On June 28, a lecture was given at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) Bankstown campus, entitled “Islam and homosexuality: an Islamic, scientific and logical approach”.
The content of the lecture was grossly homophobic… Some of the main concerns arising from the lecture included: [ul][li]Sheik Shadi, an Islamic cleric, called for an Islamic court to be set up in Australia, which would give Muslims the power to stone gay men and lesbians to death;[]Keysar Trad, vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, rejected the concept of anti-discrimination and anti-vilification legislation and urged Muslims to defy these laws; and[]Hannan Dover, a lecturer in psychology at UWS (Bankstown), told the meeting that she would not allow a gay lecturer at the university to attend the lecture. She also informed the audience that she would not allow progressive, pro-gay Muslims to attend the lecture, nor would she allow them to join a group she was establishing for Muslim health workers.[/ul]This lecture has not been reporting in the Australian media. Green Left Weekly finally reported it today.[/li]
– Does Australian media deserve criticism for not reporting this?
– Are any Muslim leaders in the US or Europe making similar public statements?
– Would US or European media report such statements? Should they?
That’s interesting and somewhat troubling december. A contextual note: as you may be aware I’m an academic at one of Australia’s larger universities. Until I read your post I wasn’t aware there was a University of Western Sydney. That’s an embarrassing admission of ignorance I guess. At least I’ve heard of Bankstown! I’ll see if I can locate any earlier coverage.
Hmm. The only item a search for “Hannan Dover” came up with on google is the Green Left Weekly article provided by the blog december cites. A search of the UWS staff directory for the School of Psychology yields no such person. There’s no reference I can find on the ACON site. Did this even happen? As yet I’m not convinced. (I’d ask whether this is yet another case of december’s enthusiasm for posting stories like this for propaganda without any real idea of whether they are true, but I’m afraid that Lib will dub december one of the outstanding minds of our generation just for daring to post some slur unchecked and undigested.)
In any case questioning the reliability of some obscure blog isn’t a sign of extremism. As for reporting the statements of a Muslim cleric it would seem to depend on how important the cleric is. And certainly you have to factor in the fact Australian Muslims as a whole have very little influence in shaping legislation and wider social attitudes. Even in the US I don’t think that statements made by ,say, Orthodox Jewish leaders on homosexuality would receive much attention and certainly not as much as those of prominent Christian leaders. This isn’t because of some kind of anti-Christian bias but simply a reflection of the fact that the latter have much more influence.
These cites and others make it clear that there is a UWS Bankstown campus, that it does have a substantial Muslim presence, and that Muslim speakers do appear at lectures there. The cites don’t confirm the specific comments reported by Green Left Weekly, but they do at least confirm a setting in which these comments could have been made.
Yeah, damn that liberal Australian media for ignoring comments that could have been made.
Is it entirely possible that they checked into the story and found nothing to substantiate it, and thus didn’t run it? Or is it just a media conspiracy to keep painting Islam in a positive light?
a) a lecture on “Islam and homosexuality” could have taken place at a seemingly obscure campus of the University of Western Sydney,
b) said lecture, if it occured, was reported by only one source of indeterminate reliability several months after the fact, and that
c) if said lecture occured as reported, homophobic remarks were offered by Muslim clerics, civil disobedience of anti-discrimination laws was urged by those clerics, agitation for Islamic reform of specific laws was recommended by clerics, and one speaker identified as a “lecturer in psychology” claimed she would deliberately discriminate against moderate or gay-tolerant Muslims.
What has not been shown includes:
a) any indication that lectures at the seemingly obscure campus typically receive a greater degree of press coverage,
b) any evidence of deliberate under-reportage on the part of the Australian press,
c) any independent corroboration that the lecture as described actually occurred, or
d) any evidence that the lecture was advertised off campus, that speakers’ notes from the lecture were disseminated to the press or that the lecture itself was widely attended or noticed within UWS or the Bankstown campus.
Note that the speakers have a degree of stature: a Sheik the vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, and a lecturer in psychology. One would expect that if Christian or Jewish speakers made the same comments, all hell would break loose. My thesis is that Muslims get different treatment.
There’s a similar problem with Falun Gong. One one hand, they are currently experiecing terrible oppression from the Chinese Government, much like Christians have experienced there for years. On the other hand, they’re solidly anti-homosexual. Now, curiously, that reality doesn’t get mentioned too often. Why? My fear is this: because people think that if people knew that, they’d be less willing to speak out against the injustices done to them. And, if true, that’s just a scary sentiment. Bigots, apparently, are more deserving of injustice than regular people.
