HERALDSUN… What an offensive corruption of our curriculum. Children are to be taught the fabled best of Islam and the imagined worst of Australia to blind us all to the real challenges Islam poses even to a country that’s peacefully integrated the many more Buddhists here:

EVERY Australian school student would be taught positive aspects about Islam and Muslims – and that Australia is a racist country – under a proposal by an education think tank.  
The plan is outlined in the Learning From One Another: Bringing Muslim Perspectives into Australian Schools booklet, published during the week by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies.
It says there is a “degree of prejudice and ignorance about Islam and Muslims”, and Australian students must be taught to embrace difference and diversity.
The booklet refers to the al-Qai’da of Osama bin Laden as “a famous name” synonymous with the traditionalist movement in Islam. It makes no reference to terrorism.
It says “most texts used in Australian English classes still have a Western or European perspective”.

How impudent for a largely immigrant community, comprising a very small minority, to demand English classes now be taught more from their perspective rather than the communal perspective of the country to which most chose to come – a communal perspective that reflects the values and institutions that have made this country worth coming to in the first place. It is particularly offensive in that the host nation is demonised as racist while the very real and in some cases lethal challenges posed by the newcomers are glossed over.
This National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies document is the well-meaning – but dangerously foolish and deceptive – work of Dr Eeqbal Hassim, a former research fellow in Islamic Law at the University of Melbourne, and Jennet Cole-Adams, director of Curriculum Services at the Australian Curriculum Studies Association.
Most tellingly, it has only passing and vague references to Islamic terrorism, which is the key explanation for Australia’s alleged “racism” towards Muslims – something that might in many case might be more properly described as a natural caution, and one limited to Muslims here than to Buddhists or any other largely immigrant group that seems curiously immune to our “racism”. There is no mention at all of the Islamist killings of some 100 Australian in Bali, or of the Muslim terrorist plots in Australia itself, which have seen 20 people jailed.
Here is the document’s reference to Islamist terror groups, suggesting that Islamist terrorism is created by Western arrogance more than any sickness within Islam itself or Arabic cultures: Continue Reading →