Once Were Radicals goes west!

Irfan Yusuf, author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist, is heading west to Perth for events hosted by the Centre for Muslim States & Societies at the University of Western Australia. He’ll be in Perth from Saturday 17 October to Monday 19 October 2009. Sadly it will only be a short visit, but he is trying to squeeze as many events in this short space of time as possible.

For more details about his tour, e-mail oncewereradicals@gmail.com.

Irfan Yusuf writes in Crikey on how tabloids report street riots …

A lesson in contrasts: how one riot was reported

It’s amazing what a difference skin colour makes to how violent street riots are reported.The Sunday Telegraph ran a story in its print edition about an incident in London on Friday, a special occasion for Muslims as it marked the beginning of the last 10 nights. Friday was also the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Two far-Right, including the newly formed English Defence League hosted a rally outside London’s largest mosque in Harrow. Previous EDL marches have featured skinheads making Nazi salutes and shouting slogans such as  ”I hate Pakis more than you”. Last month’s rally at a Birmingham shopping centre ended in “violent skirmishes and running battles through the city’s busy shopping streets on Saturday evening”. EDL’s website carries an image of remains of the bus destroyed by a suicide bomber at Tavistock Square in London on July 7, 2005. Among the dead on that bus was a 21-year-old English woman named   Shahara Islam. Ironically, the other far-Right protest group calls itself Stop the Islamification of Europe, has as its slogan: “Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense”. Yep, the terrorists and their alleged opponents from EDL and SIE  want to remove Islam. The UK press, including Murdoch’s papers, focused on possible links between the EDL and the neo-Fascist British National Party whose leader  wants to visit Australia. But the Sunday Telegraph chose to paint the far-Right thugs as an innocuous “anti-Islamic group” carrying out a “protest” with “peaceful” intent. The Tele website reproduced a somewhat longer story from AFP, which described “angry Muslim youths” throwing “bricks and bottles” at police officers and who “confronted” and “surged” upon protesters who were described as “a dozen mostly shaven-headed protestors” (a pleasant way to refer to skinheads). It also included this typeset observation: “Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar. End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar”. Unlike the sugar-coated Tele reports, a British Cabinet Minister  had no qualms in calling a spade a spade, “warning of ‘parallels’ between right-wing groups planning protests in Muslim neighbourhoods and Oswald Mosley’s incendiary marched through Jewish areas of east London in the 1930s”. So skinheads making Nazi salutes are mere innocent protestors in the eyes of the Tele. But what of young men in Auburn, who describe police from the Middle East Crime Squad as “kefeirs” [sic.] invading “brother’s house” on Facebook posts? Well, they’re described in today’s Daily Telegraph as “troublemakers” who “flash up inflammatory references to police and rally their friends for a confrontation”. The incident was described as “A RIOT by Muslim youth in Auburn”. What the halal does that mean? Auburn has the highest concentration of Muslims of any local government area in Australia, totalling about 16,000. Around half are aged 15-30, some 50% of whom are blokes. Imagine a line of Auburn police officers having to confront 4000 Muslim youth. Somehow I doubt the cops would last long enough for the Tele photographers to arrive on the scene.. And anyway, what kind of “Muslim youth” are we talking about? Would the Middle East Crime Squad be raiding the homes of Bosnians? Or Afghan Hazaras? Or Bangladeshis? Or Turks? Or Albanians? Maybe next time these young boys want to start a riot, they can avoid negative reporting by taking a cue from the Sydney tabloid’s preferred thugs by making Nazi salutes. Better to be a London Nazi skinhead than a Sydney Lebanese Muslim.

(This article was first published on the Crikey website on Monday 14 September 2009.)

Irfan Yusuf writes in Crikey on suicide terrorism and foreign policy …

Terrorism is about occupation, not religion

Irfan Yusuf writes:

Why did the three young Muslim men convicted this week in Britain of a major terrorist plot decide to kill thousands of people? Two of the men were children of Pakistani migrants. The third was of Jamaican heritage. The plot involved the use of liquid bombs that would have blown up some seven airliners bound for North American cities.

Excerpts from their “martyrdom mission” video recordings all point to one simple theme: “Get out of our lands”.

If this was about religion, we’d have seen many more ordinary British and other Muslims joining such missions. If this were about religion, even 1% of 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide would mean 12 million terrorists located in every corner of the planet. We’d be seeing much more terrorism than we are now.

But suicide terrorism isn’t about religion. If it was, the largest and most successful user of suicide terrorism would not be Sri Lanka’s crypto-Marxist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam. The Tigers believe their traditional lands in the Jaffna Peninsula of Northern Sri Lanka are under occupation. The Sri Lankan government insists the Tigers can be dismissed just by using the “terrorist” label and by focussing on ethnic wedge issues. Distorting genuinely held grievances is as absurd a strategy as ignoring them.

