Australia: Muslim leaders enraged by PM’s call for them to be “proactive” against “extremist Islam”, by AFP.
Australian Muslim leaders on Wednesday said they would boycott a meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison after he said they needed to do more to halt terror attacks in the country.
Morrison singled out Muslim community leaders as having a “special responsibility” to counter “the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam” following a terror attack in Melbourne earlier this month that left two dead. …
But Australian Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed and a group of other senior Muslim figures … said they were “deeply concerned and disappointed” with comments by Morrison and other ministers “which infer that the community is collectively culpable for the criminal actions of individuals and should be doing more to prevent such acts of violence”.
This is a common dodge, but it has no substance. Morrison isn’t saying that the Muslim community is “collectively culpable for the criminal actions of individuals.” He is simply being realistic, in a way that the Muslim leaders are not, about the fact that mainstream Islamic texts and teachings incite Muslims to commit acts of violence against non-Muslims.
This doesn’t make the Muslim community collectively responsible for jihad activity, but it does give them a responsibility to address those texts and teachings and work honestly to find ways to minimize their capacity to incite violence.
Instead, however, they are whining and claiming victim status, a strategy we have seen Muslim leaders apply only about fifty million times in the last decade: “These statements have achieved nothing to address underlying issues, but rather, have alienated large segments of the Muslim community.”
Yes, ok, but jihad violence, combined with your dishonesty in the wake of that violence, alienates large segments of the non-Muslim community.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
