backing Emirate of Qatar. Mr. Heft has been negotiating a pact with the Taliban, and I'm not sure if either your committee or the RCMP or CSIS knows about it, but he did come back yesterday and attended an event in Mississauga, where the keynote speaker was a federal minister, where he expounded his views. His view is that Canada's foreign policy is at the root cause of all jihadi terrorism. His absurd suggestion is to ally with the Taliban terrorists and to fight ISIS.
The question has been asked if the RCMP or CSIS have ever had any communications with that group. In my 25 years of fighting against Islamism and confronting jihadism within my Muslim community, as an author of two books, as a radio host and weekly columnist, let met state emphatically: Not a single time have I ever been approached by any outreach committee of the Toronto police, the RCMP, CSIS or any other security agency. They simply will not meet with any Muslim who looks like an integrated Muslim. I can draw only one conclusion, ladies and gentlemen: In the eyes of the RCMP, a Muslim is a Muslim only if he or she dresses up in medieval attire, encases his wife in a burka and speaks with a guttural accent.
The Muslins whom the Mounties certify as moderate Muslims, who we are told are fighting radicalization, are in fact Islamists who are pro-sharia and have never, ever once renounced the doctrine of armed jihad. These men and women are pulling the wool over the RCMP's eyes. As an example, one celebrity promoted by both CSIS and RCMP, through both Liberal and Conservative governments, is a Hamilton lawyer, a fine fellow by the name of Hussein Hamdani, who sits on Canada's Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. His presence on CCR has been used to push the Islamist agenda rather than thwart the Islamists.
Then there's the infamous Canadian counter-radicalization handbook United Against Terrorism, which was produced by two Muslim groups, ostensibly in collaboration with the RCMP until they backed out later. The Mounties distanced themselves from this Canadian handbook, but it is instructive in who these Islamist groups in this booklet recommended as the most reliable of North America's counter-radicalization religious advisers. They include Ingrid Mattson, a former president of ISNA, an organization that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Texas terror trial. Ms. Mattson, a White convert to Islam, once proudly represented the Afghan Mujahideen government at the UN. We have Jamal Badawi, who sat on the board of another organization listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Texas terror trial; Siraj Wahhaj, labelled as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 WTC bombings; and Zaid Shakir, who was outed for his radical ideology by a retired lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, the founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
The question is asked whether counter-radicalization programs work. Let me assure you there's no such thing as de-radicalization. It is one of the biggest money-making ventures that was ever introduced after 9/11. Experience in Saudi Arabia shows that every one of the radicals released under the guarantee of the Saudi government from GTMO turned back and are now fighting on the side of ISIS.
Let me give you an example of what Islamism is. Islamism is like an agricultural enterprise. Tilling the soil is different from planting and sowing the seed. Irrigating the soil is not the same as spreading pesticide to keep the parasites away. When it comes to harvesting the crop, the act is different than the sale of the crop. Dear senators, some Islamists plant the seed, while others harvest the crop of jihadists as recruiters. To suggest that those who plant the seed should eradicate the crop before the harvest is a fool's dream. The RCMP and other guilt-ridden, mainstream politicians may munch on this marijuana but, as a Muslim, I'm prohibited any intake of such intoxicants.
I have some specific recommendations to this committee, and I will list them for you.
Lay hate speech charges against any Muslim cleric who hides behind religious rights to attack and demonize members of another faith or another religion, as is done every Friday in every mosque of this country.
Every mosque must be monitored for such hate speech where the word Kuffar is invoked to hide the real target, which is Hindus, Christians and Jews.
Any mosque indulging in active politics must have their charitable status revoked. We have the law; we simply don't implement it.
Donations of more than $20 at all religious institutions must be made by cheque or credit card to cut off the possibility of money laundering, which I have witnessed.
Immigration from Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, Iraq and Syria must be suspended until Canada can be assured that the security documents, identity papers and university degrees cannot be bought in the black market or from state agencies. I am aware of how in Pakistan and Somalia, and in Iran, someone named, for example, Tarek Fatah could overnight become Abdul Khan or Behroze Hamadan, with documents and degrees to cheat the best of sleuths because the documents would be genuine, not forged.
