Camdenation

Australia is a beautiful country, geographically and socially. But as with all good things, it has its bad apples. News coming out of Camden NSW last month about the rejection of an Islamic school building application has put a pall of bigotry and intolerance on what could otherwise be a lovely town in which to live.

It would appear that there are conflicting views on why the application was rejected. Counter to the council’s view, quite a few people have chosen to tell the ABC why they thought the application should be thrown out. See the video “Council rejects building of Islamic school” in the ABC News article to see what I mean.

The guy who rambles on about “My kids don’t read Islamic, how are they going to go to that school?” is evidently a fluent speaker of Christian. And then there’s that “…we don’t want them in Australia” woman. I mean… “Please explain?”

People of Camden: shame on you. Not for rejecting the proposal – I’m sure any professionally prepared proposal will have come to the same conclusions. You should be ashamed, however, that you should allow your community to breed such contempt for humanity.

No faith professes the merits of evil. Islam is getting lots of bad press at the moment because a few so-called “Muslims” have chosen to misinterpret scripture, abandoning context for bravado and their own religious bigotry. But to call Islam evil or a “bad teaching” is, in itself, evil. In my opinion the events at Camden amount to religious persecution.

Go back a few centuries and you will see that Christianity has had its own PR disasters. The Crusades were a shambles – politically motivated and representative of the very things Christ would have abhorred. In 1098, troops of the First Crusade besieged the city of Ma’arrat on their way to Jerusalem and, to quote a participant: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.”

It isn’t a fairy tale. It happened. It is difficult to look upon the Crusades in an attempt to glorify one’s faith, just as it is to look upon Camden to find some glimpse of brotherly Christian love*.

I should point out that I am not out for a whinge about how Australia is on the verge of a religious war… far from it. From where I stand, Australia is becoming a rich and thriving land of cultures that I would never otherwise have encountered. It’s fantastic!

At lunch a couple of weeks ago, a friend was telling us how her parents would not enter an Italian or German establishment of any sort, and that Japanese goods were to be shunned. Now her parents love their zippy little Japanese car. Imagine going out for dinner and not having the choice of risotto or (good) spaghetti Bolognese. And think – if my beloved gelateria did not exist, there would almost certainly be another fish and chips shop in its place. And it would probably be owned by the illustrious and colourful (but only white, ployse) Pauline Hanson.

The people in Camden (with their collective views) are very much in the minority in Australia. I just wish that they knew that too.

*This could be any faith, but I use the Christian example primarily, because even though Australia is a secular state the Constitution opens with “Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God…“. It’s up to a subject of the Consitution to decide what that means to him or her, but historial evidence suggests that the reference to Almighty God relates to the Christian God.