Aussie Muslims Feel Under Siege

SYDNEY – Australian Muslim leaders have slammed the Howard government for continuing to single out the Muslim minority for criticism, warning such repetitive anti-Muslim remarks could alienate the minority further and spark racial violence.

"The government is engaging in gratuitous Islam bashing," the leader of the Islamic Friendship Association, Keysar Trad, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Sunday, September 3.

Australian Premier John Howard on Thursday, August 31, asked the country's Muslims once again to subscribe to Australian values.

"Fully integrating means accepting Australian values, it means learning as rapidly as you can the English language if you don't already speak it," he said in a radio interview.

The premier also accused Muslim men of not treating women as equals.

The remarks were backed by Howard's heir-apparent, Treasurer Peter Costello, in a television interview on Sunday.

"You have seen under the cover of a radical form of Islam, terrorism being perpetrated. You have seen it with September the 11th, you have seen it in Bali, you have seen it with the London bombings."

Trad complained of generalization.

"On the radicalism issue, they have acknowledged that it is a small fraction of less than one percent."

Muslims, who have been in Australia for more than 200 years, make up 1.5 percent of the 20 million population.

Racial Violence

Members of Howard's advisory body, the Muslim Community Reference Group, said his statements risked undermining their work, The Weekend Australian newspaper reported Saturday, September 2.

"We have already witnessed one incident in Sydney recently, in Cronulla. I don't want these scenes repeated, because when you antagonize the younger generation, they are bound to react," warned chairman Ameer Ali.

In September last year, e-mail and mobile phone messages urged White residents to beat-up "Lebs and wogs" -- racial slurs for people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern origin.

They moved after Lebanese youths had beaten a beach guard for snatching the hijab of a Muslim beachgoer.

Group member Mustapha Kara-Ali accused Howard of trying to appeal to "white Australia" by playing the "politics of the lowest denominator".

He said the description of Muslim men was misplaced, because the premier failed to take account of the domestic violence that affected the Western world.

Senior group member Aziza Abdel-Halim said the Howard's comments about Muslims needing to learn English was "hitting below the belt," said the paper.

"All migrants of all nationalities have problems with language when they first arrive, unless they've come from countries where English is a language," said the former English and history high school teacher.

Samier Dandan, another group member, had the same comment about accusing Muslims of being isolationists.

"If he talks about the Muslim community being isolationist, then he is possibly describing every other ethnic background in the country -- they have all adapted to some sense of isolation, because the majority in Australia have not accepted migrants well."

Most Australian Muslims blame Howard for fostering an image of the minority as the enemy within through his hard-line policies and unbalanced remarks.

Last year, he bluntly said that Muslim immigration to Australia had presented problems not seen in previous waves of migration from Europe and Asia.

In February, Howard, a staunch supporter of US President George Bush's war on terror and Iraq invasion, again angered the minority by saying he was concerned about extremist Muslim immigrants bent on jihad.