AARON PATRICK: Australia’s Muslim leaders have misjudged the message

Aaron Patrick
The Nightly
Nurses Ahmed Rashid Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh remain in the police spotlight.
Nurses Ahmed Rashid Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh remain in the police spotlight. Credit: AAP

Seeing itself misunderstood, wounded and victimised, Australia’s Muslim leaders lashed out this week at the treatment of its own: two Sydney nurses who seemed to relish the death of Jews.

The message, while understandable for a community that can feel culturally isolated within broader Australian society, was a miscalculation that will encourage a small but growing minority who would curtail or end Muslim immigration.

Some 80 organisations and individuals, including the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, accused the political and media class of engaging in “more than hypocrisy” over the condemnation of Ahmad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, who told Israeli Max Veifer she hoped he would remember her face when he suffered a horrible death.

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“It is calculated, politically motivated outrage,” the groups and individuals said in an open letter on Monday. “It is the deliberate engineering of public morality.”

Contempt for Jewish life

The message misjudged the mood and ignored facts. While Nadir’s claim Israelis are killed at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital seems to be boastful nonsense, the pair’s casual and unselfconscious distaste for Jewish lives should be offensive to all Australians.

The outrage was not engineered. It was spontaneous, decent and genuine.

The Islamic groups’ accusation that Veifer — who cruises online chat rooms looking for anti-Semitic rhetoric to record — was involved in “genocide” in Gaza as an Israeli army conscript was a dishonest justification of the unjustifiable.

Even the federal Labor government accepts the invasion of the Gaza Strip, while devastating for innocent Palestinian civilians, is a legitimate act of self-defence.

Tension in the West

In the West, this is a delicate moment in relations between Christian-Judaeo-dominated societies and their new and growing Muslim populations.

After two-and-a-half decades of Islamist terrorism, much of it against their fellow believers, voters in the US, France, Germany and elsewhere are shifting towards anti-immigrant parties. In response, Muslims are organising their own political movements.

In Australia, Liberal leader Peter Dutton last week suggested expelling Australian citizens who “don’t share our values” and “hate our country”. On the far-right, anti-Muslim senator Pauline Hanson says: “I was right.”

After the Bankstown Hospital video emerged, journalists tracked down the male nurse’s home. On the footpath of what looked like a typical suburb street, a woman in a black abaya stormed towards a reporter and yelled: “Get the f--- off my property, right now! Move!”

It was not her land, of course. It belongs to everyone.

To Australia’s Muslim community, do not be that woman. Leave the old conflicts behind. Embrace your country. Make peace.

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