Keysar Trad's defamation case against a Sydney radio station has collapsed, with a Supreme Court justice saying Trad did in fact make remarks that were ‘‘offensive", "racist" and ‘‘condoned violence".
Note that Trad is not on trial here. He is free to say what he will. The reason he is in court is that he bought a case to penalise people criticising his ridiculous views. The details are in the judgement.
Trad is a someone who often seems to be trying to foster good relations between the islamic community and other Australians. Yet he also seems to be playing a double game, at the same time defending pathetically primitive aspects of Islam. To understand this you need to understand taqqiya.
Trad also seems to have a few supporters among the local muslim community:
Every time I have heard or read what Mr Trad says I have felt that his opinions and views were valid
So there you have it. Trad is free to say what he likes, commentators are free to point out that he his a bigoted buffoon, and his mindless followers can at their two cents worth as well.
Whatever you think of Trad, this concept of 'taqqiya' is repulsive. It basically means that every Muslim, or person of Muslim descent, no matter how well-behaved, 'assimilated', and all the rest, is nonetheless still fair game from bigots. This is because beneath the nice, law-abiding veneer, there is supposedly a totalitarian waiting to get out. This is entirely analagous to the twists and turns of anti-semitism in 1930s Germany, whereby assimilated, or even converted Jews were held to be secret fifth-columnists. It's paranoid bigotry, in other words. And Pipes is a crackpot.
ReplyDeleteTHR, taqqiya is an Islamic concept, not something I have made up. It is not something accepted by all muslims. As a concept, it can explain apparent duplicity when one sees it. For example on one episode of Undercover Mosque, there was footage of a woman teaching an interfaith class at a UK mosque, promoting tolerance and understanding to the non-muslim attendees. Within an hour, the same person was conducting a class for muslim women, presenting the view that muslims could not befriend non-muslims. That looked like taqqiya to me.
ReplyDeleteI do not suggest that all muslims practice taqqiya. However, I think it may have something to do with the disparity between what Keyser Trad is reported to have said in the judgement in the defamation case, and the more benign message he preaches, for example at a public rally I attended in the wake of the Cronulla riots. It is very useful for explaining the public pronouncements of extremist groups like CAIR in the US.
My experience with muslim friends and acquaintances is that this sort of duplicity is not widely practised in Australia. Fortunately many muslims have a healthy disrespect for this sort of thing and the extremists who practice it.