Another purveyor of racism involved in the Campaign against the East St Kilda Community House

trashracism.jpgCriticism and critical (‘higher criticism’) scholarship about religion and religious texts is par for the course, and expected in an educated, liberal, and secular society.
[The attached image is taken from the Australian Islamist Monitor Website just to provide some ‘flavour’and it is obviously not endorsed my me or AJDS]
However, the stereotyping of all people of a particular faith or community on the basis of a highly selective, secondary reading of religious texts is unacceptable, particularly if this is used as the basis of public policy decisions.
Yet this is what one Geoff Dickson, President of the QSociety, the group leading the objections to the change in planning permit to accommodate the needs of a prayer group indulges with. Dickson’s name is attached to QSociety documents.
He has written thousands of words with provocative titles concerning the corruption of Islam, Islam and sex (The SUE and SCREW Crew), on and on and on, for the Australian Islamist Monitor, a self-styled expert site on Islam which also exists as islammonitor.org. Whether or not his work is original is hard to tell, but it seems to be that it is part of a network of shared ‘knowledge’ by anti-Muslims that appears on many websites.
The Monitor is of the view that Muslims in fact have a secret, agenda carried out through willful deception (hmm, sounds like what Jews are accused of). In fact, ‘taqiyya’ sounds like what many Jews did during the Spanish Inquisition–hide their religion. And it goes on and on and on.
See http://tiny.cc/cdtw4 for a night’s disturbing and bizarre reading.
The group, as with some anti-Zionist sites (for example, the ‘work’ of Gilad Atzmon), claims it is not racist, yet the line between criticism of a group’s views and engaging in unfair characterization based on essentialist characteristics is what it shares in common with fringe haters. The group also claims it is not opposed to moderate Muslims, but people like Walid Ali, a local Melbourne liberal Muslim, are a target.

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