Identify Muslim groups who are hostile to Islamists and enable them to fight Islamism in Canada, from the sowing of the seed to the harvesting of the crop. Here I mean Canadian Kurds, the Baloch, the African Darfuris and the victims of Iran's relentless atrocities on its citizens.
As one measure, Canada should re-examine the false designation of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party, as a terrorist group, which we have done at the insistence of Turkey, which, by the way, is the main funder and supporter of ISIS, and PKK is the only group fighting ISIS. Had it not been for the PKK and its Syrian Kurdish counterpart, the YPG, a human slaughter of immense proportions would have taken place on the Sinjar Mountain, and Kobane would have fallen to ISIS.
It is unfathomable to me that we would be allies with Turkey and Qatar, who funded if not created ISIS, but that we treat PKK as terrorists, when that group has saved tens of thousands of lives and did not flee like the American-supplied Iraqi Army did. Senators, in the Second World War, we were allied with Stalin because we had to destroy Hitler. Today, the people who fight on our behalf have been designated as terrorists, and the people who wish to destroy us are members of NATO.
I will suggest my final recommendation, which might seem very trivial but is extremely significant in what message we send out. We should ban the burka in public, as the example set by the Republic of France and that has been upheld by the European Human Rights Commission and the court for two reasons. First, the robbery that took place of half a million of dollars of jewelry in Toronto last week could very well have been a terrorist attack by men wearing burkas, which has happened. Second, by saying that we as Canadians refuse and reject a value that suggests that women are the source of all sin and therefore should be restricted in the home, we will send a clear message that if you wish to wear a burka, you're free to wear it in your home, but on our streets, we would not want our children to be scared of people who wear clothes that literally frighten infants. Thank you very much.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you for your frankness in your discussions on this. I wanted to understand from you the support infrastructure that you believe is here within the country. I'm wondering if you could give me just briefly what is the support infrastructure here in groups.
Mr. Fatah: The way you look at it, senator, is not how the world works in the realm of Islamism. We don't need a structure. Many of the things that I have pointed out are generated in the minds of infants, of five-year-old boys who are dressed up as medieval invaders of Europe. My name Tarek is a name given to me because of the general who invaded Spain in the year 711. It doesn't need the infrastructure that you are looking for.
The ideology of Islamism has escaped attention from everyone, from President Bush right down to President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron. In the entire Western world, in the OECD countries, only one popular politician has had the courage to say in so many words that Islamism is a great threat, and that is our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. No one else has had the guts, the ability to say that we are fighting an enemy that is structured around a death cult of a fascist ideology, one that considers Earth to be a transit lounge to the final destination where life will begin after death in paradise. To most people in the West, it seems like a joke; to every Muslim, it is a fact of life.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you. I would just like you to repeat a part of your message, which is that it's not all Muslims. I think that's very important to understand in today's world.
Mr. Fatah: Let me clarify. I have repeated that for 14 years. Not just me, you and every Western politician has been, in cricketing terms, batting on the back foot. We have seen the results. We have dead Canadians on our hands, and we have the Toronto 18, the Digi-bomber, the VIA Rail bombers, and we all come back to the defensive notion: Of course not all Germans were Nazis. But did we sit around the conference room during the Second World War saying, ''Oh, what happens if a German got upset?''
I suggest that 14 years is long enough for not a single mosque imam to say, ''I renounce the doctrine of jihad.'' What would it take for someone to say, in this day and age, the doctrine of armed jihad is inapplicable, inadmissible and we live as nation states? We do not have communities based on inherited race or religion. Our citizenship is based on human-created laws that can be changed by subsequent generations, not divine text sent by messengers that are immutable for all times.
Senator White: Thank you very much for being here today, sir, and for your comments. We had witnesses before us last week from the RCMP who talked about their community outreach program, in particular with young people, and their attempt of using some crime prevention methods that we've seen successful in Canada, particularly among gangs, to assist young people in finding a different path out. So your suggestion is you have had no involvement with them as to whether or not their program would help. I think you have obviously heard of the program, though.
Can you give your opinion, if that doesn't work or if it won't work, what will work when it comes to young people and trying to keep them from becoming engaged in some of the hatred and anger you're talking about?
Mr. Fatah: Senator, they're laughing at the RCMP behind your backs, these young men. These are highly staged events. These are money-making events. The de-radicalization program is a joint venture between companies, consultants and academics with a vested interest in this.