Maybe that sort of thing is reason enough to convince people to speak out against the actual injustices themselves, regardless of victim, instead of speaking out on behalf of favored general categories, or against certain derided ones.
On this specific case: Muslims should get no more special defense for their anti-homosexual attitudes than anyone else does, nor should they be singled out as homophobes simply because they are Muslim. No one should get to hide behind culture or tradition for their abuses of other people.
If anything, if there is any reason to suppose that not reporting anti-homosexual slurs from a group that has been consistently anti-homosexual for a long time is a conspiracy, then my money would be on pragmatism, not any particular love for Muslims. At the moment, people in power are worried about fighting too many battles at once, many of them already against militant Islamists, and they don’t want to create a pile on of anti-Muslim sentiment. Is that hypothetical reason sound or not? I don’t know. I do know that President Bush is going through exactly this sort of debate with some of his more hawkish advisors right now: they think he’s being far too kind in his words about Islam, while he thinks people (both Muslim and non) won’t get the message that he doesn’t think all Muslims are bad if he isn’t careful to say so.
—One would expect that if Christian or Jewish speakers made the same comments, all hell would break loose.—
Depends on who they were. No one has any interest in reporting on Rev. Phelps much anymore: he’s old hat. Some preacher in an ultra-conservative venue also wouldn’t get much hearing. Likewise, how often do we hear about David Duke’s latest deep thoughts? So I’d want to know who these guys are, and what this university and its department are traditionally like before saying more.
I can’t speak about the position in Australia or the US, but when I was in college in Ireland -
there were several meetings on a variety of issues every night of the week, addressed by various people from both within and without the college;
frequently more people spoke at these meetings than were present in the audience;
a vast amount of nonsense was spoken, and extremist views of every kind were offered; and
the newspapers and broadcast media only reported the very largest meetings organised by the very largest societies with the most prominent speakers, and then only if their journalists were expressly invited to attend the meeting and plied with free drink to encourage them to do so. Even the college papers did not report most of the meetings which took place in the college.
Assuming that this meeting took place and these things were said (which seems quite credible to me) it does not surprise me that the media did not pick the matter up. It would astonish me if they did. The same would be true if analogous statements were made by a meeting organised by Jewish or Christian students.
I would hope that “those people” would trust any source only as far as it could be verified. That’s what I do, anyway.
Even assuming it is true, I’m not surprised larger media sources didn’t pick it up. We had many guest lectures/presentations on a number of controversial topics at the university I attended several years ago… which seems to be significantly more prominent than the University of Western Sydney. The lectures/presentation were rarely covered in even the local papers, let alone statewide or national publications. It seems that for this event to be covered would be outside the norm, as I know it anyway.
Or am I being whooshed? Did december just want another opportunity to thrash Muslims?
What’s all this about “you people”? The whole point of liberalism is that you can think anyway you want. It’s un-liberal to dichotomize, take sides, and walk in lock-step. That’s what conservatives do (irony noted). As a liberal, I oppose PC, especially that towards Muslims. I’m with December on this one, although the jury is still out on his thesis.
I looked up Hannan Dover at the USW website. She’s not listed anywhere that I could see, which could mean she was a lecturer there, but no longer.
To me it sounds like the same sort of ridiculous gathering that happens on every college campus. A few people with extreme ideas get together, maybe reserve a meeting room, and hold a “conference” that attracts only their own small group and a few curious onlookers, most of whom leave thinking the same thing: “loonies.” The reason these don’t get much media attention is because more often than not they amount to nothing.
All three points of the article are just plain ludicrous, but the last one:
Hannan Dover, a lecturer in psychology at UWS (Bankstown), told the meeting that she would not allow a gay lecturer at the university to attend the lecture. She also informed the audience that she would not allow progressive, pro-gay Muslims to attend the lecture, nor would she allow them to join a group she was establishing for Muslim health workers.
suggests to me that this lecturer didn’t quite understand her level of authority within the university. How could she “not allow” gay Muslims to attend, unless she tried to physically bar them from entering? As to not allowing them to join a group she was forming, that probably wasn’t an issue. I suspect few would be interested in joining in the first place.
Hmm… A lecture using religious basis to say homosexuality is wrong. Havn’t seen that before. Good to know it’s only muslims doing that, would be awful if other religions did, too.
Shocked, I tell you. Shocked…
[sub]“In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic.”[/sub]
You are talking about “extremist liberals” posting in the thread and attacking December. I don’t see anyone from “GreenLeft” posting here; in fact it was December who quoted it.
BTW note that 