The IRA used terrorism to fight British occupation. The Brits tried to discredit the IRA by using the “t” word, thus trying to divert international attention away from the genuinely held grievances of Irish nationalists.

These young men and their Al-Qaeda masters’s central grievances are no different. In his recently published book Fit To Print: Misrepresenting The Middle East Dutch journalist and Middle East Correspondent Joris Luyendijk reminds us of what he calls “the third dimension” of Osama bin Laden’s message which “has hardly made it to the Western media”.

Luyendijk writes about Western interference in the form of propping up dictatorships “…with money, weapons, and intelligence for decades”: 

Bin Laden pointed out this interference in practically every video, and his message could be summarised in two words: sod off … Prominent Westerners often labelled the 9/11 attacks as “a direct assault on Western civilisation”. But whoever looks at Bin Laden’s story will see that he presents his program as one of self-defence … This part of Bin Laden’s message has remained, for the most part, out of the Western news stream, meaning that very few Westerners know about their enemy’s motives.

Yep, our exposure to terrorism is very much linked to our foreign policy. And if the words of an experienced Arabic-speaking journalist like Luyendijk aren’t enough to convince you, consider the findings of Professor Robert Pape who has studied every suicide terrorist attack from 1980 to 2004 and who concludes that “…overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland”.

None of this provides any moral justification for the acts of terror cells and their sponsors. And there’s no doubt that religious leaders also have an enormous responsibility in ensuring that vulnerable young people aren’t sucked into fringe fundamentalist theology used by such groups.

But our politicians also mustn’t be sucked into fringe fundamentalist politics of insisting terrorism happens in a political vacuum and our foreign policies (especially ones that involve our military presence overseas) don’t increase our exposure to terror.

First published in Crikey on Tuesday 8 September 2009.

Irfan Yusuf writes in the NZ Herald on the media terror circus …

The following article was published in the New Zealand Herald on Thursday 20 August 2009.

Terror and the press a circus act

Well it’s that time of the year again. Time for the semi-annual metropolitan terrorism raid, for Australia’s various law enforcement and intelligence agencies to show that they still have some intelligence.

And time for Australia’s media outlets to show just how little intelligence they have left.

In early August the Australian Federal Police, along with State Police in New South Wales and Victoria and with help from ASIO and the NSW Crime Commission, carried out secret raids in homes across Melbourne suburbs. The 4am raids were kept so secret their details were published in the Australian newspaper being sold across the eastern states at around 1.30am on the same morning.

Police, of course, were furious.

They’d made a deal with the editors of that American-owned newspaper known affectionately as the Oz. Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland said the early publication of details of these top-secret raids could have tipped off the terror suspects or their helpers. Or something like that.

Overland declared the leak posed “an unacceptable risk to the operation and an unacceptable risk to my staff”.

It’s a serious allegation to make against any newspaper, let alone one whose editorial line is famous in Australia for frequently flexing its national security muscles. The Oz famously supported the Iraq war, and its opinion and editorial pages are home to some of the most hawkish voices in the country.

The cosy relationship between police and the media was bound to turn sour one day. Up until now, Australian papers had happily and unquestioningly printed just about every allegation made by prosecutors in an Australian terrorism trial.

Once tested in the courtroom, many of these allegations are later rejected by judges and juries, but that’s too late to change the verdict in the court of public opinion.

And who was caught in the raids? Apparently those arrested were involved in a plot to attack the Holsworthy Army Base in southwestern Sydney. The group is accused of having links to al-Shabab (an Arabic word meaning “the lads”) in Somalia. The young men apprehended include Australians of Somali heritage.

Writing in the edition of the Oz sold on Melbourne streets three hours before the raid, Cameron Stewart described the group as consisting of Melbourne taxi drivers and construction workers “having little understanding of Somali politics or theology”. The same could be said for those involved in his report that went to print.

In one description of al-Shabab, we find these words: “Its followers shun alcohol, cigarettes, music and videos, choosing an austere, violent interpretation of Islam.”

Now most Muslims I know shun alcohol and cigarettes.The avoidance of music and naughty videos also isn’t uncommon among devout Muslims, largely for similar reasons as many conservative Christians.

Thankfully our law enforcement services don’t use such indicators to identify potential terrorists or else they’d be taking a fair few devout Presbyterians into custody.

