Limit Muslim intake, urges visiting scholar
jason frenkel
ajn.com.au
A VISITING Israeli expert on Islam has urged Australia to cap its intake of Muslim immigrants, warning “life will become untenable” unless the Muslim population is kept in check.
Raphael Israeli, a professor in Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said Australia was in danger of being swamped by Muslims – especially from Indonesia – and called for a “preventative policy” to protect national security and ensure Muslims remained a “marginal minority”.
Professor Israeli, whose visit is in part sponsored by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, has just begun a six-week stint as a scholar-in-residence at the Shalom Institute in Sydney, where he is teaching a course on “Understanding Islam”.
An author of 20 books on the Muslim, Arab and Chinese worlds, he will also give talks in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and New Zealand.
In an interview with the AJN, Professor Israeli said radical Islam would not be defeated by a war of words.
“You have to infiltrate all those circles where the Muslim radicals operate, to arrest them, and to limit immigration into western countries where these Muslims, who are bent on destroying western civilisation ... to limit immigration, even students who apply to come from Islamic countries to the West,” he said.
“It serves no purpose when you have this home-grown terrorist, who has been preparing for years to blow up undergrounds in London, and all you do is lead a war of words. The war of words doesn’t help. There is a whole gamut of actions that are possible in order to check this threat of Islam.”
Citing France, where Muslims comprise about nine per cent of the population, as an example, Professor Israeli warned growing Muslim communities could change the political, economic, and cultural fabric of a country.
“You have to adopt some kind of preventative policy. In order not to get there, limit the immigration and therefore you keep them a marginal minority, which will be a nuisance, but cannot pose a threat to the demographic and security aspects of a country.”
But Islamic Council of Victoria director Waleed Aly branded the comments “ill-advised and foolish” and said Professor Israeli didn’t understand Australia.
“It is clearly possible in the current environment to say things about Muslims that you simply cannot say about anyone else,” Aly said.
“The fundamental problem at the heart of this is that he seems to be suggesting that increased marginalisation of Muslim populations will somehow produce something other than mutual resentment. It should be obvious to anyone really that it’s doomed to failure.”
Officially, there are fewer than 300,000 Muslims in Australia according to the 2001 Census, but Islamic community officials estimate the actual number to be at least 500,000 – about 2.5 per cent of the population.
“Even though it’s so low, they are so vocal, and they make so much noise,” Professor Israeli said. “And therefore the situation has to be checked before they increase their numbers, because don’t forget in your immediate proximity dwells the largest or most populous Islamic country in the world [Indonesia], and by necessity, there is demographic pressure from there to channel the surplus of populations to wherever it’s possible.
“And one of the big possibilities is Australia, so they will continue to come legally, or illegally, and settle here, and when they get to the rate of the 10 per cent like in France, then you will see life will become untenable.”
He said France might already be at the “point of no return”.
“Then they control whole sections of the economy, there are areas in France where you cannot be elected to Parliament without the support of the Muslims and so on. And therefore, by increasing their numbers they start to have an impact on the social, economic, political and cultural nature of the country.”
He warned that radical Muslims would find it easier to “melt” into the community and plan terrorist acts without scrutiny from authorities if the growth of Australia’s Muslim population was allowed to continue.
“You will have then large concentrations of Muslims, so it’s not thousands, it will be millions, and when they become millions it’s a big mass where individual Muslims, including terrorists, can melt, and then go look for them.
“In England they already have that problem, they cannot locate them, they cannot sort them out from the general population, and sometimes you have to impose a curfew on a whole area to catch one or two or three terrorists, and by doing that you do an injustice to an entire population, and then they start complaining that they are discriminated against.”
Immigrant Muslims had a reputation for manipulating the values of their adopted countries to suit their own ends, he said.
“And that’s why Islam has become feared in western countries, which are open, democratic, and tolerant of others. And Muslim populations, which are very often minorities, very often abuse that hospitality and use democracy, openness and tolerance to their benefit, to spread their faith and to intimidate their hosts, and very often, to impose their standards and values upon them.” |
