Saturday, January 24, 2015

Tony Abbott tells Sydney Islamic protesters to 'lighten up'

Tony Abbott tells Sydney Islamic protesters to 'lighten up'

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/23/tony-abbott-sydney-lslamic-protesters-lighten-up

Prime minister says some people are ‘thin-skinned’ about free speech, and cites Egyptian president’s call for a revolution in Islam
Tony Abbott
Tony Abbott says everyone should listen to ‘the sensible people inside the Islamic world’. Photograph: Nikki Short/AAP
A radical Islamic group planning to protest against the use of images of the prophet Muhammad needs to “lighten up”, Tony Abbott has told Sydney radio.

The group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, planned to rally in south-west Sydney on Friday evening against the kind of images that proliferated in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings.

Abbott told 2GB he hoped there would be only a few protesters.

“Frankly I don’t think any of us really want to be in the business of insulting anyone, but on the other hand we all believe in free speech, and I have to say some people are a bit thin-skinned about free speech,” he said.

“I just hope the organisers of this protest lighten up a bit, and accept that in our robust democracy, a lot of people say a lot of things, and sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong, and we just have to accept the rough and the smooth together.”

A spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir likened Abbott’s comments to being asked to “discard the sacredness of our values”.

“It’s quite disingenuous to suggest a people, ie Muslims, lighten up over something that is provocative and quite derogatory to their core values and beliefs, the centre of which is obviously the prophet Muhammad,” he said.

Asked whether Islam had “a problem in its ranks”, the prime minister said he was encouraged by a December address by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, to a leading Islamic university calling for a “religious revolution” within the faith.

“[Sisi] is a devout Muslim, he’s a very senior figure in the Arab world as the democratically elected leader of Egypt.

“He called for a religious revolution inside Islam, and said there’s something fundamentally wrong when people are scared of us, and he said it was very important for hundreds of years of false thinking to be reversed,” Abbott said.

“I think that what everyone should be doing is listening to the sensible people inside the Islamic world, and there are more and more of them.”

He compared the use of Islam by some extremists to sexual abuse by Catholic priests and historical crimes committed by Christians.

Unlike Christianity, Islam had never been “through its own version of the reformation, never went through its own version of the enlightenment”, Abbott said.

“Pluralism, the separation of church and state, these are all very recent concepts for Islam,” he said, adding: “That’s my impression, I don’t claim to be an expert.”

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