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Former PM Scott Morrison is making a rare post-politics intervention. Perhaps stung by current PM Anthony Albanese’s ridiculous, spiteful attempt to shift blame for the anti-Semitism crisis, Morrison is publicly calling on the so-called ‘peaceful moderate Muslim majority’ to step up and actually show it.
In one of the most extraordinary and detailed policy interventions by a former prime minister, Mr Morrison has told the nation’s Islamic leadership that they can no longer avoid serious questions over how they practise and govern their religion in Australia.
He has also told the imams that they face a post-Bondi reckoning, as Christians did after the child sex abuse royal commission.
Morrison is urging Australia to do what countries such as the left’s beloved Denmark and France already do. These include requiring all religious teaching to be delivered in English rather than Arabic. As investigations such as Undercover Mosque in the UK showed, what mosques preach in the local language and what they preach in Arabic, a language that few outsiders understand, are very, very different. As we’ve also seen in Australia, when Arabic-speaking preachers are caught out, they hide behind spurious claims of being ‘misinterpreted’.
Morrison also wants an end to the secrecy prevalent in Islamic schools and a mechanism for preachers to be held to account.
The former Liberal leader has also proposed an audit of Islamic religious education to make sure it is free of antisemitism and promotes coexistence, and for any materials to be translated into English.
He has also called for the Foreign Interest Transparency Scheme his government set up to be expanded to foreign religious groups trying to fund or direct activities in Australia.
That’s making the big assumption, of course, that Islamic leaders want to crack down on extremism and anti-Semitism.
The nation’s top imams declared Labor’s antisemitism and hate laws as “Islamophobia in law and practice” while Mr Albanese’s hand-picked Islamophobia envoy cited research from under-fire anti-Israel academic Randa Abdel-Fattah to say the reforms passed last week could be a “rallying cry” against Muslims.
If laws against anti-Semitism are ‘Islamophobia’, what does that say about Islam?
As for curbing foreign influence, Islamic leaders are showing their true colours, there, too.
The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils teamed up with antisemitic and radical Islamist body Hizb ut-Tahrir to attack Labor’s move to list the latter as a hate group.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is listed as a terror organisation in multiple countries, including Britain, and banned in more, including many Islamic countries.
This is who mainstream Islam in Australia is nailing its colours to.
“Religious leaders must also clearly reject political Islam and transnational movements that weaponise faith for power rather than worship and warn their faithful about such movements,” Mr Morrison said in his Israel speech.
“For the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims, and imams, these reforms should change little. They are not designed to police the mainstream but to protect it from a potentially very dangerous, even deadly fringe.”
That’s making the assumption that it is a “fringe”.
