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Professor Israeli had just begun a stint as a scholar-in-residence at the Shalom Institute in Sydney, where he is teaching a course on “Understanding Islam”.

Shalom Institute CEO Hilton Immerman said that while Professor Israeli’s views do not necessarily represent those of the Shalom Institute, which “rejects any form of racial stereotyping or ethnic quotas”, the course would proceed.

An author of 20 books on the Muslim, Arab and Chinese worlds, he was also scheduled to give talks in Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and New Zealand. However, Dr Rubenstein told the AJN that he was unsure whether the talks would go ahead given that AIJAC had withdrew its support.

In an interview with the AJN, Professor Israeli said radical Islam would not be defeated by a war of words.

“You have to infiltrate all those circles where the Muslim radicals operate, to arrest them, and to limit immigration into western countries where these Muslims, who are bent on destroying western civilisation … to limit immigration, even students who apply to come from Islamic countries to the West,” he said.

“It serves no purpose when you have this home-grown terrorist, who has been preparing for years to blow up undergrounds in London, and all you do is lead a war of words. The war of words doesn’t help. There is a whole gamut of actions that are possible in order to check this threat of Islam.”

Citing France, where Muslims comprise about nine per cent of the population, as an example, Professor Israeli warned growing Muslim communities could change the political, economic, and cultural fabric of a country.

“You have to adopt some kind of preventative policy. In order not to get there, limit the immigration and therefore you keep them a marginal minority, which will be a nuisance, but cannot pose a threat to the demographic and security aspects of a country.”

But Islamic Council of Victoria director Waleed Aly branded the comments “ill-advised and foolish” and said Professor Israeli didn’t understand Australia.

“It is clearly possible in the current environment to say things about Muslims that you simply cannot say about anyone else,” Aly said.

“The fundamental problem at the heart of this is that he seems to be suggesting that increased marginalisation of Muslim populations will somehow produce something other than mutual resentment. It should be obvious to anyone really that it’s doomed to failure.”

Officially, there are fewer than 300,000 Muslims in Australia according to the 2001 Census, but Islamic community officials estimate the actual number to be at least 500,000 – about 2.5 per cent of the population.

“Even though it’s so low, they are so vocal, and they make so much noise,” Professor Israeli said. “And therefore the situation has to be checked before they increase their numbers, because don’t forget in your immediate proximity dwells the largest or most populous Islamic country in the world [Indonesia], and by necessity, there is demographic pressure from there to channel the surplus of populations to wherever it’s possible.

“And one of the big possibilities is Australia, so they will continue to come legally, or illegally, and settle here, and when they get to the rate of the 10 per cent like in France, then you will see life will become untenable.”
He said France might already be at the “point of no return”.

“Then they control whole sections of the economy, there are areas in France where you cannot be elected to Parliament without the support of the Muslims and so on. And therefore, by increasing their numbers they start to have an impact on the social, economic, political and cultural nature of the country.”

He warned that radical Muslims would find it easier to “melt” into the community and plan terrorist acts without scrutiny from authorities if the growth of Australia’s Muslim population was allowed to continue.

“You will have then large concentrations of Muslims, so it’s not thousands, it will be millions, and when they become millions it’s a big mass where individual Muslims, including terrorists, can melt, and then go look for them.

“In England they already have that problem, they cannot locate them, they cannot sort them out from the general population, and sometimes you have to impose a curfew on a whole area to catch one or two or three terrorists, and by doing that you do an injustice to an entire population, and then they start complaining that they are discriminated against.”

Immigrant Muslims had a reputation for manipulating the values of their adopted countries to suit their own ends, he said.

“And that’s why Islam has become feared in western countries, which are open, democratic, and tolerant of others. And Muslim populations, which are very often minorities, very often abuse that hospitality and use democracy, openness and tolerance to their benefit, to spread their faith and to intimidate their hosts, and very often, to impose their standards and values upon them.”

WITH MELISSA SINGER

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He said Muslim immigrants had a reputation for manipulating the values of Western countries, taking advantage of their hospitality and tolerance.

“Greeks or Italians or Jews don’t use violence. There is no Italian or Jewish Hilaly [a reference to the controversial cleric Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly of Lakemba mosque]. Why?”

Professor Israeli said that when the Muslim population increased, so did the risk of violence.

“Where there are large Muslim populations who are prepared to use violence you are in trouble. If there is only 1 or 2 per cent they don’t dare to do it - they don’t have the backing of big communities. They know they are drowned in the environment of non-Muslims and are better behaved.”

In Australia, Muslims account for about 1.5 per cent of the population.

Professor Israeli said that in France, which has the highest proportion of Muslims in Europe at about 10 per cent, it was already too late. There were regions even the police were scared to enter, and militant Muslims were changing the country’s political, economic and cultural fabric, and demanding anti-Semitic and anti-Israel policies.

“French people say they are strangers in their own country. This is a point of no return.

“If you are on a collision course, what can you do? You can’t put them all in prison, and anyway they are not all violent. You can’t send them all back. You are really in trouble. It’s irreversible.”

Professor Israeli said that in Australia a few imams had preached violence. “You should not let fundamentalist imams come here. Screen them 1000 times before they are admitted, and after they are admitted screen what they say in the mosque.”

He said some Muslims wanted to impose sharia (Islamic law) in their adopted countries, and when propaganda did not work they turned to intimidation.

Professor Israeli said his task was to describe, not prescribe. He also said his warning did not include immigrants, including Muslims, who simply wanted to improve their lot. As long as they respected the law and democracy, their numbers — Buddhist, Muslim or Jew — were immaterial. It became material when a group accepted violence.

“The trains in London and Madrid were not blown up by Christians or Buddhists but by Muslims, so it is them we have to beware,” he said.

Keysar Trad, of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, said “Not only religious clerics need to be screened before entering Ausralia but also academics … this type of academic does nothing but create hatred, suspicion and division … We should review not only what the man has said but also those who have sponsored him, to see if they endorse those comments.”

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Hooper will relive the Paperclips experience, which was made into a movie of the same name in 2004, when she visits Australia for the United Israel Appeal (UIA) Women’s Division from February 21-March 8. She will address audiences at schools and Jewish community groups in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

Hooper said she is keenly aware that she will be speaking to an Australian Jewish community with the world’s largest per capita population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.

“I’ve spoken to the Jewish community in Aventura, Florida, which has a huge number of survivors.

“We need to remember that the best acts and the worst acts all started with little things. The paperclip is a tiny thing, we think, but it has got us thinking of issues like love and respect. We need to look at how easy it is for one person to start a groundswell that can lead to something like the Holocaust and to genocides today. Look at Darfur.”

Asked how she viewed Holocaust revisionism and high-profile deniers such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel’s destruction, Hooper told the AJN by phone from Whitwell: “We give too much attention to those people who hate. We should be saying to them, ‘Sorry you don’t know any better.’”

Hooper, a firm believer in accentuating positives, prefers to talk about the massive response to the Paperclips program. President George W Bush, former President Bill Clinton and his secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, entertainer Bill Cosby and actor Tom Hanks, are among the big names who have donated major parcels. Other parcels have come from churches, synagogues and individual families commemorating loved ones who died in the Holocaust.

“You don’t have to be rich and powerful to make a difference,” Hooper said.

She said there are plans for a reunion of all visitors to Whitwell since Paperclips began, which last year included a contingent of Jewish bikers from Yidden on Wheels, many of whom are descendants of Shoah victims.

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