al Qaeda preaches at our mosque
Al Qaeda preaches in our biggest mosque:
AN AL-QAEDA recruiter, described as the No. 1 terrorist threat to America, was engaged by a Sydney youth group to address hundreds of young people - a decision that has caused deep divisions at one of Australia’s largest mosques.
At the same time as Anwar al-Awlaki was advising the extremist later charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, he was in talks with a group, Sydney Muslim Youth, about delivering a sermon to young Australians. He was already well known to security agencies as the spiritual guide to three of the hijackers on September 11, 2001…
The Herald attended the sermon at the Lakemba mosque in February last year but was ejected by organisers…
According to a director of the mosque, Ziad Ghamraoui, Shady Alsuleiman was in charge of organising evening youth events at the time of the sermon. Sheikh Shady refused to comment… IslamicMedia.com.au, an initiative of the Shady-affiliated United Muslims of Australia, streamed but did not record the speech and has 15 other audio sermons from the imam.
Shady is a contradiction of those bland assurances that the second generation will assimilate as the first did not:
Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman was born in Sydney - Australia from an Arab family who migrated to Australia in the late 60’s. He completed his School Certificate in Sydney before heading overseas on a seven year journey seeking Islamic knowledge in the Islamic world… He operates from Australia’s largest Masjid and Islamic centre (Masjid Ali Bin Abi Taleb, known as Lakemba Mosque).
And he’s formed an Islamic college in Sydney that now has five teachers. One is the Sydney-born Rameh Zoud, who was interviewed six years ago by the ABC in Yemen, where he was studying Islam at a school in a town in al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s ancestral homeland:
(Reporter) CORCORAN: The authorities regard (Californian student) Yahya (Rhodus) and the other foreigners here as moderates and today he’s helping settle in nine recent arrivals from Australia, including twenty year old Rameh Zaoud, a student of Lebanese decent from Sydney.
RAMEH ZAOUD: I finished high school in Australia, I finished Year 12 and I studied Koran after high school and I memorised most of the Koran and then I was favoured by God to come here and study Islamic studies…
CORCORAN: What’s your view on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Do you condemn them?
RAMEH ZAOUD: Well I tell you the truth, I was in Australia and I seen a lot on TV but I really don’t have any, nothing makes, I didn’t study it. I didn’t really go into it and nothing really makes sense to me. Like you’d probably know more than me. I really haven’t studied that much.
CORCORAN: Al Qaeda is an extremely sensitive topic here, one that Yahya and another American student monitoring our interview want us to avoid.
As a young Australian you read the newspapers, you watch the TV, it’s been everywhere for the past two and a half years. You must have an opinion. You don’t condemn them?
RAMEH ZAOUD: That’s the thing…
YAHYAH RHODUS: What he’s saying is that he’s not a legal judge such that he can condemn someone and the question itself is a little bit offensive for us to talk bad about someone behind their back without sufficient knowledge of that person.