IF you really want to depress yourself, type the name Sheik Hersi Hilole into Google, says David Penberthy.
He's an Islamic scholar and Somali spiritual leader who, almost two years ago when still based in Sydney, was howled down as a rabble-rouser for issuing what his (Islamic) critics dismissed as a reckless, baseless warning about the radicalisation of young Somali refugees in Melbourne.
Hilole is now living and working in Singapore as an academic. No doubt he watched the events in Melbourne this week with a sense of weary despair. For, without wishing to prejudge the terror charges, the case the prosecution will try to prove could well resemble some of the scenario painted by the cleric in late 2007.
The trouble began for Hilole in April 2007 when he offered a candid analysis of the challenges facing the Somali community, particularly its youth, many of whom were struggling to adjust to life in Australia after escaping the horror of life in Mogadishu. But Hilole didn't use that or their relative poverty in public housing in Australia to excuse the fact that some young Somalis were not just susceptible to but may be active with terrorist sympathisers. He warned it was dangerousand urged that something be done about it.
As the ABC's PM program reported at the time, Hilole found himself ostracised by others in the Somali community who resolved that because of the furore they should stop talking to the media and turn in on themselves. Hilole kept on.
In an interview with this newspaper in late 2007, talking to the award-winning journalist Richard Kerbaj (who broke Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali's "uncovered meat" outrage), Hilole lamented the fact that his initial warnings had been ignored.
Kerbaj wrote: "Young Somalian Muslims are secretly travelling back to their homeland to fight alongside al-Qa'ida-backed terrorists at the urging of hardline spiritual leaders inAustralia.
"Somalian spiritual leader Hersi Hilole yesterday warned that young men returning from their jihad mission against the Ethiopian-backed Somalian government were more likely to consider becoming involved in a terrorist attack on Australia.
"'Now when they come back, how are they going to join the rest of society?' Hilole said. 'There is a great danger that they could carry out any kind of terrorist activity here.'
"Sheik Hilole, chairman of the Somali Community Council of Australia, said hardline clerics in Melbourne continued to 'prey' on young Somalian men, whose welcoming attitudes to Wahabism -- a puritanical interpretation of Islam espoused by Osama bin Laden -- were a result of the ideology's prevalence in their home country."
Clearly a far-fetched scenario. Two months later, Hilole was warning again that he feared radical Islamists would use the defeat of the Howard government to capitalise on the more moderate domestic political climate.
"The extremists will try to take every advantage that they think will be possible and available for them, and they will most probably try to spread their ideas and recruit more people for their cause," he said.
Again, Hilole copped it from most Islamic quarters, even though he had also accused the Howard government of exaggerating aspects of the Islamic threat for political gain. Despite that caveat, a lot of Islamic leaders clearly thought Hilole should just shut up.
Others, such as a former member of John Howard's Islamic reference group, Indonesian Muslim spiritual leader Amin Hady, said it simply did not make sense to sideline the hardliners, as Howard had done when he excluded Melbourne-based cleric (and sceptic of Muslim involvement in the London bombings) Mohammed Omran from his group. "The government should use mainstream leaders to approach them (hardliners) and to bring them in line with the rest of the community members," Hady said.
This reflected the view of most Islamic leaders, who shied away from the tough conversation that Hilole was trying to start.
They probably didn't want to create a perception that there were members of their community who wanted to kill other people, and themselves, in the pursuit of holy war on Australian soil, even though that perception might have been based entirely in fact.
Hilole's dismissal as some kind of fringe-dwelling doomsday prophet is a source of shame for Australia's Islamic leaders.
It's also a pity that the wider community did not listen to him, as he is exactly the kind of plain-speaking, excuse-averse guy that Australian Muslim communities need, rather than the lost-in-translation stylings of a Keysar Trad, who spent several hectic years complaining on behalf of Hilaly about the quality of the subtitles.
The Hilole case also demonstrates the problems a civilised nation such as Australia faces in acting on such a warning. In a society that tries to respect human rights and values freedom of religion and freedom of association, Hilole's call could result in state action that would immediately be condemned as offensive to our values and laws.
In his own clunky way, Ibrahim Khayre has given fresh voice to Hilole's warning in his comments this week about his nephew's alleged involvement in the Holsworthy plot. He told The Herald Sun that Yacqub "fell in with a bad crowd" when he dropped out of school and left home, and blamed the police and social workers for blocking attempts by the family to make contact with Yacqub.
Clearly, it's absurd to blame this boy's subsequent actions on a couple of cops and social workers, and Khayre has been carved up on talkback and online for suggesting it.
But his point isn't a world away from Hilole's. And it prompts the question: what should have been done? Should the authorities have gone in and seized this kid, stopped him from attending this prayer centre? Should the prayer centre be shut down? Its clerics put under surveillance, jailed or deported, for preaching violent jihad?
The problem we have as a liberal democracy is that most of the people who care about "inclusiveness" would rather go to a multi-faith harmony celebration put on by the Uniting Church than confront the tough reality that, at some tiny mosque, they're watching re-runs of September 11 and have no desire to be included in mainstream society.
What you do about that, I don't know. But as the treatment of Hilole shows, pretending it doesn't exist is the worst possible answer.
penberthyd@thepunch.com.au
Source: The Australian
No comments:
Post a Comment