Today was Easter Saturday, so it meant that certain interstate people would be in Melbourne for the holidays, myself included. We organised to meet up at RaRamen in Glen Waverley, with Mahmud pulling out in the last minute and Wong not responding much to outgoing communication, most likely as a result of being involved in some sort of training. Hemanga woke up late today, and as such was not notified until the gathering was about to commence, so also pulled out. I got there at around 12.45 and walked around the Glen Waverley shopping area looking for the place. Shehan had called me earlier so I knew that he was there, but I decided to try find it myself and didn’t call him for directions as a matter of pride and nothing else. I walked up and down Kingway multiple times looking for it, but could not find it. Eventually I did call Shehan, but just as he was about to instruct me on where to go I noticed the big yellow sign, and so walked in and up the stairs. Mitesh and Shehan were already there, and we would later be joined by Pasukov and a few of Mitesh’s uni friends.

Shehan, like myself, is still at uni whereas Mitesh and Pasukov are both working full-time for a Bank and the Army, respectively. They talk about how good it is to go home and not have homework, something I cannot really relate to.

A lot of stuff on the menu involved pork in some way, so I ordered some steamed vegetarian dumplings and ate those.

Afterwards while heading to our cars Mitesh and I discovered that we had been having the same sort of dream several times, where we would be taking a subject and not doing much study, and then having exams.

I gave up blogging on this topic for many years, largely because I believed the facts of the matter were self-evident to anyone capable of even basic cognition. But it seems that is not the case, so I will proceed to outline my thoughts.

Israel and the USA say that Palestine should not unilaterally attempt to gain the status of statehood without negotiation. This is hypocritical because America did not gain their independence from Britain via that path, nor did Israel have any negotiations with the Palestitians when their state was being formed.

They also say that recent moves like the Unesco vote show that the Palestinians are not genuinely interested in Peace. Being granted membership of Unesco doesn’t actually affect anything on the ground for Israelis, it is largely a symbolic gesture. Settlement-building and home-demolition on the other hand actually do affect Palestinians’ lives and their prospects for a future state.

Israelis and the USA are always going to be like this, I accept that, but what annoys me is when our politicians here blindly toe the line. The only good thing I ever saw from one of the major parties here was Kevin Rudd recommending that Australia abstain from the UN bid for statehood. Shows what a sad state of affairs we are in when it comes to being controlled by the pro-Zionist lobby.

I also think western politicians need to examine these issues when they want to look at why their domestic Muslim youth hold hostile attitudes to the West. It is not because we irrationally hate freedom; it is because the west continues to blindly support injustices against various Muslim peoples perpetrated by Israel or by corrupt puppet rulers.

I came back from a night shift this morning and I saw the headline “Turkey pursues rebels into Iraq”. I was completely confused because I could not imagine why a turkey would chase people so aggressively. That is all. Going to sleep.

This is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald which talks about how a proposal to legalise sound moderators on firearms has been rejected by the NSW government.

I will proceed to outline why this is baseless; an unsuppressed .22LR shot produces a muzzle report of at least around 120 Decibels, which is the same rating that would be given to a noise like a car horn, and does not cause significant pain. A centrefire shot generally produces a noise of around 140-170db and is much more unsafe without hearing protection, but suppressed can be brought down to about 130db, which is still louder than the currently-legal unsuppressed .22LR.

In medicine we have the concept of ‘evidence-based medicine’ which involves looking at treatments, strategies and guidelines and rigourously assessing them to determine their benefit. For example in the case of breast cancer, many women are encouraged to do self-exams, but recently there has been some discussion that these self-examinations do not really increase the overall rate of detection, so any money spent on promoting this practice may be better spent elsewhere (this is something that was discussed in class so I do not have immediate references).

I think it would be good if we had such a thing as evidence-based lawmaking, because there are a lot of laws which pretty much have no basis in reality, especially around firearms. For example, NZ does not restrict firearm suppressors at all, so it would be worth looking at how many gun crimes there have involved their use. Also some European countries actually require suppressors for OH&S reasons, so it would be worth looking into how many people in those countries are being silently assassinated, and then determining whether the suppressor ban actually has any merit. But perhaps that would make too much sense.

Especially agitating to me is this comment from a spokeswoman for the Police Minister:

”The NSW government rejects absolutely any suggestion that moderators or silencers have any place in the community … Currently, legitimate commercial feral animal and pest control professionals can acquire a moderator only with the approval of the Police Commissioner. Changes to this regime have been mooted in a private member’s bill currently before the Parliament, and will be opposed by the NSW government.”

It makes no reference as to why they believe this.

A preliminary investigation by myself seems to suggest that anyone can access an image on facebook if they know the URL of the jpeg file. I am testing this with a control picture which I have set to be viewable by only myself. If you can see it then the loophole exists, in which case it would seem a pretty major oversight by the developers.

Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed has been appointed to the role of ‘Grand Mufti of Australia’.

The point has been raised that he does not speak much English and that it could affect his role. Personally I don’t believe it will be much of a problem, as long as the people working under him are able to effectively engage with the wayward youth.

Some are likely to bring up the point that this is an undemocratic appointment. I for one don’t think that’s really an issue at all; since when have Mufti’s been democratically elected? And it’s not really a position which requires democratic election. Positions like ‘representitive’ would generally have that requirement, since the representative would have to represented the views of his people, but this is not really one of those roles.

My main gripe with this whole story is that he is being appointed as the ‘Grand Mufti of Australia‘. I very much doubt that he will end up engaging with those outside the Eastern capital cities. That is not a criticism of the man himself, but that is just how things work around here. The Muslim communities in the different cities are pretty independent, I think if they want they should just have Muftis in each one. Maybe they already do though, and maybe that’s why he is the ‘Grand Mufti’, I don’t really know how these things work.

The reason I raise that point above is that after living in country Australia for the last four years there has been hardly any engagement with our mosque from the external community, apart from the Tablighi Jamat when they pass through on their travels. I think this holds true for other regional university towns as well. The result of this is that the mosques are run by the GCC international students, and they run it similar to the way (I assume) they run it back home; there isn’t much engagement with women or children or community activities or the sort of things you would see in the city-mosques. And organisations outside that do run national events (like the YMA which I have worked with) only ever really advertise in the capital cities anyway. The only exception I’ve seen is the Al-Ghazzali centre which has events in Newcastle which is a non-capital metropolitan centre. The country is still left out.

In short I hope that if the Australian National Imams Council sees fit to call themselves that then they will at least extend their reach out to those of us who live in what I like to call the ‘real’ Australia and not just their cozy enclaves where halal food and baklava are sold aplenty.