Banned Sheik Feiz Mohammed back in Australia
YONI BASHAN AND JESSE PHILLIPS
March 13, 2011
A RADICAL Muslim preacher - who has likened Jews to pigs, denounced Christians and urged children to die for their
religion - is teaching Islam to young followers in Sydney after years in exile in the Middle East.
Despite Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd previously telling Sheik Feiz Mohammed never to return to Australia, the firebrand
is delivering sermons at the Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah centre in Auburn.
NSW police told The Sunday Telegraph they were monitoring Sheik Feiz, who has a reputation worldwide as an
inflammatory preacher.
"We maintain an ongoing relationship with him and other members of the local community as part of our community
engagement program," a police spokesman said.
"NSW Police Force will only take an interest in teachings by members of the community if they promote breaking the
law."
The Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah centre, of which he is the full-time Amir, is on Auburn Rd behind the Bakhiri Book Store,
which sells religious texts and other artefacts.
The Sydney-born cleric and former champion boxer created a furore in 2007 when his Death Series DVDs were uncovered
by the The Daily Telegraph.
In them he likened Jews to "pigs" and urged Muslim children to become martyrs.
"Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid [holy warrior].
Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom," the Sheik said in one taped sermon.
In another lecture, he said "every single non-Jew is a slave created to serve the Jew", adding that "their time will come
like every other evil person's time will come".
The comments provoked outrage with then opposition foreign spokesman Mr Rudd, who said: "I would say this to Sheik
Mohammed: Do not return to Australia, you are not welcome here."
At the time Sheik Feiz, who preaches with a strong Australian accent, was living in Lebanon and running by proxy the
Global Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, which was raided by the AFP as part of its investigation into him.
Mr Rudd yesterday said of his return: "If he was found to have contravened laws, he would be subject to appropriate law
enforcement."
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Sheik Feiz has been accused of being linked to a political sabotage campaign on
the streets of Auburn.
Candidate Jamal Daoud, who is standing in the state election, complained to authorities that campaign posters had been
stripped from shop windows by the Sheik's followers. "They told everybody that democracy is not permitted," Mr Daoud
said.
A spokesman for the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaah Association of Australia said his sermons would be religious teachings
that would promote peace "as all religions do".
Sheik Mohammed did not return calls, however Samil Dandan, the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, said
Sheik Feiz was a changed man and should not be judged on his past.
How a vile sermon of ignorance has done Australia a big favour
Miranda Devine
October 29, 2006
WHEN you think about it, Sheik Hilaly has done us a favour. For one thing, his recently translated sermon, declaring
women as Satan's agents who incite rape with immodest dress, has at last provoked Australia's moderate Muslims to find
a strong voice, as they lined up last week to condemn the mufti.
"His comments imply we've got no sense of right and wrong," said Mustapha Kara-Ali, the youth representative on the
Prime Minister's Muslim community reference group.
As well, by revealing so unequivocally his primitive views of women, Hilaly destroyed the claims by cultural relativists
that Sydney's series of gang rapes by Muslim men had nothing to do with culture or religion.
"If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street ... without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or
the uncovered meat?" he said in the sermon to 500 people last month at Lakemba mosque. "The uncovered meat is the
problem. If the meat was covered, the cats wouldn't roam around it. If the meat is inside the fridge, they won't get it ...
if the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she's wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don't
happen."
Then in a clear reference to the gang rape trial of Bilal Skaf, he said: "A woman possesses the weapon of seduction. It is
she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect
us ... then it's a look, then a smile, then a conversation ... then a date, then a meeting, then a crime, then Long Bay
jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years."
The only incitement committed by 18-year-old Ms C, who was raped 25 times by up to 14 men including Skaf in 2000, was
being Australian. Sitting on a train, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, and reading The Great Gatsby, she was a
slut, an "Aussie pig" as they called her later, while boasting: "I'm going to f--- you Leb style."
"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," she said.
Hilaly was simply echoing what the father of four Pakistani-born gang-rapists from Ashfield once said of the young
victims: "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."
Hilaly's younger, Australian-born counterparts have been saying the same thing for years.
"A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world," Sheik Feiz Mohammad told 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall
last year. "Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world ... strapless, backless,
sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses."
Egyptian-born Hilaly may have been escalating his rhetoric to shore up support as extremist groups such as the Islamic
Youth Movement encroach on his territory.
It is worth remembering that terrorism experts have regarded Hilaly as a moderating influence, and Singapore-based
Rohan Gunaratna described him as "a mild man, compared to others".
Reports yesterday that Hilaly's planned deportation in 1986 was stopped by none other than the former member for
Bankstown, Paul Keating, and that a public servant lost his job for trying to stand up to the political interference, are
certainly frustrating.
But Hilaly, who claimed in a 2004 sermon in Lebanon, "I have four wives and plenty of children", is an Australian citizen
now. Deportation is not an option.
Moreover, in the rush to banish the mufti, people should realise that whoever replaces him might be worse, as a new
generation of radical firebrands emerges who have long fought Hilaly for control of the influential mosque.