You cannot produce one de-radicalized person in the last 14 years. Each person who is marketing himself as a former radical is doing so for financial purposes. You show me one person who says that he has been de-radicalized, one former radical from GTMO who says that jihad is inapplicable. Out of 1,000 Islamists there will be one jihadist. What we're saying is, ''How do we fight Islamism?'' Is it like a vaccine, the same way we fight chicken pox, by introducing the same germ so they can destroy the other germ? No. This is cancer. You're introducing tumours where tumours already exist. This is becoming a profit-making venture.
For me and many secular liberal colleagues, we know this is a war declared on us. Unfortunately, for many other civil servants and folks, this is a money-making venture. You form a committee; you bring a proposal; you get funded. Millions have been spent, and we cannot defeat men in caves? Trillions. Imagine the amount, the hundreds of billions the Americans spent in Iraq and the army ran away, yet not a single American general has been held accountable? It's because it was a total fraud. Nobody dares say that billions were stolen in this enterprise.
The Brits and the Canadians have had a very good record in having armed forces that fight with dignity. The private guards and private mercenaries — even Snowden is not a CIA employee. Since when did we fight our enemy by contracting out to private forces? Even the people who vetted Snowden were a private company. You cannot win a war against people who are dedicated to die for no money whatsoever and face them with people who go on tours of duty, a term unheard of in the First and Second World Wars. Don't recruit an army saying, ''Get a degree in engineering or an American citizenship by serving a term in Iran.'' Those people don't fight wars. They want to come back and run a company.
So what's happening with us, and this is a rare opportunity for me because nobody wishes to speak to the ordinary Muslim. Ninety per cent of us don't go to a mosque, senator. Ninety per cent of us have no affiliation with any mosque. We are architects, we are cab drivers, we may even be pole dancers, but none of us dresses up in that medieval costume that the RCMP and CSIS have, in a racist way, imposed on us as an identity. Do you think after 25 years I need to dress like a Saudi to be believed by you that I'm an authentic Muslim? This is blackface in my face. I am not a joker. I'm a Muslim Canadian. I came here to escape those tyrants, and the RCMP and CSIS are feeding them.
I've been to the CCR meetings and I've met a member as senior as an assistant minister who is a Muslim briefing us at the Friday prayers on what story to give to the RCMP officers, a con job that, if I was anyone in the government, I would charge that man for being a traitor to this country, to the place that gave our parents and us a place to be free. I can't speak in Canada, and you're bringing the people who wanted to kill me and make them RCMP advisers? We would have lost the Second World War if we had the same leadership in Canada and Britain as we have today in our intelligentsia.
Senator White: If I may, obviously you don't think the program works. That's pretty clear. I'm asking you the question: What will work? We have people in this country who are, if not before, then now, finding themselves in a position of supporting something that involves killing Canadians.
Mr. Fatah: First thing is suspend immigration from Iran, Pakistan and Somalia. I can take you to Mississauga Road and the million-dollar mansions of Pakistani generals of the ISI — it is not ISIS, by the way — who live here amongst us.
You want to know the foreign students over here, the MSA, the Muslim Students Association, designated by the Muslim Brotherhood as their front, is hosting an event in Windsor on November 26 where an RCMP superintendent is sitting down with two Islamists. Would that RCMP come to an event that we would do? Impossible. There's nothing to offer. I have no exotic meals to offer during Ramadan to these hundreds of RCMP and CSIS and Toronto police officers who every Ramadan have a feast day. It's multiculturalism gone mad, senators, and our country is being hurt and nobody is watching. The Mounties don't get their man, I can assure you, not today.
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much, Mr. Fatah, for an excellent presentation. I think all my questions have actually been answered because you have given your views on radicalization.
For community members who speak out, like you, are you threatened, alienated or targeted by radicals in any way? Do you feel you are in any danger for speaking out like this? How do you encourage others who are truly moderate to speak as well?
Mr. Fatah: You will be surprised. I heard the gentleman before me talk about Internet security. I am the person banned on Facebook. Seriously. I am a danger to Facebook.
On a social network that hosts ISIS, prostitution gangs and drug gangs, it is me, as a Sun columnist, whose profile is banned. When I get a death threat, the police investigate me in Toronto. Who comes to investigate me? The head of Toronto police intelligence is one of my co-religionists.
