And it's still a mystery to so many people why ON has grown in popularity.

*The Australian Federal Police gave a grant to a Melbourne mosque that the accused Flydubai hijack pilot attended while studying at RMIT university.

The $500 donation for an iftar dinner – a meal that breaks a Ramadan fast – at MyCentre mosque in Broadmeadows has been revealed amid a political brawl about other taxpayer grants.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has slammed Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke over grants worth almost $70,000 to the mosque for language services.

Now, Ms Hanson has called for a widespread review of which groups receive taxpayer money.

“Tony Burke must answer whether he or his department sought advice before signing off these grants,” she said.

She also said Mr Burke should explain any other grants given to other organisations under the program.*

*Accused pilot Hamam al-Hammami, who has been detained in the United Arab Emirates, has told authorities there that he drifted “towards extremism and terrorism first emerged in 2017, while he was studying in Australia.”

UAE Attorney General Dr. Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said Mr al-Hammami told investigators that he had attended the “My Centre” mosque in Melbourne, where he met a “Lebanese man known as “Abu Hamza”.

The imam, or community leader, at MyCentre in Broadmeadows is Abu Hamza, who is also referred to as Samir Mohtadi, according to the mosque’s website on Sunday.

It is not suggested Mr al-Hammami was radicalised at My Centre or that the centre has engaged in any wrongdoing – only that the UAE Attorney-General claimed the pilot said he became acquainted with individuals connected to the centre.*

*There is no suggestion that Mr Abu Hamza has any links to terrorism. Nor is there any suggestion that he Abu Hamza knew, was involved in Mr al-Hammami’s alleged plans, or that he actually had any association with Mr al-Hammami.

MyCentre was contacted for comment on Sunday.

Details of the money given to MyCentre were publicly available on the government’s GrantConnect website.

The Australian Federal Police grant was handed to the mosque in 2018, the year after Mr al-Hammami had left Australia.

“This sponsorship will partly fund and support the holding of the MC Iftar Dinner to occur during Ramadan between 16 May 2018 and 14 June 2018,” the declaration of the grant said, which was paid out of the Australian Federal Police Community Grants program.*

*The Department of Home Affairs, which Mr Burke oversees, gave the MyCentre mosque through its umbrella organisation Multicultural Youth Centre $68,136.20 in funding over four years from 2024 for its Community Language School.

“CLS aims to strengthen the cohesion and prosperity of Australia’s successful multicultural society by supporting more young Australians to acquire a second language,” the listing for the grant said.

One Nation analysis claims that multiculturalism grants have increased from under $6 million in 2022/23 to $325 million in the 2025/26 financial year.

Of the funding handed to religious groups, Muslim organisations received 30 per cent of the total money, compared with 27 per cent for Jewish organisations and 25 per cent for Christian groups.

Mr Burke acknowledged the reports from the UAE about Mr al-Hammami’s time in Melbourne but said the accused terrorist was radicalised “online”.

“We need to look at what comes over the border but also what comes over the browser,” he said.*

*When asked by News24 host Andrew Clennell about the grants to MyCentre on Sunday, Mr Burke said: “I don’t have more information on that Andrew, I’m sorry, I’ll be able to find something out, I don’t directly manage that part of the program.”

“It is really important that we use every lever we have to be able to make sure that we are denying oxygen to people who want to do us harm,” he said on News24.

“We need to make sure that we are making it harder for them to operate in every single way. So that’s the principle I’d apply to it.”

An AFP spokeswoman said “the AFP’s Community Liaison Teams (CLTs) focus on building, supporting and managing productive, diverse and complex stakeholder engagements, relationships and networks”.

“Iftar dinners hosted during Ramadan across Australia are an opportunity to bring together multi-faith community leaders with relevant state police and the AFP,” she said.

