Top 10 Waleed Aly Quotes at QuotationFun

Displaying Top 10 Waleed Aly quotes

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The Pope should mind his words. So should some of his Muslim critics. LET me get this straight. Pope Benedict XVI quotes the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus asserting before a Persian Islamic scholar that the prophet Muhammad brought nothing new to the world except things "evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". Some Muslims clearly interpret Benedict to be quoting Manuel with approval, and take offence at the suggestion that Islam is inherently violent. The response is to bomb five churches in the West Bank, and attack the door of another in Basra. In India, angry mobs burn effigies of Pope Benedict. In Somalia, Sheikh Abu Bakr Hassan Malin urges Muslims to "hunt down" the Pope and kill him, while an armed Iraqi group threatens to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican. There. That'll show them for calling us violent.

The Age Newspaper - September 18, 2006.

Politics, Patriotism

On the eve of the campaign, he began by charging that our leaders were being duplicitous on asylum seekers. His argument was that each of the major parties was making the issue out to be more catastrophic than it merited, and that neither leader was showing any serious inclination to correct the mythology that surrounds it despite the fact that they knew better. And there is little doubting the truth of that analysis. Few things are as astonishing as the speed at which a few thousand boat people making no grand political claim beyond asylum can bring a wealthy nation like ours to a belligerent panic. That only happens in a political environment that is either ideologically brutal, or more interested in marginal seat polling than perspective. And so, Tony Abbott talks of peaceful invasions, and Julia Gillard dons her action hero pose and boards a navy vessel to provide action-man photo opportunities for Labor's sitting member in the marginal seat of Lindsay - a landlocked electorate in Sydney's west where, to date, no unauthorised boat arrivals have been documented.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

Hasn't just about every commentator, of every political stripe, being saying exactly this for the past five weeks? Didn't Julia Gillard, in her coded way, admit as much when she declared two weeks in that it was time to reveal the "real" Julia? Wasn't all this apparent when every former prime minister to speak during the campaign, from Howard to Hawke and even to Rudd, sounded far more engaging than either of the candidates? Latham was doing nothing more than articulating conventional wisdom here. And he was right.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

Which brings me to Latham's most recent argument in his 60 Minutes piece. His central charge, continuing a theme explored in his Latham Diaries, was that this election reflected a broken political system. That elections had become about political game-playing and polling and focus groups and just about anything except policy. That everything about this election is stage-managed and substance free. That the aim of the major parties now is to take or hold on to power, but not necessarily to do anything meaningful or constructive with it. And hereabouts we run into one of the least remarkable commentaries of the campaign.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

Ultimately, amidst all the condemnation and sanctimony, Latham emerges as a useful prism through which to view this campaign. Here lies a disconcerting quasi-paradox. Latham's prominence over the past five weeks, with all its attendant personality-driven sensationalism and unattractiveness, demonstrates with almost matchless efficiency the very point he has ended up trying to make.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

Then came the sustainable population debate - a debate which represents a backflip from both major parties that earlier this year were all aboard the immigration train. Latham's initial observation here was perfectly true: a debate about population implies inescapably a debate about immigration which the government was seeking to avoid. Ultimately, Gillard had to concede the point, so we started talking immigration after all. The Coalition lapped it up, then promptly announced an immigration target that wasn't really a reduction at all, and still amounts to a quite expansionary population policy - particularly when combined with the Coalition's fondness for paying people to have children.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

All this talk about regional off-shore processing centres overlooks the fact that a de facto one already exists in Indonesia. The solution suggests itself. Resettle a bunch of people from Indonesia before they give up on the system. That will stop the boats, or at least a good proportion of them. And no refugees need to be mentally destroyed in detention centres in the process. The Government knows this. That's why it has recently committed to increasing the number of resettlements from Indonesia by 900 per cent. Yes, 900 per cent. But here's the kicker: it made the commitment without telling anyone. We only know because the UNHCR spilled the beans to 4 Corners. Why keep silent on this?

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

Yet suddenly, some of those so dismayed by vacuity of this election campaign became even more vocally dismayed with Latham. Sure, this has much to do with his often aggressive behaviour, but consider the uproar surrounding his plea for Australian voters to leave their ballot papers blank this Saturday in protest. Was he really, as Fairfax's Jacqueline Maley suggested, acting to "weaken our democracy" or driving us to a system "approximating the types of regimes our infamous 'boat people' are so desperate to escape"?

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

It's an absurd proposition. Latham was advocating a protest vote on the basis that our democracy has already been weakened. The fact that millions of people across the world would risk their lives for the privilege of voting does not for a moment imply that we must reward a cynical political process with our acquiescence, and probably implies the opposite. Whether you agree with it or not, Latham's argument was in fact a pro-democracy one: one that objected to the idea that democracy could be reduced to such substantive emptiness. It was a form of democratic engagement.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

For the record, I don't agree with his prescription, and I will be filling out my ballot paper this weekend. Personally, I think other forms of protest voting would be more effective. But an informal vote remains a perfectly legitimate form of protest, and accordingly, a perfectly legitimate political voice. The hysterical suggestion early in the week that Latham had broken electoral laws by advocating this demonstrates almost no understanding of the nature of political speech. Latham's advice was not illegal, and even if it were, that would merely make the law a far greater ass than him.

ABC - The Drum Unleashed - 19 August 2010.

Politics, Patriotism

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