Sometimes pragmatism favours the devil you know.
'Jihad' sheik to face new probe
By Simon Kearney
The Australian
January 19, 2007
THE firebrand cleric who went overseas just days before some of his cohorts were rounded up in the nation's biggest
counter-terrorism raid is the subject of a new police investigation, after a call for children to join jihad as holy warriors
appeared in a DVD being sold in Australia.
Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohamed's radical sermons - available on the internet and on DVDs and videos - have become
popular with Muslims around the world.
In one video, running on the hugely popular website YouTube, he admonishes his followers in English for not "sacrificing a
drop of blood" as martyrs.
Australian Federal Police said yesterday they had begun inquiries into Sheik Feiz's DVD encouraging jihad, which is
believed to be unclassified in Australia and illegal to sell.
NSW Premier Morris Iemma accused the cleric yesterday of inciting terrorism.
"This DVD goes a lot further than vilification," he said. "The sort of incitement that the DVD encourages is incitement to
acts of violence and acts of terror."
Sheik Feiz, a member of Sunni Islam's fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, left Australia for Lebanon in late 2004, just days
before federal and state police and ASIO conducted raids in Sydney and Melbourne, arresting 23 people on terror-related
charges.
The cleric calls two of the accused terrorists close friends and knew all of the Sydney men arrested. He has links to
almost every notable member of Australia's Islamic community and continues to direct his Global Islamic Youth Centre -
the nerve centre of Islamic youth in Sydney, setting the tone for 4000 youths, their families and fraternities.
Along with Sheik Mohammed Omran in Melbourne and Sydney's Sheik Abdul Salem Mohammed Zoud, he is considered one
of Australia's leading radical clerics. Unlike Sheik Omran and Sheik Zoud, Sheik Feiz preaches in English with a strong
Australian accent rather than Arabic.
In the video running on YouTube, which could not be dated, he criticises Muslims in Australia for not sacrificing their
blood as martyrs and for putting lifestyle ahead of action in response to massacres of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Palestine.
"In our times it is the fear of death, the fear of sacrificing your finger, your toe, a drop of blood that is more honourable
than anything else," he says.
"Why? Because martyrdom to us is, is not as appealing to us, as it was to those ancestors, the great warriors ... who
lived around the best creature that walked the earth, Mohammed."
The YouTube video follows revelations in a British documentary that Sheik Feiz's collection of DVDs - called the Death
Series - were being sold by children in the car park of a mosque in the British city of Birmingham.
In that and another series called Signs of the Hour, made about four years ago, Sheik Feiz labelled Jews "pigs" and
exhorted children to jihad.
"We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam," he says. "Teach them this: there is nothing more
beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of
martyrdom."
In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Sheik Feiz said that every one of those remarks could be put in context.
"The jihad I speak of is not one of violence," he said. "It is one of personal struggle against things like mischievousness,
temptation and personal harm. I have never advocated violence against Australians or anyone embracing the Australian
way of life. I have never called for people to be harmed. If anyone fights you for what you are, you defend yourself.
"I don't believe in suicide bombing, I don't believe in violence against others. We don't invite that, we don't encourage
that. We denounce that. This is not Islamic law and it is not moral."
He said he regretted the remark about Jews being pigs and said this was made in the days following the images of a
young Palestinian, Mohammed al-Dura, being pinned down with his father in crossfire in Gaza in 2002. The boy was killed
and the images became an enduring propaganda tool for the Palestinians during the intifada years.
"That remark was made in the heat of the moment and I regret it," Sheik Feiz said. "It was not something I should have
said and is not something I believe."
B'nai B'rith Anti-defamation Commission chairman Michael Lipshutz said the Muslim community as a whole had to publicly
distance itself from anti-Semitic individuals and organisations.
However, Muslim youth representative Fadi Rahman said the reaction to the four-year-old video that authorities have
been aware of for nearly as long was an example of prejudice against the Muslim community.
"This is what tells us we will never fit in no matter what we do," he said. "It's telling the kids they're always going to be
marginalised."
Acting Attorney-General Kevin Andrews said the matter was being investigated by the relevant authorities.
"It's offensive to the Australian people, it's reprehensible, it's particularly outrageous that certain groups in Australia,
such as the Jewish community, have been highlighted in these comments and we condemn the comments," he said.
Experts believe the DVD material - recorded in 2004 - would escape federal sedition laws, which were passed in 2005 as
part of the federal Government's terrorism legislation, but may fall foul of other laws.
University of NSW law lecturer Andrew Lynch said NSW racial vilification legislation might apply to Sheik Feiz's
description of Jews as pigs, and the videos could be in breach of the federal criminal code, which prohibits incitement to
commit an offence.
While the Mufti of Australia, Taj Din al-Hilali, sparked national outrage by comparing scantily clad women to uncovered
meat, Sheik Feiz once told a meeting at Bankstown, in Sydney's southwest Muslim heartland, that indecently dressed
women were setting themselves up for rape.
Additional reporting: Martin Chulov, Simon Hayes
