Thursday 19 February 2004

The Australian Mufti Speaks Candidly (but not in Australia)

As I wrote on The Command Post, the Mufti of Australia has been a little more forthright about his views when in Lebanon than he is in Australia. Here's a sample :
I blessed Hizbullah for liberating the prisoners and the bones of the Shahids and I praised it and its sacrifice. Hizbullah has become a model for all the Mujahideen in the world. Most of the Australian people do not support the policy of the Australian government, which has placed Hizbullah on the terror list out of submission to the U.S., and the Australian prime minister will pay the price for this in the next elections.
Here's another one, reported by a United Arab Emirates newspaper :
The media all over the world are controlled by Zionist fingers, particularly the Western media, and that includes Australia, in which the media are under Zionist hegemony. But in Australia, which unlike the West and the U.S. is multicultural, the media are less racist in their enmity to Muslims and Islam. This is evidenced by the fact that we won the last media battle in Australia...
(Source: Middle East Media Research Institute. Assuming this, and the other more inflammatory remarks he's made in various Arab newspapers are reported here, I'd say he's just scored a spectacular own-goal in the media. He's obviously not got his head around the fact that communication is globalised: the time when you could say one thing to one set of people, while saying something different somewhere else in the world - and not get caught is over. And now we know what he really feels, and what he stands for.

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