I don't like to wash my dirty linen in public, senator, but I have had it. It has been 14 years, and Canada and the United States couldn't defeat a bunch of ragtag, medieval monsters.
I wish Justin Trudeau were here so I could ask him, ''Do you think I deserve to get jihadis?'' Would he go to a mosque where women are sent to the back of the bus?
Senators, you cannot fight radicalization if you believe that women deserve to sit in the back of the bus. Every mosque I know except for two send their women to the basements, behind balconies or in the last row. The RCMP, the Liberals, Conservative and New Democrat politicians go there, look at that, and never once did they say, ''I'd like to see a sister in the front row.'' They dare not because they would be accused of being racist.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: I have listened to you carefully. One of the things you spoke about was the RCMP. The RCMP exists in Canada; it will be there tomorrow and in the future. What do you think would be the best awareness strategy for the RCMP to maintain or create contact with the Muslim community? In your opinion, what should the terrorism prevention community awareness program look like? It is easy to say that the RCMP does not do this or that. Nonetheless, it will still be there tomorrow.
[English]
Mr. Fatah: Senator, I understand the paradigm which says they have to do outreach. I can't understand why it is the RCMP's job to do outreach. It is the politician's job to do outreach to the community and engage. The RCMP's job is not to cater to the whims and fancies of people. They are there to solve criminal activity.
Some of us listen to your hearings live, and I heard either CSIS or the RCMP say they do not investigate mosques. Nobody asked why. If the RCMP is in agreement with the mosques that they will give 24-hour notice before they enter, is this a victory for the RCMP or for those who think that the Friday prayers should start with a prayer asking for the defeat of infidels and the victory of Muslims?
We cannot expect our security agencies to do community outreach. They're neither trained nor responsible for that. Their job is crime prevention. This is not criminal activity. This is war. This is terror. If we can't call it war and terror and refer to it as criminal activity, we have already lost the war. Hitler didn't commit a crime when he invaded Poland. He committed a crime when he killed the Jews. When he invaded Poland, Austria, Denmark and France, he committed war.
We are living in a different age when states are not attacking us but non-state actors want to kill us, and they're recruiting from within us. These are not deprived, uneducated kids, but two Quebecois, sons of the soil, came from us and killed our own soldiers. Nobody has asked who converted them to Islam. Not a single person has asked these questions: What was that contact point? Who was the individual?
Not journalists, not politicians, no Liberal, no Conservative, no New Democrat, nobody dared ask this question because that would be racist, wouldn't it? If I had to solve a crime, my first point is who recruited you to the mafia? If it was criminal, wouldn't that be the first question?
This guy killed his own countrymen, and we don't want to know who made him do that?
The Chair: I'd like to follow up on Senator Dagenais' question. As you know, with our hearings we are doing our best to have a public conversation with respect to identifying the problem and being able to assess what supports the ideology that obviously accompanies this type of activity. What can prevent it?
The question put by Senator Dagenais to you is how can governments, the federal and maybe the provincial government, help and assist within those communities, in this case the Muslim community that you referred to, the vast majority, to be able to counteract this type of extremist ideology that is being perpetuated.
You have just said that the RCMP is in a situation where some might say they obviously are working with the individuals involved within the community and can identify the community. At the end of the day, they are responsible for enforcing the laws.
The question then has to be, within that community, if it's not the RCMP or other government agencies, who within that organization or within that community would be best suited to be able to work within the community to move it ahead? You're not going to change this overnight.
Mr. Fatah: Sure.
The Chair: If you could answer that in a manner that tells us, on the record, what could be done.
Mr. Fatah: Absolutely. CSIS and the new legislative powers that the government is introducing will be very helpful in that matter.
Let me give you the example of the Toronto 18. They were busted by good intelligence work.
The Chair: That's right.
Mr. Fatah: Right? Nobody is out doing community outreach or playing basketball. There was a spy, $300,000 was spent — well invested — he brought the code and the convictions, but tell me who let the convicted guy out of this country to go and die in Syria?
I'm not a senator or an MP. I'm just saying we have evidence of what works and what doesn't. We know there are people being injured in Syria who come back for health treatment and then go back. We have people who support the Haider family who work with the RCMP. The RCMP says these are our good guys. That's a self-confessed murderer, a terrorist.
