Trade, speaking as one of those blank, blank types who watched 60 minutes sometimes I have to ask did you see the story?

Your post suggests not.
Firstly the story was prefixed with the acknowledgement that the overwhelming majority of muslims in Australia are peaceful and not part of the extremism the story was about.

Secondly there were real points of concern in the story. Put in context with extremist behaviours elsewhere in the world some of what I saw made it fairly clear that the extreme end of the muslim community is further out there than is generally acknowledged. Put in context with extremist behaviour in other parts of the world it is legitimate to ask "what do we do about this?".

Shouting down those concerns does not help, open discussion involving all of the community may.

R0bert

kalweb,

great job of misrepresenting my intention by quibbling over degree.

"a delusion (a fixed, false belief system - not based on fact and out of context with the person's sociocultural background - which cannot be reasoned or argued with - is held with unshakeable conviction - and which is not shared by others)"... l think you have made a fair assessment of the situation and that definition does a pretty good job of summing up SOME of the comments.

The tone of your posts and the way you construct your raltionalisations dont seem to be in accord with your experience "as a psychiatric/mental health nurse of some 30 years duration." oh that's right you are a nurse not a doctor. Sorry to dig, but you are making claims of credibility based on experience.

"Well trade, I guess you can always go to another forum on another website." ... ditto.

Dont head shrinks just prescribe a bottle of pills for everything these days, not to mentiion that virtually every behaviour has been classified as a treatable malady.

Woah, really intelligent, empathic, compassionate and reasonable article.
Shame the same cannot be said of most of the posts, no matter what particular philosophy the poster subscribes to.
Maybe we should all give up our faiths, philosophy's and most cherished beliefs (read prejudices), throw our hands up in the air and admit that it is the human condition not to know.
It seems it is our determination to convince others about the rightness of our own beliefs that causes all the grief. For God's, Buddha's, Allah's, The Goddess's, Humanities sake, lets agree to disagree.
If we can't even do it here, in response to this intensely human article, what chance have we got anywhere?

The thing is enaj, religion is important and people forget that to their peril.

Athiests like to lick their chops when religion comes into play but in fact, they are every bit as bitter and twisted as they so like to portray the religious.

Christians have had to put up with plenty of hatred and a fair dose on this website. I sometimes rub my eyes when I read some of the posts and then think, hey, but Stalin and Mao were the greatest butchers of the 20th century and they were athiests.

I think this thread is drawing to an end and I would like to reiterate what I have said before: more power to the Irfans and I do believe the fact that the London bombers were home bred has been a huge wake up call to Muslims generally and we Christians wish them well in their attempts to rein them in (and yes, the sooner America and her allies leave Iraq to the Sunnis and Shias to fight it out among themselves the better) and for my money Irfan is very welcome to live in Australia (and I'm only a 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th generation Australian). I look forward to having a cup of coffee one day with him and the guys from the Islamic Counil of Victoria after we get this wretched vilification legislation in Victoria, which has only served to drive us apart, amended.

As enaj says, sometimes we have to say on a forum such as this "lets agree to disagree", and let's do our best to remain civilised

Mr Yusuf is just another racist.He expects the average Australian to not think that there is a serious problem with certain ethnic diasporas . These people have a hide to accuse someone like me of racism just for pointing out that I think that their community/culture has too many racist biggots in it. This was all One Nation did, was to react Cabramatta and Bankstown being the crime capitals and to the terrible obvious ethnocentrism and racist disrespect that these ethnic kids are being taught. Two of their most prominent leaders, Keysar Trad and Sheikh Hilaly : Keysar told all muslims to ignore discrimination laws in relation to gays in 2002 at UWS, he then stood by while a certain sheikh Shadi called for sharia courts to be set up in Aust. to stone gays to death. Keysar also called us "white dreggs" and described our culture as sick some years back. As for sheikh Hilaly, he praised the 911 bombers, said that jews run the world with sex and most recently used hostage in Iraq Mr Wood's life as a pawn in his filthy "used car salesman-like" personell campaign.Another lunatic that the muslim community or its leaders just mentioned have not condemned is sheikh Feiz, who said it was a western girls fault if she got raped because they wear shorts etc. These comments were termed "out of place" by Keysar Trad and no other muslim leaders condemned it, they're all silent. How can the Australian public take the muslim community seriously if they don't condemn these racist, biggotted people? Parties like One Nation, who condemn the clustering of racist, crime ridden communities, are called racist by the migrants,and the leftwing people are just cowards and treasonous.

Yep lets all continue the mud slinging - that always makes people feel all warm and fuzzy about each other.

Forget about mutual respect, compassion, tolerance and forget about actually assisting the muslim community in this time of crisis.

Just continue the hate people. That will solve all the world's problems.