This past weekend, we blogged here about foaming-at-the-mouth proponents of jihad rampaging through the streets of Australia’s largest city, Sydney [see our blog post here].
Today, the mainstream Australian media are reporting with astonishment on the sight of elementary school children being pushed front and center by radical adults to embody the lust for Islamist jihad and to advocate the killing of unbelievers.
*An eight year-old Australian girl called Ruqaya, reading a prepared speech promoting jihad at a Hizb ut-Tahrir (“Party of Liberation” in Arabic) conference for “Islamic fundamentalists” in the western Sydney community of Bankstown this past Sunday, a day after the riot. [The video is here – she starts in Arabic, and then switches between English and Arabic.] The name of the conference: Muslims Rise. More than 600 people took part.
*A second child, probably younger than the girl, is photographed today in several Australian papers, holding a placard that reads “Behead all those that insult the prophet.” It’s unlikely he has the ability to read the sign, let alone write it.
Jared Owens writing in The Australian [here] says, without much evident conviction, that these unsettling developments amount to a challenge for moderate Australian Moslems to stand up and speak out. Speaking in customarily measured and moderate Australian tones, he uses the word ‘set-back’ in describing the general mood among Australians exposed to the events of the past four days.
Our familiarity with Australia gives us the sense that, after showing considerable tolerance and exemplary patience to their newly arrived Islamic neighbours over several decades, a sense of alarm and dismay at what these people are ready to do to their own children has begun setting in, along with a sense of dread about what they are willing to do to other people’s children
We wonder how much Australians in general know about the emerging calls to restore this thing called a caliphate. Following is a brief extract from Wikipedia’s “Caliphate” entry:
“Al-Qaeda has as one of its clearly stated goals the re-establishment of a caliphate. The late al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, called for Muslims to “establish the righteous caliphate of our umma.” …Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s mentor and al-Qaeda second-in-command until 2011), once “sought to restore the caliphate…which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century.” Once the caliphate is re-established, Zawahiri believes, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading the jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” Zawahiri later wrote, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”
In the videos of Saturday’s Sydney Islamist riots, the clearly-heard rallying cry of the men bashing the police was “Obama, Obama, we love Osama” [check it on the RT (Russia Today) video here]. Understanding what they mean is child’s play.