We need to have our ideas clearer. So the Toronto 18 mechanism works. CSIS should be empowered. Their job is to develop intelligence, and not by working with a community group but working within it.
Senator Dagenais: With your permission, I have a clarification.
[Translation]
Mr. Fatah, we are going to talk about community leaders. How could they work with Canada to prevent radicalization? Let us not think about the RCMP, but about community leaders. Then, I would ask whether we can establish a relationship of trust between the government, the local communities and the RCMP.
I would like to know how the community leaders could prevent radicalization.
[English]
Mr. Fatah: That is an excellent question, senator. Community leaders are leaders of cultural communities, not religious clerics who are paid to show us the moral compass of how to live as good human beings. If you go to any Muslim event, it will look different than what your mosque looks like. Go to any wedding with me, and I will tell you that you won't see the hijabs and burkas you see at the mosques. The way to reach the community leaders is to reach with the cultural communities that sing and dance the way Canadians do. Nobody reaches out to the Nile Foundation, which is an Egyptian group. Nobody has ever reached out to some symphony in Montreal.
I can give you a number of cultural groups that meet every year and have fun — dinners, games, children playing. We have focused on Muslims as if the only thing a Muslim does is preach and pray. That's not what we are. We are just like you. We don't like going to the mosque. We go there and we have to sit. We are old; we can't sit on the floor, many of us. We are 65 now. The guy is always boring. He has the microphone. He is like the 12th century Catholic priest speaking in Latin, which I can't understand. Eighty per cent of Canada's Muslims don't understand Arabic, and 100 per cent of the sermons are in Arabic. For goodness' sake, that's not where our community leaders are.
I'm not a community leader. I'm just a journalist. Senator Ataullahjan is a community leader. She's a senator. She should be the community leader. The RCMP should work with her. There was another Muslim senator. There are members of Parliament. They're community leaders. They get elected, MPs, whether they're New Democrats, Liberal or Conservative. They are the leaders.
If the imams have to become leaders, let them fight elections and get into Parliament. Parliamentarians are the leaders. We elect you. We respect you, whether we oppose you or not. But don't tell me that I need a 12th century monk from the Sinai to tell me what to do with landing on the comet. This doesn't work. So stop meeting with people of the 12th century; start meeting with people of the 21st century.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: If it is any consolation, over the course of three months, I attended Maghrebian, Lebanese and Armenian evenings, and I can tell you that I had a lot of fun with the people of the different communities.
[English]
Mr. Fatah: Precisely.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: We danced, and we ate well.
[English]
Senator Stewart Olsen: I wonder if in the Muslim community, when there are people who do speak out, is there support for them within the Muslim community? Are there support structures that they would dare to come and say so-and-so — I wonder about the responsibility being taken by the community itself, and do they need assistance?
Mr. Fatah: There are huge numbers of Muslims who, within their homes, are desperate to get rid of the image that we have. My daughter works for the CBC. None of my nieces — well, I shouldn't be saying that. This will be recorded. But people want to become Canadians. Don't force us to become something else. Everyone who wants to integrate faces an obstacle. Everyone who wants to go away is funded. Not a dollar spent by the entire Canadian government is there to support those Muslims who oppose ISIS — not one.
In 2005, you may be aware of the sharia debate in Quebec and Ontario, the death threats that the Quebec assembly member Fatima Houda-Pepin faced. What we endured in that debate, thank God the Ontario government had the wisdom and the National Assembly of Quebec had a unanimous resolution to reject sharia. Britain is paying the price for not having Muslims to come out. It wasn't easy for us.
What are the two things that happen when a Muslim stands up against the mullahs? He doesn't get a plot to bury himself or his parents in the graveyard. He's never invited to a wedding or birthday party, which, in a marginalized community, is social ostracization, which destroys the very soul of the first-generation immigrant because he's not entertained by anyone. The social pressures are such that they affect you back home. The very people involved in this moral crime of forcing people not to be Canadian are rewarded by politicians, police and the intelligentsia.
It is a sad story, which perhaps my daughter will someday write about: the decades lost, when people came to this country to offer, and because they wanted to be Tommy Douglas, they wanted to be the Diefenbakers, they even wanted to be supporters of the PQ, they were told, ''No, you need to go eat a samosa somewhere and dress up in a bizarre way. The RCMP will come and entertain you.''
