Sydney - Australian Muslims said Tuesday that racism was
behind a Sydney council's decision to approve plans for a Catholic
school and reject a proposal to build an Islamic school.
The building projects are in the Sydney suburb of Camden, where
five months ago the local council received 3,500 complaints about a
plan to build an Islamic school and had to hire security guards to
ensure order at meetings where the project was discussed.
Camden Mayor Chris Patterson said comparisons between the two
projects were invalid because 'any application is site-specific. If a
Catholic church had put in for the Quranic Society site, it would not
have been approved, and alternatively, if the Quranic Society had put
in for the Mater Dei site, and it meets the criteria, it would be
approved.'
Quranic Society spokesman Issam Obeid said the council was
applying a 'double-standard' rather than simply following zoning
rules.
'No one knows anything about the Catholic school, and they say,
'Yeah, give it a tick already,'' he said. 'I think racism is
affecting this.'
The Quranic Council is appealing the decision to reject its
proposal for a 1,200-pupil school.
At rowdy meetings in May, Camden residents argued that few Muslims
lived in the area and the pupils would be bused in from distant
suburbs with large Muslim populations.
The Quranic Society project is not a test case: Islamic schools
are scattered across Australian cities, which, like Catholic schools
or Jewish schools, receive government funds.
The campaign against the society's project was marked by
prejudice. Pigs' heads rammed on metal stakes and draped with the
Australian flag were placed at the proposed school site.
Angry residents bedecked in Australian flags were vocal in
rejecting the school on religious grounds. Protest leader Kate
McCulloch said in May that the 350,000 Muslims in Australia 'take our
welfare and they don't want to accept our way of life.'
Another protest leader, Emil Sremchevich, denied he was racist in
campaigning against the Islamic school. 'Why is it xenophobic just
because I want to make a choice?' he asked The Sydney Morning Herald.
'If I want to like some people and not like other people, that's the
nature of the beast.'
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