The reports placed enormous emphasis on terms like “sharia” and “Islam” and “Muslims” and “wahhabi”. But anyone with even elementary knowledge of Somali politics would know that it is just as much (if not more) about clan as religion. There’s little evidence al-Shabab or any other warring faction has replaced clan-based loyalties with a unifying common religion.

The evidence in these terrorism cases will be tested before the courts. In past cases where convictions were secured, crucial evidence came from persons from within the communities. Often this has come from imams, preachers and teachers, including those associated with vilified groups such as members of the “wahhabi” sect.

Writing on his Herald-Sun blog, which boasts over one million readers per month, Andrew Bolt wrote: “The alleged terrorists arrested in Melbourne yesterday were all Muslims, from either Somalia or Lebanon … In fact, if you wanted to confirm a stereotypical profile of a modern terrorist, this pretty much fitted the bill.” So you have to be Somali or Lebanese to be a terrorist. I guess that lets Osama bin Laden off the hook.

Elsewhere he wrote: “The rise of yet another Islamist terror group suggests there is something in Muslim or Arabic culture peculiarly susceptible to the call to violence.” I always thought Arabic was the name of a language, not a culture. And I never knew that 1.2 billion people identifying as Muslims could all have the same culture.

And so the terror circus continues, with religion used by overseas extremist morons to threaten our national security, while national security is used by an assortment of bigots to threaten our social cohesion, so further threatening our national security. Go figure.

* Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and associate editor of AltMuslim.com.

Review in the Sun-Herald …

Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist was reviewed by Robyn Doreian in the Sun-Herald on Sunday 2 August 2009. Here is an excerpt:

HAD Irfan Yusuf not outgrown a flirtation with Islamic fascism, his current address might well be Guantanamo Bay. In 1985, when he was 16, the lure of jihad became so strong that he felt ready to make “the ultimate sacrifice”.

Yusuf is now a lawyer and respected political commentator and Once Were Radicals is the 40-year-old’s journey into extremism …

Far from a dour account of events leading to his galvanisation, Yusuf explains the complexity of Middle Eastern culture and its history in lively, simple language.

Added to accessibility is laugh-out-loud humour, as he pokes fun at John Howard’s national security fridge magnets, and writes of his less-than-altruistic reasons for being involved in the Islamic Youth Association: the good-looking “sisters” in hijab.

More than anything, Once Were Radicals provides an engaging look at the Australian Muslim experience: what it means to be a part of Muslim culture, how it feels to be stereotyped, and non-Muslims’ role in the wider “Muslim question”.

Irfan Yusuf writes in Crikey on the Melbourne terror raids …

The following piece was published in Crikey on Tuesday 4 August 2009.

Somali politics is just as much about clan as it is religion.

What drives young second and third generation men living in relatively comfortable surrounds to involve themselves in an overseas conflict whose nuances they have little or no understanding of? Certainly the AFP, NSW and Victorian Police and the NSW Crime Commission have been asking these questions during the seven months of their investigation into a possible attack on an Australian army barracks.

The front page story in The Australian today provides some answers but also too many unanswered questions. According to Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland, publication by The Oz posed “an unacceptable risk to the operation and an unacceptable risk to my staff”.

It’s a serious allegation to make against a paper whose editorial line so frequently flexes its cultural warrior and national security muscles. On the other hand, it’s unclear what dangers newspaper reporting could pose to 400 heavily-armed investigators who cordoned off entire streets.

Some reporting and analysis showed a laughable ignorance of Somali and/or Muslim cultures. Cameron Stewart writes of the group of Melbourne taxi drivers and construction workers “having little understanding of Somali politics or theology”. Probably the same could be said for all those involved in the final version of Mr Stewart’s story that went to print.

The reports place enormous emphasis on terms like “Islam” and “Muslims” and “wahhabi”. But Somali politics is just as much (if not more) about clan as it is religion. There’s no evidence al-Shabaab (the group linked to the alleged proposed attack) or any other of the warring factions in Somalia have risen above the clan-based loyalties that have divided this nation for decades. Still, there’s no doubt that non-Somali Muslims and Somali kids with little understanding of clan undercurrents could be attracted by the lure of pan-Islamic rhetoric.

What really made me almost fall off my chair was this sentence describing the al-Shabaab group:

Its followers shun alcohol, cigarettes, music and videos, choosing an austere, violent interpretation of Islam.

Most Muslims I know (including myself) shun alcohol (though I’m just a teetotaller, not a teetotalitarian) and cigarettes. Avoiding music and naughty videos also isn’t uncommon among Muslims, though largely for similar reasons as conservative Christians.

This kind of pedestrian theological speculation really isn’t helpful, especially when it involves the kind of simplistic analysis you’d expect from tabloids. I guess Andrew Bolt and his buddies will have lots of fun speculating on how having the wrong ethnicity and/or religion turns you into a terrorist.

