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AUSTRALIA

ISIS misusing ancient religious symbols

  • 22 September 2014

Rumour has it that we're living in a global village. I grew up in the 1980s, and used to see my global village once a year at national Muslim youth camps. We were a motley bunch of Aussie kids – blonde-headed Yugoslavs (as they called themselves) from Mt Gravatt, fair-skinned red-headed Lebanese from Doncaster, Fiji-Indians from Condell Park and this Mongolian-looking Indo-Pakistani from St Andrews Cathedral School.

When we weren't gas-bagging and poking fun of our 'uncles' at camps, we were running up our parents' phone bills on STD calls. We had no email or social media in those days. The massive black bricks known as 'mobile phones' hadn't yet been invented. And far from being bombed from a great height, jihadis were meeting President Reagan at the White House.

Muslim kids these days can talk with their interstate and overseas friends on their mobiles for no cost, on Skype, on Viber and even on Facebook. They can hide their identities for innocent and not-so-innocent purposes. They live in a cosmopolitan world where national and nationalist boundaries are supposedly becoming meaningless.

But if they use the Kalima Shahada (the generic Muslim creed of 'there is no god but God and Muhammad is God's Messenger') in white Arabic letters on a black background as their ID, they receive a notification that their ID is considered offensive and must be taken down.

One Sydney tabloid reported some weeks back that an ISIS-type flag was being auctioned at a fundraiser for a Western Sydney mosque. In a flight of populist fancy, the devout Anglican premier threatened to ban the flag.

Perhaps the Premier wasn't at a national conference of the Australian Liberal Students Federation (ALSF) back in the early 1990s when the pre-Apartheid South African flag was auctioned off to great cheer by the delegates. Under that flag, millions of black and 'coloured' South Africans were excluded, oppressed, bashed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered in a systemic program of state-sanctioned racial supremacy. Liberal students were commiserating the end of a system of state terrorism.

But why would state Premiers and Facebook moderators want to ban a religious symbol? Must the misuse of a generic symbol used by almost one quarter of humanity become a cause of offence because it is misused by a tiny group of violent nutjobs?

Islam has had its days of violence and no doubt will continue to do so. Just as Christianity Hinduism and Buddhism. Some of
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