I don't want this outreach. Please stay away. Keep away from us. When somebody issues a death threat and the police come to my house to investigate me for making a false claim, what does it tell my children? They sent Muslim police officers to my home. Senators, it is a comedy of errors what is happening, but very few will tell you this because nobody wants to wash the dirty linen in public.
Senator Mitchell: Mr. Fatah, my experience with the Muslim community is so fundamentally different than yours. I know so many wonderful, remarkable, amazing, beautiful people. Don't say anything till I'm finished, please.
Mr. Fatah: I'm sorry?
Senator Mitchell: Don't interrupt me.
Mr. Fatah: Did I?
Senator Mitchell: Just about. I find that the implication that every single imam in this country is inciting people to violence, which is in a sense what you said --
Mr. Fatah: No.
Senator Mitchell: — because the first prayer --
Mr. Fatah: No. Don't put words in my mouth, senator, please.
Senator Mitchell: My first question is have you been to every mosque in the country? You say preaching on Friday starts with a prayer that talks about a battle with non-Muslim people?
Mr. Fatah: Senator, I resent the fact that you are teaching me my religion, number one. You will have to live 65 years of my life — 10 years in Saudi Arabia and 30 years in Pakistan and 25 years here — to dare to tell me what is Islam.
Number two, I did not say they incite violence. Those are words that you are putting in my mouth. You should not do that. You are a senator. You should be the role model not to change my words.
Number three, I suggested that every Friday prayer is preceded by a prayer asking for the defeat of the infidel at the hands of the Muslims, and I stand by it, sir. That prayer has been going on for 1,400 years.
I didn't say that you did not meet Muslims or that Muslims were not fantastic. I am a Muslim and I am fantastic, and I am the role model for Muslims in this country. The people that you buy, as a Liberal senator, in creating multiculturalism and sidetracking us away from the challenges that we face, I resent the fact that you implicated me as an Islamophobe, and that is exactly what politicians like you do to silence us.
The Chair: Colleagues, we're getting to the end of our time. I want to thank Mr. Fatah for coming before us and taking the time and the effort to be before us and put his opinion forward.
This is an extract from an article on Shia Muslims.
(3) The problem with Shia groups is that they claim to follow Hadhrat Ali (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), but at the same time they denounce and accuse the other three Khulfa-e-Rashideen as wrong doers (Asthaghfiruallah).
They also claim that after Prophet Mohammad (صلى الله عليه و آله وسلم) left this world; only 4 Sahabah were steadfast in Islam. (i) Hadhrat Salman Farsi (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), (ii) Hadhrat Abu Dhar Ghaffari (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), (iii) Hadhrat Miqdad bin Aswad (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ), and (iv) Hadhrat Amaar bin Yaasir (رضئ اللہ تعالی عنہ). This is a disrespectful belief as it questions the integrity and Islamic character of other Sahabah and Khulfa-e-Rashideen (رضئ اللھ تعالی عنہم اجمعین ).
The above shia belief is similar in nature with Salafi beliefs who claim that after the first generation of Sahabah, the entire Muslim community till the birth of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab were apostates. The majority of Salafi groups believe that whoever follows Imams of Fiqh is Mushrik. In the Book of Judgments from Al-Insaaf, Ibn Taymiyyah said - "He who makes it compulsory to follow an Imam, then his repentance is sought and if he does not repent then he is killed." In other words Ibn Taymiyyah has given the fatwa that all Muslims who follow Imams of Fiqh should be asked to repent and if they don't, then they should be killed.
famous Shia Cleric Mullah Baqir Majilisi in his book 'Haqqul Yaqeen', 2 - 519. He wrote "When Imam Mahdi appears, he will deal with the Sunnis and their Ulema first before dealing with the Kuffar and he will kill and annihilate all of them."
(7) Taqiyya is a mandatory Shia practice of concealing the truth for the purposes of misleading unsuspecting people into the Shia fold. Similarly, Salafis conceal truthful Islamic teachings to baptize unsuspecting people into Salafism. Salafis openly change the books of Ahadith and other Islamic literature and misinterpret the meanings of Quranic verses or simply deny the existence of a Hadith or declare it Da'ef if it is not suitable for their self fabricated Aqeedah.
http://www.cifiaonline.com/shiagroupsintheworld.htm