Sorry, but the Jew-hater can't be with him The big-talking head of what was billed Australia's biggest Muslim conference said he'd invited lots of foreign speakers - who turned out to include a gaggle of hate-preachers and bigots. Now come a few excuses: BROTHER Waseem Razvi, the organiser of the Australian Islamic Peace Conference, opened the event in front of about 2000 faithful yesterday with two apologies. Advertised keynote speaker Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais - the imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, whose invitation had drawn opprobrium from Jewish, Christian and interfaith groups concerned about his calls for the annihilation of the Jews and descriptions of them as "pigs and monkeys" - could not make the Melbourne conference "for personal reasons." The office of Immigration Minister Brendan O'Connor informed The Australian on Monday that Sheik Sudais, who had been denied entry to Canada and the US, had not applied for a visa. Mr Razvi told the faithful that Sheik Sudais had every intention of coming until the last minute... He then went on to apologise for the absence of his second choice of sheik to lead the Salatul Jummah prayer, Kuwaiti Sheik Mishary Alafasy. "He is very sick and he is not able to come out of the jet-lag of travelling from Kuwait to Australia yesterday," Mr Razvi said. Instead, Brother Imran of the Indian Islamic Research and Education Foundation and Sheik Anwar Sahib, New Zealand's only Salafist sheik, led the prayers. I might believe this man if it were not for his recent lecture explaining the circumstances under which lying is permissible: Lying is not permissible in islam except in three cases. One, a person lying in order to bring two people together, or two communities together or two nations together. Second, a person lying in a situation in war... And the third reason is a husband lying to his wife [or vice versa] Astonishingly, given the bigots Ramzi claims to have invited, the Islamic Council of Victoria maintains its support: Victoria's peak Islamic representative body wishes to express its grave concern and disappointment regarding commentary surrounding the upcoming Australian Islamic Peace Conference. The Peace Conference is being organised and held by an affiliate member of the ICV, the Islamic Research and Education Academy, with the official support of the ICV. The stated aims of the Peace Conference are: To provide a platform for Muslim organizations to come together; To facilitate dialogue between multiple faith groups by inviting representatives of other faiths to speak; To build bridges between local authorities and the Muslim community via engagement with numerous authorities, including police and government. Public commentary made regarding this conference has been derogatory and Islamophobic. Particularly noteworthy is the marked difference in tone between discussions about the Peace Conference as opposed to the recent visit of Geert Wilders. It is worth stating to begin with that comparing the visit of a renowned hate monger, whose stated aim is to enact discrimination against Muslims including their deportation with a Peace conference whose aim is precisely the opposite, is offensive. This is astonishing. If criticising this conference is "Islamophobic," I can only presume that what is being attacked is indeed Islam as defined by Victoria's peak Islamic group. Moreover, if this is indeed Islam, then a phobia of it strikes me as positively healthy and a legitimate expression of self-defence: And when you check precisely what a number of the speakers have said, you come up with a picture of Islam remarkably similar to the one Geert Wilders is trying to warn against. Take the main organiser himself. In a lecture recorded last December in Melbourne, Waseem Razvi, who supports Sharia law in Australia, said Islam allowed violence in defence of the faith: You don't have to try to convince by being compromising on Islam â¦ you don't have to say that Islam is all about peace, "no we don't fight, we are not violent." You know, the Prophet fought 30 wars â¦ yes, we are not non-violent, we are violent but when there is a need for it. We are battles people. We are not like Buddhists wearing an orange dress and always saying we want peace, and you never get your own country. No, we fight for our country. We have in Islam Jihad, yes, but we will never do terrorism. Yes Jihad is very Islamic, so you don't have to retreat from that. Here are some facts you should know about the other invited speakers. Al-Azhar Sheikh Abdur-Rahman Al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, is the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world. He has prayed to God to "terminate" the Jews and is a virulent anti-Semite to judge from his sermons: [Jews are] the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs... Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others"] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race "whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs..." These are the Jews, an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption... Another invited speaker is Sheikh Assim Al-Hakeem, who says the punishment for gays is death: In a video on YouTube in which he is asked whether being gay is wrong, Al-Hakeem says homosexuality is âunnatural. âIf you refer to the Old Testament, you will find that homosexuality is forbidden and the punishment for that is stoning to death. In Islam, the same thing applies. He added: âHomosexuality is an abnormality which should be treated and should not be accepted as a normal thing. In answer to a question on his website, Al-Hakeem also compares gay people to "animals that seek only their sexual satisfaction through their weird ways." Al-Hakeem also calls for the death of those who leave Islam: What is the penalty on a person who change his religion from islam to some other religion ? This is apostasy and it is punishable by death in an Islamic society. Another invited speaker - described by the conference organiser as "my boss's boss" - is Sheikh Zakir Naik, who has said he was a supporter of Osama bin Laden if he was attacking enemies of Islam: Every Muslim should be a terrorist. Naik also denies Islamists caused the September 11 attack: It is a blatant, open secret that this attack on the Twin Towers was done by George Bush himself. Another invited speaker is Abu Hamza from Melbourne-based IISNA, who has offered Muslims advice on "how to beat your wife" to make them "shape up": In a lecture titled "The Keys to a Successful Marriage," ... Mr Hamza said men could beat their wives, "to shape them up..." He also said women "must respond" if their husbands wanted to have sex, and ridiculed laws that prohibit rape within marriage... In the sermon Mr Hamza initially tells his listeners "don't hit your wife." But he goes on to detail how men should hit their wives, according to his interpretation of Islamic teachings. He says it is permissible to hit women as a "last resort" but that "the beating the Mohammed showed is like the toothbrush that you use to brush your teeth." You are not allowed to bruise them, you are not allowed to make them bleed... Sheikh Yee, another invitee, claims Jews celebrated the September 11 attacks, which weren't the work of Muslims, and Jews are the real extremists: The most extreme nation in this world is the Jews. So if they use "extremists," it doesn't apply to Muslims. It applies to the Jews. They are the extremists of the world. That's why they kill Palestinians every day.... [Jews] go to Hell. Another invited speaker is Melbourne's Sheikh Abu Ayman (aka Sheikh Omran), who long defended Osama bin Laden: I dispute any evil action linked to bin Laden. Later he was a little more equivocal - but only a little: He is a good man in some ways, and not in other ways. Another invitee is from the Islamic Online University of Bilal Philips, who has been linked to jihadists and terrorist groups: But the choice of Philips is even odder given the United States named him as an "unindicted co-conspirator" over the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Centre, and our own security agencies judged him such a threat he was banned from coming here. Philips insists he rejects terrorism and considers al-Qaida a "deviate" group. But ... he was hired by the Saudi air force during the first Gulf War to preach to American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia and convert them to Islam... Philips didn't just take down their names; he also visited them back in America. "My role was confined to encouraging them to train Muslim-American volunteers and go to Bosnia to help the mujahidin and take part in the war (against Serbia)," he boasted. That worked, too. Philips says his name was dragged into the investigation of the first World Trade Centre bombing, in which six people were killed, because some African-American soldiers he'd converted were offered by someone else to Sheik Abdel Rahmen, spiritual head of the terrorists behind the attack.... And to those invitees these, as noted by an informed observer: Does the ICV truly endorse these invitees? Does it truly claim that to criticise such speakers is "Islamophobic"? If so, I must be "Islamophobic," too. Who shouldn't be?