Irfan Yusuf writes on the Rushdie fatwa in the Canberra Times …

The following article was published in the Canberra Times on Monday 3 August 2009.

Fate of the curious fatwa

Muslims really are a pathetic lot. Even after two decades, 1.2billion haven’t collectively been able to knock off Salman Rushdie. Assuming, of course, they collectively wanted to.

The ABC Compass program’s website promotes its episode on ”The Satanic Verses Affair” by claiming the novel had sparked riots across the Muslim world.

I wish I knew what the precise boundaries of this ”Muslim world” are, given that some 30 per cent of Muslims live as minorities. And when 1.2billion people across the globe are spontaneously sparked into one huge riot, I’d expect the ozone layer to be almost destroyed and the Pacific Ocean to rise exponentially, overrunning even our Great Dividing Range. Alas, Lake George remains empty.

That’s not to say that there weren’t Muslims who objected to the book in various ways. Some refused to buy it. Others wrote passionate letters to the editor in newspapers. A number of protesters died, as did some translators of Rushdie’s book. Some people exploited the issue for their own political ends. The Compass program refers to one such person: ”Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini invoked a fatwa, effectively sentencing the writer to death.”

I’d just started my second year of university when the Satanic Verses controversy began. The late Ayatollah Khomeini’s self-styled Islamic revolution in Iran had just ended a disastrous war with Iraq. His revolution was demonised by the West for its role in sponsoring terrorist groups in Lebanon that had kidnapped numerous foreigners. In other words, Khomeini was condemned by America for doing what then United States President Ronald Reagan was busy doing in Latin America.

Khomeini was also demonised by Saudi Arabia, whose royal family and religious establishment had thus far had a monopoly over Islamic religious fervour, given its custody of the holy pilgrimage sites in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis painted Khomeini as a sectarian figure, a representative of Shia Muslims who made up hardly 10 per cent of the entire Muslim population. The Saudis, who funded and bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s army against Iran, painted the Iran-Iraq war as a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias, despite the fact that Iraq had a Shia majority and plenty of Shia troops fighting on the frontline.

In Australia, this rivalry between Saudi and Iranian political Islam played out in the form of free literature flooding mosques and Muslim youth groups. Iranian religious foundations had their literature promoting the revolution as a unifying force for all Muslims and painting the Saudis as champions of a fringe ”wahhabi” sect that despised both Sunnis and Shias. Saudi literature painted the Iranian revolution as a nefarious force seeking to infiltrate Muslim communities using intrigue and dishonesty.

Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was curious.

Rushdie’s most offensive passages were reserved for Aisha, one of the prophet Muhammad’s wives who is often painted in an extremely negative light in traditional Shia devotional literature. Saudi-funded imams made full use of this fact to undermine the legitimacy of Khomeini’s fatwa.

So did any Australian Muslims support Khomeini’s fatwa?

In his book Australia for Pakistanis, Syed Atiq ul Hasan mentions the case of a Sydney Pakistani restaurateur interviewed by Jana Wendt on the Channel 9 A Current Affair on three consecutive nights. A Current Affair presented him as a prominent Muslim community leader, and showed him giving the Australian Government an ultimatum to remove all copies of the book from bookshop shelves within 48 hours.

”I am a very violent man and the people who are helping me are violent,” he was shown as declaring.

And which people were with him? Which Muslim community did he lead? We never quite found out. He was arrested and then released on bail. The magistrate obviously didn’t feel the man had too many followers, but the violence of his words proved instrumental in painting a negative picture in the minds of ordinary non-Muslim Australians.

Melbourne historian Bilal Cleland in his 2002 book The Muslims of Australia: a brief history mentions another incident around this time a Sydney-based Shia organisation holding a rally calling for Rushdie’s book to be banned. Children at the rally were photographed wearing T-shirts with the slogan ”Kill Rushdie”.

Cleland cites an article written by the late Pamela Bone in The Age entitled ”Malaise of the West drives more to Koran” in which she writes: ”Scores of Letters to the Editor and callers to talk-back radio in recent weeks indicate that Islam has a terrible image in the minds of many Australians.”

Cleland himself was inclined to agree: ”Even over a decade later the damage to the reputation of Islam attributable to this issue remains in the minds of many Australians.”

For most Muslims, the Rushdie fatwa and controversy was one huge embarrassment. In my own case, I couldn’t understand how a work of fiction could be deemed blasphemous. I also found it difficult to understand how some of my Pakistani Muslim ”unkulz” could find Rushdie offensive without having read his book.

