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September 18, 2006

Australia: Mosques Still Teaching "Jihad"

News from Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, Special Broadcasting Service, News.com.au and the Australian reports that in some mosques at least, violent jihad is still being preached.

The alarm was raised by Dr Rohan Gunaratna (pictured), a Singapore-based terror analyst, who maintains that in Sydney and Melbourne there are still Muslim clerics preaching violence to young and impressionable followers. These clerics in their mainstream teachings keep such lectures quiet now, he claimed. He said: "We have seen a number of Australian clerics preaching jihad and martyrdom. The most likely form of attack in Australia is a suicide attack for jihad. You will need to make arrests in time."

Clive Williams of the Australian Defence Force Academy concurs, saying that such jihadist teaching happens now by means of "koran classes". Williams said: "They are doing it differently now."

On Macquarie radio, Dr Gunaratna said: ""It's to a very small group, and also what we have seen is that of the number of clerics that are preaching violence (they) are able to radicalise only a very small percentage of the Australian population."

"Less than one per cent of the Muslims in Australia support extremism and violence, so it's a really tiny minority that is involved in this."

When asked if the threat was real, Dr Gunaratna said: "It is a significant threat."

The Prime Minister, John Howard, did not reject the claims made by Dr Gunaratna, and admittted there were concerns about sections of the Muslim community. Howard said on Macquarie radio: "I never talk about any information I have, but suffice to say that we continue to worry that there is a section of the Islamic community, a very small section, that is not serving the interests of anybody with some of the things that they've had to say."

"...I think we have to be realistic enough to recognise that if people are going to incite others to do evil things they will find a way of doing it to try and escape attention."

"But the more open you make the links between all sections of the community and the mainstream of the community, the better able we are to ensure that, as far as possible, acts of violence and anti-social behaviour don't occur."

Dr Ameer Ali of Howard's advisory body, the Muslim Reference Group, was quick to rubbish the claims of Dr Gunatra. He said that if Gunatra had evidence, then he should hand it over to the Australian Federal Police. He questioned the validity of Gunatra's statements, as the terror expert was not even based in Australia.

Another person to rubbish the claims of the SIngapore-based terror consultant was Sheikh Mahmoud Omran, chairman of the Muslim Community Service of Western Australia. He said that counter-terrorist experts made their living from reporting terror threats and it served their aims to keep the threats alive. He also said that if anyone had evidence, they should present it, or keep quiet.

Australian Radicalism

But there is a radical element in Australia, found among imams and also organisations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, who seek to radicalise young people, particularly students, as we mentioned earlier.

Usman Badar, who is president of the University of New South Wales Muslim Students Association declared recently outside Bankstown Town Hall in New South Wales that: "Western values are not worthy of human subscription.....Democracy sounds nice enough - not to a Muslim....Sovereignty is for none but Allah." He added: "Allah did not say....whatever the people want, we'll have this."

Badar said of secularism that "it relegates Allah to the margins of public life and places human beings above him. This, to put it blatantly, is as blasphemous as it gets.....The overriding commitment of a Muslim is to Allah, and Allah alone."

But while the internet and young radicals such as Badar and the exponents of Hizb ut-Tahrir pollute the minds of youth with ideas that denigrate democracy, secularism, and man-made law, prequisites on the road to fullblown jihad, the preachers of hate are still the biggest influence.

One of Australia's most extreme Salafist preachers, Sheikh Mohammed Jamal Omran, has openly said that he thinks Osama bin Laden is a "good man." He has also denied that Muslim fanatics created 9/11, preferring the insane conspiracy theory that the US government itself committed these attacks upon its own people. The Sheikh is based in Melbourne, Victoria, where he runs a prayer center in the inner north of the city.

He has said that he is no more radical than the other 13 imams in Melbourne, but openly supports attacks against coalition troops by insurgents in Iraq.

He is head of the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah Association of Australia, founded 20 years ago. It describes itself on its website as "The Ahl Sunnah wal Jama'ah Association was established more than 20 years ago. We are a national body with affiliated organizations in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. We have always been a part of the Australian landscape - amongst the Muslim community we are known and respected for our relentless pursuit of moral truth in all aspects of life."

When several suspected terrorists were arrested in Melbourne and Sydney on November 8 last year, it turned out that some of these young suspects had attended Omran's prayer center on the second floor in Michael Street in Melbourne. The sheikh had denied they were regular visitors.

