Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun has some pointed observations about the situation in Australia. (Thanks to Kevin.)
IT goes like this. First, Australia’s Mufti, Taj El-Din El-Hilaly, praises terrorists in Arabic.
Then, when his words leak out, the sheik’s spokesman, Keysar Trad of the Lebanese Muslim Association, tells us in English how we’ve again got the peace-loving cleric all wrong.
Roll the tape. Just before the September 11 attacks, Hilaly was filmed by SBS in his Sydney mosque endorsing suicide bombers.
Afterwards, Hilaly went to Lebanon and signed a statement by clerics endorsing suicide attacks in Israel — like those which have killed so many civilians.
Trad tried to explain away both incidents, just as he this week claimed Hilaly was again taken out of context by reports this week of his visit to Lebanon.
Those reports said he’d again called for a jihad against Israel, praised suicide bombers as “martyrs”, and met the head of Hezbollah, a terrorist group he called a “model for all the Mujahideen in the world”.
And how credible is Trad as an apologist for this?
After all, Trad was a translator for the extremist Islamic Youth Movement of Australia, which has been linked to al Qaida.
And although denouncing terrorism himself, he is a zealot who has called Australians “the descendants of … criminal dregs”.
Lovely. So why do Muslims call Hilaly their Mufti?