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Updated ,first published
Leading Liberal moderate Andrew Bragg has called on Australian Muslims to take some responsibility for religious extremism, after former prime minister Scott Morrison told an antisemitism conference in Israel that Islamic leaders should enforce stronger standards on their own communities.
Morrison said Australia’s Muslim leaders should license preachers, translate all sermons into English and set up a board to police radicals. Morrison’s comments were made at a conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday night (AEDT), where he was hailed by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “terrific, terrific champion of our people”.
Morrison’s speech drew swift condemnation from Labor MPs and the Australian National Imams Council, which said the comments were “reckless, irresponsible, and deeply ill-informed”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said Morrison was a “pretty divisive figure” who was pursuing his own agenda, while Chalmers was confident in the government’s approach to cracking down on antisemitism and hate speech.
Morrison argued in his speech that an Islamic peak body should not be purely representative, but have the “authority and tools to enforce membership standards”.
“It is time that Islamic institutions in Australia adopted nationally consistent, self-regulated standards, including a recognised accreditation framework for imams, a national register for public-facing roles, clear training and conduct requirements, and disciplinary authority for their governing councils,” he said.
He said many Islamic states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had been better at confronting radical ideology than liberal western democracies, including through policing religious teaching, although he acknowledged such state-centric tactics could clash with liberal principles such as freedom of religion.
In a later post on LinkedIn, Morrison said, “to treat such issues as taboo” would allow extremism to flourish.
Bragg backed Morrison’s call on Wednesday and claimed there had been a “mutation of Islam” in Australia.
“I think the Australian Muslim community has to take some responsibility for the behaviours we’ve seen exhibited over the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, it has been a pattern of behaviour that some of these smaller incidents – and now we’ve had a significant terrorist incident – have emerged from these communities,” the opposition housing spokesman told ABC’s Radio National.
“The West has probably been too nice for its own good, and a lot of Western countries probably feel that they can’t be honest and open about some of the issues.”
Asked whether the Christian community should take responsibility for Nazi hate speech, Bragg said: “99.9 per cent of Australian Muslims are fantastic citizens, but… this is a mutation of Islam which is leading to now the deaths of our fellow citizens. And so we need to do everything we can stop that.”
“I’m not going into this sort of false equivalent stuff. I mean, we’ve had a massive religious massacre in Australia where people who are adherents of a mutation of Islam have decided they wanted to kill Jews,” he said.
President of the Australian National Imams Council, Imam Shadi Alsuleiman, rejected Morrison’s attempt to draw a line between the Muslim community and the Bondi attack.
“The comments by former prime minister Scott Morrison are reckless, irresponsible, and deeply ill-informed,” he said.
“It is deeply concerning and disappointing that someone who has held the highest office in the country would make such divisive remarks. To blame an entire community for the actions of a few criminal terrorists is unacceptable, rejected, and undermines our social cohesion.”
Alsuleiman called on Morrison and Bragg to “work towards uniting the Australian people, not undermining social cohesion, especially at a time when Australia needs it most”.
“It saddens me that such language comes from political leaders who shape our country’s policies,” he said.
Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy labelled Morrison’s intervention as “problematic and troubling”, and said Muslim Australians should be able to practise in peace like any other religious group.
“The Liberals are dividing this nation. They’re trying to hold 1 million Australians responsible for the acts of two individuals. And I’m appalled by that, and I oppose it 100 per cent,” he told Sky News.
“To tar an entire religion, I just think is unacceptable. It’s not based in fact, and it undermines social cohesion,” he said. “Every Australia should have a right to follow their religion in peace in this country as long as they follow all the laws of the land.”
Morrison on Wednesday insisted he was not discriminating against Muslims. “I’m not proposing really anything different for how religion is practised in the Islamic faith in Australia, as it is in all other faiths,” Morrison said, speaking on 2GB from Israel.
“We want to have systems for Islam in Australia, which help them deal with radicalism that occurs within their own ranks and protect their own people from that radicalism,” he said.
“There are requirements that you need to follow, and you need to be accountable to leaders in your own faith community, and that’s what we should all expect of all of our religious communities. I believe that good religion is good for our society.”
This week Attorney General Michelle Rowland wrote to the Australian National Imams Council to assure them the new hate speech laws would not “introduce restrictions on the ability of faith communities to practise and teach their religious and cultural beliefs”.
Muslim leaders have condemned the Bondi attack, and in Sydney last month said they had been warning police about hate preachers for a decade. Threats and hate speech against Muslim Australians have spiked following the Bondi terrorist attack, a shift NSW Premier Chris Minns denounced as “horrifying”.
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Brittany Busch is a federal politics reporter for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
Mostafa Rachwani is a Parramatta reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously the Community Affairs reporter at Guardian Australia.Connect via email.From our partners
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