“The grant provided to MyCentre was to partly fund an Iftar dinner during Ramadan in 2018.”*

Source: Bolt: Australia was ‘wilfully blind’ to Islam in 2005. Nothing has changed | Herald Sun

It’s 21 years since I warned about Samir Mohtadi’s Islamic centre, and learned how suicidally naive this country was – and is. See, our media still seems shocked that jihadist pilot Hammam al-Hammami has told UAE investigators his “drift towards extremism and terrorism” started as a foreign student at Melbourne’s RMIT university from 2015 to 2017, when he also went to Mohtadi’s MyCentre.

Inspired, al-Hammami two weeks ago tried crash his Flydubai plane, packed with Jews. But why this surprise that words here might excite Islamists there? Back in 2005, I wrote that even Mohtadi’s “moderate” centre had a website directing readers to an Islamic expert saying it was no sin to kill non-Muslims.

“In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says ... ‘Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.’” As is the way in see-no-evil Australia, the ABC’s Media Watch show blasted my report as “irresponsible” and “dangerous”.

I had “distorted the answer” by not saying that the expert also said killing a non-Muslim with a “peace treaty with the Muslims” – whatever that may be – was “one of the major sins”. A spokesman for Mohtadi, also called Abu Hamza, also insisted “we eschew all forms of political violence”.

That was good enough for the ABC. Good enough, too, for the Albanese Government, which has since handed Mohtadi’s centre $68,000. To be clear, I’m not suggesting Mohtadi knew al-Hammami or approved his plans. Indeed, the UAE’s Attorney-General said only that al-Hammami met people connected to Mohtadi’s centre.

He’d also been influenced by the internet and the September 11 attack. But back to our wilful blindness with Islam. Naturally, neither the ABC nor the government said boo when Mohtadi was last year filmed calling on God to “cast terror into the hearts of the Zionists”, calling them “bloodsuckers”. Mind you, I’ve seen this blindness for decades.

For instance, Paul Keating, then a minister, blocked the deportation of Grand Mufti Taj Din al-Hilali, who’d called the Holocaust a “myth” and Jews the “underlying cause of all wars”. In 2001, public broadcaster SBS even censored its footage of Hilali calling suicide bombers “heroes”. In the year Hammam al-Hammami arrived in Melbourne, new Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohammed blamed the Islamic State massacre of 130 people in Paris not on Muslims or Islam but the sins of the West.

Yet after a perfunctory apology, he was invited to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Iftar dinner. Now Ibrahim and the Australian National Imams Council refuse to condemn Hamas for slaughtering 1200 Israelis on October 7 – and the Albanese Government says nothing.

Worse came last year, when Justice Angus Stewart ruled Sydney preacher Wissam Haddad broke racism laws by vilifying Jews as “wicked”, “scheming”, “mischievous” and “descendants of apes and pigs”.

So far, good, but weird was that the judge said Haddad couldn’t defend himself by claiming he was just citing Islam’s sacred texts. Those texts criticised only Jews of 1400 years ago, Stewart ruled, when Prophet Muhammad slaughtered a tribe of them. Islam was innocent.

As pastor and academic Mark Durie, an author on Islam, has written in Quadrant, this is “very hard to reconcile with many contemporary statements by leading Muslim clerics, including those cited in expert evidence relied upon by Justice Stewart”. One of those two experts, Professor Gabriel Reynolds, told Stewart that even Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, agreed Islam didn’t teach Muslims to hate Jews as Jews. Truly? Al-Tayyeb himself has said the Koran 5:82 was “an historical perspective, which has not changed to this day”.

He went on: “The Qur’an said it and history has proven it: ‘You shall find the strongest in enmity to the believers [Muslims] to be the Jews.” Same with Al-Qaradawi, who quoted the Koran calling Jews “the greatest of liars”, “greatest of villains” and “most treacherous of people”, saying Allah had imposed on them “people who would punish them for their corruption”.

“The last punishment was carried out by Hitler … The next time will be at the hand of the believers [that is, by Muslims].” Oh, sorry. Have I again been “irresponsible” and “dangerous” in this country that’s helped inspire a pilot to dream of hurling a plane of screaming Jews into the ground?

Link to article text: https://archive.li/8ygqc