Another man who was arrested on November 8 was the Algerian-born preacher Abu Nacer Benbrika. This individual was a teacher with the The Ahl Sunnah wal Jama'ah Association. Omran denied Benbrika was his deputy.

For some strange reason, on the front page of the website of Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jam'ah, lectures on Islam are advertised, which are held by Sheikh Abu Ayman. This is another alter ego of Omran, stated the Australian in June. In July, Omran, masquerading as Abu Ayman, and a Sydney cleric Abdul Salam Mohammed Zoud (calling himself Sheikh Abdul Salaam) appeared at a "dawah" conference at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Mustapha Kara-Ali of the Prime Minister's advisory board, the Muslim Community Reference Group, has claimed that Omran and Zoud used false names because they had a "hidden agenda" to recruit more Muslims and alienated youth into his sect. Kara-Ali claimed that both the clerics preached Wahhabism, an extreme salafist ideology.

Omran is also a close associate of Samir Mohtadi (pictured left), who also goes under the alias of "Abu Hamza", who runs a Salafist mosque in Coburg, Melbourne. Mohtadi, who runs the Islamic Information and Services Network (IISN) recently said the Bible should be banned, and challenged Cardinal Pell, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, to a "debate".

Mohtadi was an associate of Abu Nacer Benbrika, and he told a court in Victoria at the start of August that he had heard rumours that Benbrika and his followers were plotting terror attacks. He never reported his findings to the police.

Instead, 42-year old Mohtadi said: ""I had heard from others that Abu Bakr and his young followers were planning to do an act of violence in response to Australia being a land of war. I became worried that he would take it too far and do something stupid. I feared that he was teaching hate to his young followers, who are all new to the religion, and I feared they would learn hate and start to hate themselves......I impressed upon him....that if he wanted to fight, he should go overseas, not do anything in Australia."

In 2003 it was reported that a court in Spain had heard allegations that Sheikh Omran had links with Abu Dahdah, aka Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, thought to be Al Qaeda's top operative in Spain. The court in Spain also documented that Yarkas had also been in contact with another Australian, Bilal Khaazal, from the Islamic Youth Movement at Lakemba, Sydney. Yarkas was also accused of supporting Indonesian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah responsible for the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005.

Yarkas was sentenced to 12 years jail on September 26, 2005 for belonging to a terrorist group. He had also been convicted of involvement in the 9/11 plot and given 15 years' jail additionally, but this 15 year sentence was quashed on June 1 this year.

Bilal Khazal was, disturbingly, a baggage handler at Qantas airlines. He was convicted twice in absentia in Lebanon for terrorist activities. He was found guilty with his brother Maher Khazal of assisting a group which bombed a MaDonalds restaurant in Beirut in April 2003.

He wrote a pamphlet called "Provisions On The Rules of Jihad", which was published on the internet, a court was told on June, 2005. Accused of making documents likely to facilitate terrorist acts, Bilal Khazal was said to have placed his document for jihad on the internet in 2004, after allegations about his involvement with Spanish Al Qaeda operative Yarkas had become known.

A resident of Lakemba in Sydney, he was due to stand trial in New South Wales state Supreme Court in April of this year, charged on two counts of inciting terrorism.

Khazal may be extradited to Lebanon, once his trial is finished in Australia. Currently he is in Lakemba, on bail. He had been associated with Jordanian-born Jamal Saleh, another former resident of Lakemba, who was also implicated in the bombing of the Beirut McDonalds. Jamal had fled Australia to Lebanon, and is now awaiting extradition back to Australia.

Jamal had worshipped at the Haldon Street Mosque in Lakemba, where Willy Brigitte also attended. Brigitte, suspected of being an al Qaeda member, is now in jail in France.

The mosques may well be preaching jihad on the quiet.

But a mosque is not the only place to become radicalised. There are Islamic youth groups, such as the Islamic Youth Movement where Khazal recruited followers (now defunct), there are university activists on campuses attempting to convert young people to radical Islam, there is Hizb ut-Tahrir, and there is always the online route to jihad, via the internet.

Mosques may still pose a problem, but the threat is all around.

People sometimes talk about "six degrees of separation" - i.e. every person in the world is linked to every other person in the world by only six others. In the case of radical Islam, with its complicated webs of connections spanning the globe, it appears that there are only four or even three degrees of separation linking every Muslim with every Islamist radical throughout the planet.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 18, 2006 11:23 PM

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