My blogging might be construed as somewhat anti-Muslim lately, so here's some news which is definitely good. It seems the Muslim youth are waking up to the fact they have nutty old dudes running their community into the ground.
Mustapha Kara-Ali, a member of the Prime Minister's Muslim Community Reference Group, said the integration of young Islamic people into the wider Australian society was being thwarted by immigrant leaders opposed to change.
"They want to run community affairs on their terms. and their terms are different to the terms of the young people who have a natural tendency to be with the big community," he told The Australian yesterday.
"No new blood is flowing into community organisations, because they don't trust the Australian-born second generation in leading the community."
Mr Kara-Ali warned that a lack of youth involvement and representation within the Muslim community would only create more violent "young thugs" such as those who were involved in the revenge attacks following the Cronulla riots last year.
Young Muslims were experiencing a "crisis of identity", he said.
I'll say.
Another young Muslim spokesman, Kuranda Seyit, agreed with Mr Kara-Ali that it was time for generational change in the Islamic community.
"We would have hoped that by this stage we would have had more developed youth programs and resources to deal with youth problems," said Mr Seyit, executive director of the Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations.
Immigrant leaders were too out of touch with young people to deal with the rising number of young Lebanese Muslims who were turning to the "convenience of crime" for the sake of "camaraderie and belonging", Mr Seyit said.
"There's a lot of information that shows there's an increase in criminal activity among some of these young Lebanese people who are now resorting to serious crime, including car rebirthing, prostitution, gun smuggling and drugs," he said.
"When Muslims are engaging in criminal activity, then they have no one else to blame if people have negative attitudes towards them."
Good God, more Muslims like these people, less like the ones in the news.
Update: Typo ("definately" rather than "definitely") fixed. Thanks Jan!
Posted by Quentin George at February 13, 2006 05:34 PMThere are many Muslims like that. It's just that empty vessels make the most noise, so you get the retards speaking up instead and demonstrating on the streets with their badly-designed posters. I bet half of them don't even know what the Hell they're protesting against.
Posted by: Jan at February 13, 2006 06:21 PMWell, I'm not doubting that. It's just these guys have been a bit too quiet up until now. Hopefully this will change.
Posted by: Aidan at February 13, 2006 06:23 PMAn interesting and inspiring piece of news.
Haha, you made a typo! 'definately' is a common one that catches people out.
Posted by: Engels at February 14, 2006 12:32 PM