Gee, just read a stack of comments concerning Nayeefa's thoughtful essay, and must back Tony Kevin and a couple of others.
Some of the anti-muslim/anti middle eastern stuff here is so crude and simplistic; like out of the dark ages. Some of you please, go away and rethink and read a few history books. Then come back when you have got some of the medieval fear and loathing out of your systems.
If cosmopolitian people elsewhere in the world read some of this KKK rubbish Australians will develop really an even worse name as boors and peasants in civilised parts of the wider world "out there"
I had no idea so many Aussies apparently know so little about the wider world. Are we all just big clumsy ockers stumbling around the place with heads up a dark place like bulls in a china shop?
Talk a bout "dumbed down"!
Seriously, am feeling quite sick with embarrassment at some of this Howard-like redneck rubbish.

I wonder how many of the writers here have ever met any muslims that they denigrate so much.

Perhaps if you look at the person it might enlighten you all.

When I first got involved with the Afghan shi'ite muslim community it was at a New Year's eve party, December 2001 which was hosted by Lowitja O'Donoghue and the Catholic Aboriginal mission. I taught shy and beautiful little boys and girls how to dance while their parents watched with the greatest of joy - many of them are friends to this day. The men cooked all the food and served it with the exception of the birthday cake.

One thing all these young Afghan people had in common was being locked up in Woomera and tormented by nice, white Australian guards who used tear gas and water cannons along with batons - even on small children - at Ruddock's instigation.

I don't know any more about islam today than I did then because not one of them has tried to ram it down my throat - unlike every christian I have ever met who babbles about the love of god as if this god was a real person or thing.

I felt entirely safe with 130 young Afghan men that night - I rarely feel safe alone with even a couple of Australian men, Tony Kevin and Frank Brennan excepted - better add Jeremy Moore.

What ugly minds many of you have to abuse this young woman and then declare that muslims treat women with disrespect.

Tony Kevin

Yeah, I think you're right. A Muslim person makes a good-faith attempt to write an article that reaches out to "mainstream" Australia, and is met with a torrent of abuse from people who then have the hide to accuse Muslims of isolating themselves from our so-generous welcomes to this country.

Well, duh.

The moral panic about Muslims in Australia is a rinse-and-repeat copy of what the South-East Asians in the 80s, the Mediterraneans in the post-war years, the Catholics for decades, the Chinese in the 19th century, have all copped. Same "they won't integrate", "they're a threat to our society", "they'll take us over" BS rhetoric.

It really doesn't pay to be the latest new arrival in Australia.

When the swarming hate-locusts have moved on, I wonder to whom they'll next turn their attention? We haven't done over the Sudanese or the Brazilians yet, but if they start turning up in really big numbers, I guess it'll be their turn.

How infantile. And how predictable. And hurtful. And ultimately, boring.

I disagree the original article is an attempt to examine and discuss religion but what follows is about denigration.
I think this attitude is as I say the latest hyping of our leaders aided by a media who does not inform merely sits astride a position, commerce.
Yes as one post says there are previous examples and a lot more to the debate concerning faith than emerges here. For a start why do people need a faith? See Francis Crick The astonishing Hypothesis and for the use of fear of difference which is what comes out of these posts see Carmen Lawrence Fear and Politics as a primer for the use of fear of difference.
I can only think that you must all be young and virile in need of proving manhood using the sort of behaviour I experienced at boarding school from the popular groups arguing as this series of posts does.
Confrontation and disputer rather than dispute resolution, the use of might to make right!
Leaders who choose issues likely to arouse fear and distort them. See Israel’s Sacred Terrorism by Rokach on the web at www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/sacred_terror.html?20062
And search the web to seek confirmation of its truth!I might be lying.
Foreign Affairs are all about little coteries playing games and distorting data to achieve democratic support remember Iraq!

[Deleted for flaming the author. Poster suspended.]

[Deleted for flaming. See previous post.]