El-Australia

The Mufti of Australia and New Zealand Taj Al-Din Hamed Abdallah Al-Hilali, who last came to public attention for driving an unregistered car on the streets of Sydney, has claimed in a sermon on February 13, 2004 at the Al-Quds mosque in Lebanon that Australia was discovered by Afghan Muslims. (Hat tip: reader DL). Al-Hilali also called for a Jihad against Israel. Al-Hilali said:

"Australia is an old-new continent. The Europeans issued a false birth certificate for it when the British seafarer Captain James Cook reached it. However, Australia already had the most ancient race of men on the face of the earth - the Aborigine people... They continue to live their primitive lives to this very day. But when you become acquainted with their traditions among their tribes, you find that they have customs such as circumcision, marriage ceremonies, respect for tribal elders, and burial of the dead - all customs that show that they were connected to ancient Islamic culture before the Europeans set foot in Australia.

"That is, Islam had roots deep in the Australian soil and read the Qur'an and called to prayer before the bells of the churches rang in Australia. The best evidence of this is the hundreds of mosques in the center of Australia built by the Afghans. Some of them were destroyed, and others were turned into Australian archeological museums, and still others remained unharmed, and they bear a history that proves that Islam has roots and ancient connections to Australia. But because they did not have the proper conditions to continue to exist, such as schools, propagation of the religion, and connection to the Islamic world, the first generation of our Afghan ancestors dissolved..."

"I visited the town of Alice Springs in central Australia, and found there a map [of Alice Springs] under the name Mecca. Alice Springs is surrounded by high black mountains, similar to the mountains of Mecca. Summer there lasts 10 months, and winter only two months. The temperature is above 50 degrees Celsius. There are several kinds of dates and palm trees there. We did not believe that dates could grow there. Now that we know the reason, we no longer wonder. We found that our ancestors the Afghans were among the first Muslims, and they settled this area and called it Mecca."

"The strange thing was that when our muezzin [who accompanied Sheikh Al-Hilali on his visit to Alice Springs] stood up to call for prayer, the old people of the town came out, and so did men and youths, and they looked different than the black Aborigines. They were a mixture of Afghan and Aborigine, as a result of marriages of Afghan men and Aborigine women. When the muezzin called 'Allahu Akbar,' they said, 'We have heard this song from our ancestors...' When they asked us 'What is this song you are singing?' we told them that this was an announcement of prayer time. When we asked them their names, they answered John, or Steve, but their names ended with Saraj Al-Din, Abdallah, or Muhammad..."

Properly speaking then, Australia may be regarded a Muslim land, stolen from the Dar Al Islam by the Crusader Captain Cook  Advocates of gay marriage should also take note that they may be on Al-Hilali's hitlist. More from the principal Muslim cleric in the Antipodes.

"More dangerous yet are the sex education classes in the schools. In the West, the society is divided, generally speaking, into different parts in accordance with how interesting they are. First comes caring for dogs and cats. In second place is the woman, and in third place is the child, and in fourth place is the male. Australia is one of the Western societies, and it has recently enacted laws enacted allowing men to marry men and women to marry women. The church officially registers them... These are the dangers of freedom and permissiveness."

But there is no need to worry. As  Edward Rothstein observes in the New York Times, fear has been declared backward and obsolete. At a conference which he attended, called "Fear: Its Uses and Abuses", he heard speaker after speaker excoriate the fear-mongers of the right for warning of a nonexistent danger.

Beginning with former Vice President Al Gore, who delivered the keynote address, speakers asserted again and again that the American government is preoccupied with instilling fear. ... But the dominant idea was that, as the conference's thematic statement put it, fear was being "encouraged by our government and exacerbated by our media." It was compared with the irrational fear of Communism and the perversions of McCarthyism. It was described as part of a counter-constitutional coup by a radical right. Talks about other aspects of fear — how, for example, it tends to drive out reflective thought with its stimulus of the "lateral nucleus of the amygdala" — mainly served to frame the theme.

But Rothstein is not so sure:

"We are caught," Mr. Harris writes, "in the midst of a conflict between those for whom the category of the enemy is essential to their way of organizing all human experience and those who have banished even the idea of the enemy form both public discourse and even their innermost thoughts." For those prepared to accept even some of Mr. Harris's premises, there is nothing to fear but the lack of fear itself.

El-Everywhere

Postscript: Reader ME points out that Muslims were in America before Columbus. Islamic Paths says:

Numerous evidence suggests that Muslims from Spain and West Africa arrived in the Americas at least five centuries before Co1umbus. It is recorded, for example that in the mid-tenth century during the rule of the Umayed Caliph Abdul-Rahman III (929-961), Muslims of African origin sailed westward from the Spanish port of Delba (Palos) into the “Ocean of darkness an fog.” They returned after a long absence with much booty from a “strange and curious land.” It is evident that people of Muslim origin are known to have accompanied Columbus and subsequent Spanish explorers to the New World.

The NASA plaque on the Mars Rover commemorating the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy listing the name of astronaut Ilan Ramon beside a tiny Israeli flag is another in the list of Crusader and Zionist falsifications. Everyone knows that long before the Crusader American space program the Caliph ...