'Four Corners' blames non-Muslims for extremism

Yes, there really is a moral equivalence between the targeting of civilians to establish a totalitarian Islamic regime and the overthrowing of a regime in order to install democracy. You see, the freedom of religious thugs is equal to the freedom of everyone else. The left's moral relativism applied to real-life.

Gandhi Sindyan was the only person to bring a sober perspective to the program:

GANDHI SINDYAN, ETHNIC COMMUNITY LIAISON OFFICER, NEW SOUTH WALES: Yeah look honestly I think there is, yes. There is, you know because it’s so easy to be a victim. It’s so easy to sit back and say, you know, "I give up, everybody’s picking on me," you know. But I use that to empower myself. But once again this is how I operate but I can’t say that other young people in my community will have that same mentality.

As Tim Blair points out on his blog, Neighbour's crusade against non-Muslims is easily undermined by the facts:

BOMBERS EXCUSED
The ABC’s Sally Neighbour on Britain’s July 7 bombers:
”They flourished in poor, under-employed, ghetto-ised communities, already alienated from British society and further marginalised by the belligerent politics and policing of the war on terror.”
Nonsense. The bombers were not marginalised http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4678837.stm nor particularly poor. Two had university degrees. One left behind £121,000 http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/009705.php . Neighbour is rewriting history. (Via Ganesh S.)

Has Neighbour any objective evidence for her claims? She speaks with Waleed Aly from the “Global Terrorism Research Centre”, but he is simply an Islamic spokesperson and community leader, who opposes the banning of books which promote terrorism. So Neighbour has done the equivalent of asking a trade union leader for an opinion on industrial relations: you are never going to get an objective, disinterested answer. Rather, Aly, like Neighbour, is keen to shift responsibility for anti-social behaviour by Muslims onto non-Muslims.

As Noel Pearson wrote, terrorism involves a poisonous and nihilistic ideology which relies on an “Islamist narrative”. While Muslims should certainly not be victimised for the acts of a few terrorists, it is equally important to engage in the field of ideas and win the intellectual debate against the Islamists. The truth is that Muslims are not generally being persecuted, and when they are, it’s usually by fellow Muslims. In fact, most Muslims in Australia have been admitted as citizens on humanitarian grounds, because they were refugees. Most of the time, they were being persecuted and were at risk from other Muslims. When the Islamist narrative is compared to the facts, it simply does not measure up. This is our biggest intellectual weapon in the fight against extremism.

Yet the left want to surrender this important weapon by legitimising these absurd feelings of victimhood. The problem with this approach is that it would empower Muslims to feel more aggrieved, thus justifying more bad behaviours.

Sometimes it’s forgotten that there is a real difference between resentment which is justified, and that which is not. To repeat, the Islamist narrative does not stack up. If Muslims are encouraged to feel like they are victims, some will be making other demands on us too, such as the implementation of sharia law (one study in the UK by Daniel Pipes found that 50 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law implemented in the UK). We would end up with a situation similar to before World War II, where the English and the French were so keen to appease Nazi Germany they allowed it to empower itself to the point where a second World War was unavoidable. Rather than avoid conflict, this type of “solution” is destined to produce it.

Instead, national dialogue should concentrate on the individual and collective responsibility of Muslims. To deny or ignore the anti-social behaviours which have caused hostility towards Muslims will not help anyone in the longer term, including Muslims. Instead, the legitimate concerns that non-Muslims have should become the focus. Not in the sense where blame is distributed from one group to another, but in the sense that we admit that there are problems within the Muslim community and we constructively discuss how to best confront those problems.

Instead of feeling sorry for themselves as a result of the suspicion cast upon them, Muslims must instead be honest and focus on the reasons why those suspicions exist and resolve to work towards helping themselves.