Back then, few names as unusual as mine appeared as by-lines in mainstream English language newspapers. Indeed, the first such name I saw was that of Rushdie himself in a 1988 review he wrote for the Guardian of Palestinian academic Edward Said’s autobiography After The Last Sky. It was my first proper introduction to the Palestinian cause, one that did not involve images of plane hijackings.

I still haven’t read the controversial book. I tried reading it but was soon bored out of my brain. Still, writing boring books shouldn’t be deemed an act of blasphemy or a hanging offence. But nor should all those identifying as Muslims be lumped in with Khomeini’s crowd in the manner some of Rushdie’s defenders enjoyed doing.

On the eve of the Crusades, one Syrian Muslim scholar named Abul Ala al-Ma’arri was told of nasty uncivilised European crusader thugs who even resorted to cannibalism. His response? ”There are only two classes of people in this world: those with dogmatism but little intelligence and those with lots of intelligence but little dogma!”

Perhaps therein lies the lesson of the Rushdie affair.

Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-fascist (Allen & Unwin; 2009)

Irfan Yusuf on “Asia Down Under”

The following video is taken from an episode was broadcast on New Zealand TV ONE in late July 2009. It was recorded in late June when the author was in the process of developing a bronchial infection.

Irfan Yusuf writes about faith schools in Crikey …

Irfan Yusuf, author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist, writes about faith schools and religious discrimination exemptions in Crikey on 29 July 2009.

Costello shows little faith in the possibilities of education

St Andrews Cathedral School Old Boy Irfan Yusuf writes:

In 1980, I started grade five at Sydney’s only Anglican cathedral school. My parents wanted to send me to a school which taught their values. But my parents are not Anglican. They are South Asian Sunni Muslims. Among my closest friends at school were a Jew, a Mormon and an atheist brought up in a nominally Catholic family. Their parents may have sent them to the school for similar reasons.

But Peter Costello thinks the main reason parents send their kids to a Christian school is this: “Parents who choose to send their children to a Christian school have a reasonable expectation that the child will get a Christian education. How could the school fulfil its obligation to the parents if it is required by law to employ non-Christian or anti-Christian teachers to provide it?”

Perhaps Mr Costello should consult his well-heeled constituents of Sikh, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and other non-Christian faiths to find out why they choose to send their kids to exclusive (often selective) Christian schools. Perhaps having a name like Sydney Grammar or St Andrews on one’s resume can help overcome the prejudice of employers at allegedly unpronounceable surnames.

Presently religious institutions and faith schools are exempt from the provisions of anti-discrimination legislation which forbid discrimination in employment on the basis of religion. This could change in Victoria, and Costello writes in both The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald expressing his opposition “to restrict the freedom of religious schools to choose their employees on the basis of their religious faith”.

I’ve acted for both Muslim and non-denominational independent schools in workplace relations matters. Muslim schools employ non-Muslim teachers, only requiring them to display respect and empathy to Muslim religious values. Female teachers aren’t required to cover their hair. School principals told me that they had to hire non-Muslim staff as there weren’t enough Muslim teachers.

This presumably means these schools would take advantage of discrimination exemptions and employ only Muslim teachers if they had half a chance. Would Costello support Muslim schools insisting Muslim kids only be taught by Muslim teachers? Perish the thought! This kind of non-integration and breach of Australian values is what Costello so often pontificated on when he was treasurer.

I’d be appalled by the idea of kids from Islamic schools not having non-Muslim teachers. Hopefully by the time there are enough Muslim teachers, the law will have changed so that neither Muslim nor any other faith schools can discriminate. Religious and cultural cocoons aren’t healthy for children or for social cohesion.

Then again, Anglican cocoons didn’t harm me. Back when I was at school, to be employed at St Andrews as a teacher, you had to show some kind of commitment to Christianity. Some teachers evidenced this by a letter from their parish priest. We’re not sure exactly how my popular Year 11 English Teacher, Mr Scott, evidenced his Christian commitment. But at the last St Andrews’ Class of ’87 reunion, one of the lads recalled Scott had a habit of wearing polka-dotted ties. I’m not sure if he still wears them to work.

Review in Bookseller + Publisher Online, May/June 2009

Here are some excerpts from this review by freelance writer and part time bookseller Lucy Meredith published in the May/June 2009 edition of Bookseller + Publisher Online.

The book won the 2007 Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues and it’s a modern commentary on Muslim culture. It’s highly political and opinionated, but also a story about belonging and acceptance, common to all teens, religious or otherwise … Those interested in history, religion and politics will enjoy this story, others will be left with a heightened sense of awareness and understanding.