Dear GOD, this man is an outed Marxist. Who on earth will ever believe his crap again?

Agree wholeheartedly …… but sometimes, when our enemies gather together, even if only for the day, we are the ones who get hurt.

What’s the issue here? Abbott is a Catholic conservative; he wants to recruit conservative Muslims to the right, just as conservative Catholics were recruited to the right via the DLP. What is surprising is that people as fixated by Howard that any disagreement with Howard is considered progressive. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend; I would have thought the left would have learnt this by now?

Equally, it’s a mistake to suppose one’s opponents form a monolithic block; there are fissures and fractures along ideological and religious lines.

Agree with most of what you both have said …. but I’m only 1 in 20 million.

Sorry, but I’m pessimistic.

We were all too relaxed and comfortable for too long.

We left ourselves wide open to having our government and our institutions manipulated and usurped by hostile pseudo-religious hoodlums and charletans.

We failed to update our treason laws so as to stop anyone in government - from the lowest to the highest - dragging Australia from semi-independence back to being merely somebody else’s colony.

Too late to do anything about that now. It’s off to the stake with all you heretics and infidels …..

Touche, you finally agree that there is a theological issue here as well which it seems most Aussie commentators are afraid of or incapable of investigating or addressing. I would also suggest that it is of import even amongst moderate Muslims even if they do not support violent or coercive propagation of their faith/faith-politics.

Of course there are more dominionists in the U.S. then there are Islamists in Australia. The U.S has 300 million people, we have 20 million. Even 0.1% of 300 million is going to be more than 0.1% of 20 million.

I don’t have any desire to defend covenant laws. But I will
a. bet that nearly everyone who is married wants to see their relationship survive and grow and don’t set out to see it end in a divorce court, regardless of their religious persuasion and would variously avail themselves of any options to guard and protect their marriages
b. they are open to anyone, not necessarily religious and
c. they are remarkably liberal given the Christian understanding of marriage/remarriage even those who opt for the more liberal “Erasmus option” and
d. divorce is still not a crime under those laws as was proposed in Turkey, currently being proposed in Indonesia etc. and
e. face it Mark, faith and in particular the Christian faith plays an infinitely more public and important role in American society and yet they still offer and maintain more freedoms for people of no faith or differing faiths than even your most liberal or secular Muslim society (want to talk Christians in Turkey? Ever enjoyed the company or the clubbing of religious police in eastern Malaysia have you ?) and
f. they do not prevent one from apostasizing from or converting to any faith. Wanna say the same for a sharia religious court?

As to the dominionists, yeah, they’re a minority position within US Christianity but then so are Islamists within Australian Islam. And I bet there’s more dominionists about in the US than there are Islamists in Australia.

The covenant marriage laws allow people to opt in to a different type of divorce law based on a religiously grounded belief that divorce ought to be very difficult.

1. Australia is not America. Australia is not America. Australia is not America. Australia is not America. Australia is not America. Ooops. And pray tell too how is covenant marriage in Arizona or wherever (which I still think is odd) and which is not tied to any religious group or open only to a particular religious group, similar to a parallel Muslim religious court?

2. You should perhaps visit a few U.S. god blogs and Christian theology and political sites and see how often those “dominionists” as you call them get debated and deflated by Christians from all traditions and all perspectives.

3. I have often said, both here and on my blog and elsewhere, that the majority of Muslims just want to get on with their lives: work, raise their families, enjoy life. Just like everybody else. I don’t need a survey to tell me that. I just know it from the Muslims I know (with the exception of one)

4. Having said that I also have said that just like Christians, atheists, Hindus or whatever, are variously engaged, disengaged or partially engaged with their faith. In any case their theology will influence them to some degree even if differently and with a different intensity for a fifth generation Aussie Afghan Muslim mum living in regional South Australia than that for first generation Aussie Lebanese Muslim teenager living in the western suburbs of Sydney. This is no different to the spectrum of nominal, collapsed, lapsed, committed and fundamentalist Catholic Christians (or any other Christians for that matter)

5. It therefore matters to know who it is one worships.

I think the real issue - then as it is now - is how would Costello actually put in place a plan to deny citizenship, or remove citizenship from people who don’t uphold ‘Australian values’.

