Some valid points in terms of not treating all religions equally or holding them to similar standards:
Abdel-Magied was trying to make a similar point about Islam, the prophet Muhammad and subsequent patriarchal interpretations of the Koran. Maybe she was naive to think the “reality show” that Q&A has descended into was the best place to use phrases like “Islam is the most feminist of all religions” and “There is a difference between religion and culture.” Sentences like that need to be placed in context, unpacked for nuance.
Unfortunately context and nuance are not big features of conversation inside the outrage machine, but double standards are rife.
It seems that every Australian Muslim who pokes their head up in public is expected to own, explain and condemn any terrorist act carried out by any extremist Muslim anywhere in the world. The outrage machine demands it, and then that same machine judges if the words are sufficient.
Why isn’t this same outrage applied to Australian Catholics? If we are going on a body count the Catholic clergy has done more harm to more Australians than extremist Muslims. More than 4,000 reports of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic church made to the royal commission. God knows how many more are unreported. Innocent Australian children and young people are the victims. Lives have been ruined: suicides and mental illness, broken families, grotesque physical injury.
Why isn’t the outrage machine demanding the Catholic prime minister condemn this horrendous and sustained attack on Australians every time the commission hears from another victim of Catholic abuse?
Why aren’t they regularly calling for the Catholic deputy prime minister to speak out and make clear he does not condone what some Catholic clergy have done?
Why aren’t they asking the Catholic-raised leader of the opposition about whether Cardinal George Pell should face questions in Australia? Oh, wait, the leader of the opposition said in parliament two weeks ago that Cardinal Pell should be sent back to Australia to face questions. Why didn’t the outrage machine join that bandwagon?
Why aren’t they demanding the government urgently implement a national redress scheme to make reparations to the Catholic church’s victims?
Or is taking on Australian Catholics hitting just a little too close to home?
It’s easier, isn’t it, to pick on the young woman with the scarf on her head, or get upset about two little girls in a hijab, all in the name of making Australia safe.
What brave defenders of freedom, of Australia, you are.
Interesting insights into how the vetting and selection process worked:
One had been a senior government official complicit in human rights abuses. Three had been involved in “subversion by force.” Another was considered a danger to the security of Canada.
Government documents obtained by the National Post reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrians as refugees, and provide a “high-level overview” of the backgrounds of those who were selected.
The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada documents, released under the Access to Information Act, summarize the results of interviews of Syrian refugees conducted by visa officers in Beirut.
The refusal rate for Syrian refugees was 4 per cent according to the documents, which, though released only recently, date to the early stages of the Syrian refugee program, when the Liberal government was trying to fulfill a campaign promise to resettle 25,000 by the end of 2015.
During the first month the Liberals were in office, Canadian visa officers refused Syrian refugee claimants 35 times for everything from failing to answer questions truthfully to uncertainty about their identities.
Between 2014 and Nov. 17, 2015 83 applicants were refused — five of those for security reasons. (Because some may have been rejected for more than one reason, it is unclear exactly how many Syrians were turned away in total.)
According to the documents, the Syrians accepted as refugees came from five areas: Aleppo, Hassakeh, Damascus, Homs and the Dara’a and Sweida region along the Jordanian border in the south.
Those from Aleppo were “virtually all” Armenian families with one or two children. Most were “self-employed businessmen and tradesmen (welders, mechanic, jewelers) with moderate to high levels of wealth,” it said.
The oft repeated narrative with this group was that they were forced to take flight very suddenly, in the middle of the night or early morning upon discovering that the Daesh (ISIL) was marching on their town or village
They tended to be from neighbourhoods close to Aleppo’s old city, near the frontline between government and opposition forces. Most had fled Syria in 2012, although some had stayed until as late as 2014 because they didn’t have the money or needed to care for elderly family members.
“Those who stayed longer tended to float between neighbourhoods staying with different family members. They moved as the fighting moved and intensified in different parts of the city,” a report on the interviews said.
They cited their reasons for leaving Syria as the complete lack of security. “There was no water or power, and regular shelling of neighbourhoods. There were a few accounts of client, client family members, or neighbours having been kidnapped and ransomed.”
In Beirut, most found work in their trades while others were employed part-time at places such as restaurants. Those lacking money or jobs “tended to migrate back and forth between Lebanon and Syria,” the report said.
Multicultural Meanderings 