Same concern here among our security, police and government forces about Australians going to ISIL and returning to Australia, so great efforts are made to identify these people and stop them leaving.
Contrary view among everyone I know, including me, is “Let the bastards go, and don’t let them return.”. As usual, governments are out of step with common sense among the average people.
Same in Australia among all non-Muslims I know, and among most Muslim community and religious leaders in their public statements.
I have a problem with that statement, and with the public comments by some Islamic leaders here along similar lines which seek to shift blame from Muslims attracted to ISIL and other primitive Islamic movements by blaming the West.
Major party Australian politicians and others from the minor parties and independents, except for a trivial minority of ignorant fools https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o63FGy3mPWI , have all been careful not to paint all Muslims with the ISIL etc brush.
Nonetheless, there are Muslim elements here who claim that the problem is Western military intervention in the Middle East etc which imposes great injustices upon Muslims by killing them in droves and destroying their homes and societies and so on. This is rubbish. Most Muslims in the Middle East and other hot spots of violent Islamic virtue such as Nigeria are killed by other Muslims, in pursuit of ancient medieval divisions about which is the one true faith, much as Europeans did for several centuries in their various intra-Christianity wars and atrocities.
The problem I have with your statement is that it echoes similar statements by some Muslims here, in and out of leadership roles, along the lines of “Well, you’re branding all Muslims as terrorists, so we might as well behave like terrorists, so it’s your fault you’re making us into terrorists.” Either you’re opposed to Islamic, for want of a better term, terrorism in which case it doesn’t matter what others say about you, or you’re not fully opposed to it and even allow it and then blame non-Muslims for forcing you into what is essentially an intra-Muslim form of genocide mixed with an unreasoning hostility to the West and everyone else who isn’t like you. (I’m using ‘you’ here in a general sense representing that type of thinking rather than implying that it represents your personal attitudes or beliefs.)
That is exactly the sort of attitude which disturbs non-Muslims here as it ignores the efforts made by most of our political, non-Muslim religious and community leaders to distinguish between pro-ISIL / Boko Haram and sundry other psychopathic jihadi types of Muslims and the vast bulk of other Muslims who do oppose ISIL and its ilk.
I come from an Irish Catholic background and am old enough to remember the discrimination and suspicion towards me and my ancestors by the dominant English Protestant elements in Australia, which were much along the same lines as that now experienced by many Muslims in Australia at street level, although generally not at higher levels. For example, large sections of the public service at state and federal levels were closed to Catholics, as was employment in many large corporations, in an era long before anti-discrimination laws arose. None of that applies to Muslims here now.
There is an understandable sense of victimhood among many Muslims here, and justifiably so because of the hostility shown to some of them at street level by our ignorant and or prejudiced non-Muslims, but the problem arises from the actions of a very large number of Muslims in the guise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIL, and countless other Islamic advocates for fundamentalist Islam ably sponsored by the Saudis on the Sunni side and Iran on the Shia side and their various clients such as, respectively, most of the really violent Sunni groups and Hezbollah. It is reinforced by the variously evasive, ambiguous, disingenuous, and duplicitous public statements by various Islamic leaders which imply support for, or at least a refusal to condemn, ISIL etc, of which this is a prime example: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s4103227.htm
The problems within Islam and without Islam, such as Saudi and Iranian sponsored terrorism in the name of and in pursuit of their versions of Islam, are peculiar to and are confined to Islam. Nobody but Muslims can solve these problems. Given the blood feuds that have been going on between the various brands of Islam for the past 13 or so centuries, and which are neatly encapsulated in the current crimes against humanity by ISIL as this branch of Sunnis wreaks vengeance, rapine and mayhem on everyone who isn’t them, it is nonsensical to blame the West for this. It is even sillier to expect the West to solve these issues when the whole problem is limited to conflict within Islam.
Muslims killing Muslims; raping them; enslaving them; and generally trampling upon their human rights as expressed in modern international covenants, and in ancient Koranic principles http://www.islaminfocentre.org.uk/human-rights.html , in pursuit of their brand of Islam is a choice made by Muslims.
Muslims are entitled to a grave sense of victimhood, but currently and historically it arises mainly from their oppression by other Muslims.
It has nothing to do with the West, or anything outside Islam.
It is not, from my Western viewpoint, my problem and, as a non-Muslim, there is nothing I can do to correct it. Except to support the actions of any government which opposes ISIL, Boko Haram, and all forms of violent jihadism in accordance with the sound principles of human rights espoused in various international covenants and, among others, the Koran.
If that makes Muslims feel that I and people who think like me are victimising them, they need to shed the victim scales from their eyes and get a grip on the vile reality of what is being done in the name of Islam and do something practical about it instead of blaming everyone but other Muslims for the predicament brought upon them by their co-religionists.
: they can all come in, as long as they adopt the values and culture of the country they chose.