But Costello has no idea. He hasn’t even the vaguest of plans for how to do it.

How would you actually strip people of their citizenship? How would people be denied citizenship? How would we test if they are upholding Australian values? Who would decide what those values are? Would there be a questionnaire? An exam?

I think Costello won’t give an answer to any of these questions. He won’t ,because he can’t.

I reckon Tony Jones on Lateline nailed it back in 2005 when he responded to Costello ideas with:

“ But isn’t this the sort of thing you hear in pubs, the meaningless populism you hear on talkback radio?â€?

When pushed to give an answer in that Lateline interview about how these ideas would actually be implemented, Costello admitted that it would be voluntary! You would simply ask the person to leave Australia.

So the Treasurer is not only pandering to racism but is flakey . He deserves to be ridiculed as much as heckled.

But I think it is worth reading Costello’s Sydney Institute speech to the end, where lists in some detail what he sees are the six key Australian values.

‘Value’ number six is:

“Strong Physical and Social Infrastructure: Australia has roads that are paved, where traffic moves.�

I don’t know what is more stupid: that Costello thinks traffic moves in Sydney or that ‘roads that are paved’ is a core Australian value.
–
I wrote some more about on my blog http://www.benoquist.com

There was a neat op/ed piece in the Age which expresses the view of a lot of Muslims who chose to come here, and just want to get on with their lives.

You can over-estimate the influence of theology and of clerics - we all know that lots of Catholics use birth control, etc. etc. And similarly, lots of young Muslim women in Australia choose whether or not to wear a hajib. I think we need to get this discussion in better perspective.

————

Muslim: We want sharia law.
Aussie: Too bad.

Muslim: So we can’t have it, then?
Aussie: No.

THE END

————

Funny when Tim Costello made similar remarks about publishing and debating extremist points of view he was howled down by certain commentators.

However….

While I agree there is an Islamist element (albeit small) within Austrailia and I don’t agree with the Peter Costello (and Ruddock etc) line that citizenship should be used as some stick/carrot. (I also find it odd that the government was so keen to promote citizenship in its early days in government as a means of fostering commitment are now discussing and have used it as a weapon.)

and…

While I accept multiculturalism has much to offer (although again I note the definitions that Abbott infers) I also don’t think that multiculturalism however you define it is an answer to what is essentially a theological problem.

For violent extremists: I think action has to centre on defusing their attractiveness - perhaps not by convincing some of their leaders but their potential followers (in the way you deprogramme cult followers???). Last year I blogged about this programme in Yemen which was yielding positive results. Do we have such Muslim clerics or theologians here who can work towards “immunising” their faith groups? I can’t see any amongst the present (self appointed?) Muslim leaders.

For those who nevertheless want to advocate parallel religious courts, sharia law in the civic sphere (who I think are Costello/Howard/Ruddock’s targets; some of them may be violent extremists, some probably aren’t) I am not aware of very much in Muslim theology that fosters the possibility of separation of church and state. If anything I think you will find some moderates would still argue for say parallel relgious courts (as one Muslim group did in Victoria last year). I personally am dead against parallel religious courts because they can be and have been used to prevent people from apostasizing and therefore go against freedom of religion - I made some comments on that at Public Opinion. But want to convince some Muslims that they can dump what is perceived as a key tenet of their faith?

Even Turkey still struggles with this - they got howled down by the EU when they tried to make adultery a crime (something advocated by conservative groups) and I note that Indonesia is about to debate laws which will also allow for a ten year jail term for, wait for it, public kissing, to bring them in line with other Islamic states. Gosh I didn’t even think the Singaporeans were that draconian. Abbott’s sentiment may be fine but my question is: is there room in Muslim theology to accept and embrace something akin to what we understand as separation of church and state and still remain a Muslim?

Abbott wasn’t calling for Sharia law, he was calling for those that espouse these views to be engaged with rather than isolated (or deported)