7.30 Report: The Mine and the Islamists

Well, that is quite a story on tonight’s 7.30 Report about The Mine and the weird Islamic fundamentalists. It is worth revisiting my diary for July 28 2005, July 27 2005 and July 26 2005. There were many earliier entries on Diary-X referring to the Islamic Student Forum in 2003, but they sadly have gone. There have been two forums since, but I did not attend them. My friend the Mufti of Watson’s Bay was one of the speakers at the first and second ones, and in fact told the students in no uncertain terms before the second one to make sure no “total crap” was handed out. The bulk of the sessions was reasonable, or where fundie/conservative (not the Mufti, that’s for sure!) it was sadly like Christian and Jewish glazed-eye literalists, the usual “I have a hotline to God” routine, you know: “The Book says, and it’s true because the Book says it’s true and when the Book says it is true it is true because the Book says it’s true because it is a True Book etc — in eternal circularity…” Mister Tariq, the principal fundie at the seminar, seemed to take everything literally and regarded Abraham, for example, as his best mate and as real and as knowable as John Howard. He also had this line where covering your wife (as in hijab) was cool because she was a precious possession, and just as you’d cover your Porsche if you had one… (Mind you, head scarves don’t offend me in the least if that’s what the wearers want to do; they even look rather nice quite often.)

All of which is sad, and the Khilafah mob are crazy as cut snakes in many respects. The argument on The 7.30 Report last night went thus:

 

About the St Matthias Churches

It is of course a recognised ploy, with the sincerest good reasons like stopping young persons from going to Hell, that fundamentalists and literalists target adolescents. Even the Pope is at it. The Mine Christian group and the protestant classes in non-compulsory Scripture — not to mention the University of NSW — have long been captured by the keen young things from The Church of the Holy Jensens, advocating “divine inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.”

 

David Lange Speech on Tolerance: Otago University Thursday 5 August 2004

It is healthy to turn to this speech last year by the late David Lange, former PM of New Zealand (Sirdan met him, by the way), especially in the light of John Howard’s announced receipt of the Woodrow Wilson award, and Peter Costello’s comments on anti-American teachers.

Although I was asked here to talk about peace, I am not what could be called a pacifist. I think that, like individuals, societies and nations have the right to defend themselves from attack. I think for example that the government of Kuwait was entitled to call for military assistance when it was invaded by Iraq in 1990. I think that this country, New Zealand, was right to identify itself with the victims of aggression as it did in 1939 when it declared war on Germany.

I am just as sure that there must be limits on the use of force. The use of force can only be justified if it is in proportion to the threat which is offered. Tomorrow is the anniversary of an attack which in my mind cannot be justified, and that is the bombing of Hiroshima. Like the bombing of Nagasaki, it was done to make a point, and the harm done was out of all proportion to the threat.

I see no justification for the terrorist attacks of September 2001. They are a crime against humanity. The Bali bombing was no less an outrage. There is no justification for the murder of the innocent.

The government of the United States, and the government of Indonesia, had a duty to pursue the people who were responsible for these terrorist crimes. The Indonesian government has had some success in bringing the murderers to account. The Americans had a harder task.

It is the American response I am going to talk about tonight.

 

"The Place Where We Are Right" by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

 

Bishop Richard Holloway

I am reading Richard Holloway’s Doubts and Loves (2001) at the moment, and find in it an antidote both to cynicism and fanaticism. It really is a wonderful book. Lesbian writer Jeanette Winterson reviews it thus:

 

SBS – The World News – celebration of David Lange

Thousands of people have attended a memorial service and barbecue at an Auckland sports stadium to celebrate the life of former New Zealand prime minister David Lange. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said all people who had met him, even those who had crossed swords with him, acknowledged Lange was “an extraordinary man”.

Mr Lange has been lauded as the architect of New Zealand’s 20-year-old nuclear-free policy and a bold reformer who transformed the South Pacific nation’s economy.

“His vision saw our small country stand up for big ideas and values critical for the survival of humankind,” Prime Minister Clark told the audience of more than 2,000.

 

From Mormon splinter groups to Australian Aboriginal child abuse…

Quite a journey, that!

Remember I recently read Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer? Well consider this from Adult Christianity — and it is a fair representation of Krakauer’s book:

It’s been known for years that there exist fundamentalist men who raise young girls in isolation, limit their education, and when these girls reach puberty assign them to be married to an older man in the community. These girls are then raped and forced to bear as many children as they can. The men they are married to may already have dozens of “wives,” or more, and dozens of children. At the same time, in an effort to limit competition with the privileged elders, teenaged boys, with the same limited education and experience as the girls, are forced out of the community to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar world—that of Utah and Arizona and the rest of the United States.

 

Now I wonder who that was?

Scott Poynting of the University of Western Sydney is an ex-student of mine from my Wollongong days. He has done some good work in the area of multicultural education (see link above). But I see he has a letter in today’s Daily Telegraph on the issue of unqualified teachers in private schools, recalling an unqualified history teacher from 1972 who taught that Tunisia was an island off the coast of Italy.

I taught Scott in 1972, I think. English though.

I know Tunisia is off the coast of Africa, see…

 

Global Views on Homosexuality: PEW Research Center

This is interesting. Yawning Bread (go to August 2005, “Why are some people homophobic?”) brought this to my attention.

You will find further discussion of this and other research there.

 

Encounter: 7 August 2005:: – After the Bombs: Being Muslim in Australia

This one I missed altogether.

 

Encounter: 14 August 2005:: – Glory Be…For Dappled Things

I have been sleeping pretty well lately, but last night (or early this morning) I woke up and caught the last part of this. It really kindled some enthusiasm for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, Enda McDonagh’s readings being very fine indeed.

 

Dip Ed

When I mentioned a day or two back that the Dip Ed course and the first few years of teaching could be somewhat transformative I remembered a funny story from my couple of years as a lecturer in Sydney University’s Dip Ed. I won’t mention names, as the person concerned turned out to be a really good English teacher who has had a very good career.

 

What’s right?

Eric Aarons is about 85 years old and is in fact an ex-student of The Mine, a fact not usually mentioned as in the first fifty years or so of his life, or at least from 1938, Eric was one of Australia’s leading Communists. Today he is no longer a believer in the Marxist grand narrative, having discovered the relevance of the limitations of human nature and the importance of emotion. He has also come to the conclusion, rightly I think, that the critical element in our thinking about politics and society is values, a term he prefers to morality, though that is encompassed in the concept of values.

Aside from a chapter or two where the old Marxist terminology (which has always sent me to sleep very rapidly) is trotted out, he says in his recent book What’s Right (Rosenberg Publishing, Dural, 2003) quite a few things of relevance. He certainly can think, and for an octogenarian he is very sharp and very up-to-date. I will never be like that should I ever reach his age, I suspect. So on the grounds that the dominant paradigm in the West at the moment — the neoconservative market-worship we know so well — is possibly as vicious and erroneous as Marxism ever was, it is worth attending to what Aarons says.

 

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf. New York: Schocken, 1987

In this and similar posts, always bear in mind what I say about the purpose of this blog: to clarify ideas for myself, and then maybe for others. What I am really wrestling with is what attitude is best calculated to minimise the harmful effects of division in a culturally diverse society such as ours is, especially in the current world climate, not as some ideal but as a matter of fact and practice. As an ESL teacher who has been necessarily concerned with multicultural matters, and as one who in his own life has lived an intercultural experience, these things matter a lot to me. In most Sydney and suburban schools these things are part of the daily round as well, if not for much longer in my case.

I read this some years ago, borrowed (of course) from Surry Hills Library.