…big favour
WHEN you think about it, Sheik Hilaly has done us a favour. For one thing, his recently translated sermon, declaring women as Satan’s agents who incite rape with immodest dress, has at last provoked Australia’s moderate Muslims to find a strong voice, as they lined up last week to condemn the mufti.
smh.com.au/articles/2006/10/ … 57803.html
[i]As well, by revealing so unequivocally his primitive views of women, Hilaly destroyed the claims by cultural relativists that Sydney’s series of gang rapes by Muslim men had nothing to do with culture or religion.
“If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street … without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat?” he said in the sermon to 500 people last month at Lakemba mosque. “The uncovered meat is the problem. If the meat was covered, the cats wouldn’t roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won’t get it … if the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen.”
Then in a clear reference to the gang rape trial of Bilal Skaf, he said: “A woman possesses the weapon of seduction. It is she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us … then it’s a look, then a smile, then a conversation … then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”
The only incitement committed by 18-year-old Ms C, who was raped 25 times by up to 14 men including Skaf in 2000, was being Australian. Sitting on a train, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, and reading The Great Gatsby, she was a slut, an “Aussie pig” as they called her later, while boasting: “I’m going to f— you Leb style.”
“I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference,” she said.
Hilaly was simply echoing what the father of four Pakistani-born gang-rapists from Ashfield once said of the young victims: “What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don’t go out at night.”
Hilaly’s younger, Australian-born counterparts have been saying the same thing for years.
“A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world,” Sheik Feiz Mohammad told 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall last year. “Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world … strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses.”
Egyptian-born Hilaly may have been escalating his rhetoric to shore up support as extremist groups such as the Islamic Youth Movement encroach on his territory.
It is worth remembering that terrorism experts have regarded Hilaly as a moderating influence, and Singapore-based Rohan Gunaratna described him as “a mild man, compared to others”.
Reports yesterday that Hilaly’s planned deportation in 1986 was stopped by none other than the former member for Bankstown, Paul Keating, and that a public servant lost his job for trying to stand up to the political interference, are certainly frustrating.
But Hilaly, who claimed in a 2004 sermon in Lebanon, “I have four wives and plenty of children”, is an Australian citizen now. Deportation is not an option.
Moreover, in the rush to banish the mufti, people should realise that whoever replaces him might be worse, as a new generation of radical firebrands emerges who have long fought Hilaly for control of the influential mosque.
Sometimes pragmatism favours the devil you know.[/i]
[size=75]Courtesy of SMH.com.au[/size]
Wow.
