As FIANZ president Hazim Arafeh so elegantly conveys in his latest interview, oppression is a woman’s right in Islam! Gamal Fouda, of Christchurch Mosque fame, would agree in his sermon titled “Rights of Husband“, which he’s videoed for our benefit.
Remember from the very start, FIANZ was only created to bleed money for overseas terrorist enterprises.
Hazim Arafeh blames Muslims ignorance of ‘true Islam’ on Isis, not the koran or actual Islamic teachings here in NZ, as this website shows in great detail!
And let’s not forget, oppression is a woman’s right! His excuse that 1400 years of sharia law can not overcome Saudi cultural traditions is laughable! Arafah gives no quote from koran to back his claims.
The koran is pretty clear 4:34,
This from Stuff: …
Muslim leader Hazim Arafeh, in a suit and tie but no shoes or socks (the journalist arrived early), enjoys telling the story.
He pads across the lounge, shutting the windows to drown out the smell from his newly-painted deck.
What better person to reassure Kiwis in the age of Islamist terrorism and Trump than a friendly suburbanite from Palmerston North?
Arafeh, 44, puts his bare feet together under the coffee table and says he was “really heartened” by a recent local demonstration against American president Donald Trump’s ban on Muslim migrants.
All the speakers “expressed that Muslims are very welcome in Palmerston North – they are free to come, live, work and worship”, says the president of the Federation of Islamic Associations in New Zealand.
But not everyone feels that way.
A “middle-aged Caucasian fellow” came to the local mosque last June “and started shouting ‘terrorists’ and ‘devils’ and ‘Go back to where you come from’. And then a few people stood in his way and then he left before the police came.”
Was this someone seriously threatening or just a crazy old coot?
“I think the latter is more of a description of what we really felt,” says Arafeh.
“If you ask the wider Muslim community here in New Zealand, you know they will all tell you that New Zealand has been very kind to us and these incidents won’t really affect the way that we feel towards New Zealand.”
Still, the number of “incidents” seems to be rising since Trump came along. This summer a pig’s carcass was dumped on a property in Blenheim earmarked for a mosque. The woman next door got rid of the pig and told Muslims she was appalled.
“We thanked her for what she has done,” says Arafeh.
Then in Huntly a woman abused a Muslim woman sitting quietly in her car: the victim’s phone video of the incident went viral. Some found the filming “bizarre”, Arafeh says, but this had happened to her before “and she didn’t want it to be her word against the offender’s”.
Arafeh is polite, careful, educated, middle-class and good-humoured: the perfect diplomat.
On the lounge window is a complex graph and algebraic equations done in marker pen by his elder son, Hamzah, 17.
“I don’t understand it either,” says his father, explaining that the family shifted to their present home because it’s in the Palmerston North Boys’ High School zone (younger son Omar, 16, also goes to this “very good school”).
Arafeh and his wife, Rona Naser, came to New Zealand as skilled immigrants: they are both agronomists and met at university in Jordan. Now he’s a business manager for a seed company and Rona a food safety adviser for Fonterra.
New Zealand, he says, made the right decision not to ban the burqa. “People are supposed to be free to wear whatever they feel like.”
He won’t buy the Western feminist argument that the burqa is a sign of the oppression of women, a sort of mobile prison.
“They have misinterpreted the use of the burqa completely. The burqa or niqab is nothing more than extra protection that a woman may choose to use if she finds it necessary for her to protect herself.
“And it’s all related with the modesty and the humbleness that a Muslim woman should show when she gets out of her house. It’s not a prison at all.”
As a matter of fact, he says, “Islam is the first religion in the history of humanity which gave women rights”.
The Qur’an, Arafeh says, gives women equal rights to property, education and leadership.
Many Westerners will balk at this. Aren’t women in Saudi Arabia, for example, clearly second-class citizens?
Religion is one thing, he replies, and cultural traditions another.
“I was born in Saudi Arabia and my Mum [a teacher] wore a black dress. All women in Saudi Arabia are always dressed in black. When I was young I used to think that the colour black is mandatory, Islamically mandatory,” he says.
“When we relocated back to Jordan, my mother used to wear a brown dress, you know, or a blue dress, or a green dress, all right?
“I once discussed it with my Mum, actually. She said the colour black is not mandatory, it’s the cultural tradition of that country.
“And when you are in their country you have to respect their cultural tradition.”
Islamic countries, he says, span a wide spectrum, from “more conservative” Saudi Arabia to other “more liberal” states.
The terrorists of Islamic State, he says, break the Islamic code that forbids unjustified killing both of Muslims and non-Muslims.
He was “surprised” by former prime minister John Key’s claim that some New Zealand women became “jihadi brides” and went to help Isis in Iraq and Syria.
However, it could have happened: “I would say you can never say never.”
He is worried about radicalisation of young Kiwi Muslims by Isis propaganda.
“It’s less than a handful,” he says, “but when it comes to us one person is one person too much. We want the number to be zero.”
The Muslim community is taking steps to deal with this, he says, but revealing what it was “might be counterproductive”.
Do Muslim leaders in New Zealand co-operate with the intelligence services?
“We maintain some interaction with the intelligence services,” he says, and declines to elaborate. Doing so “could jeopardise whatever we are trying to do to safeguard New Zealand”.
Last year Arafeh sacked Auckland imam Mohammad Anwar Sahib for making an anti-Semitic speech at a mosque in Manukau: “The Christians are using the Jews,” the preacher said, “and the Jews are using everybody because they think that their protocol is to rule the entire world.”
Can he reassure New Zealanders that others aren’t also preaching hate in the mosques?
That’s why you have Islam awareness week, he replies, when the public can visit mosques and ask questions. Such as “where do you hide the weapons?” he laughs.
One reason for the widespread prejudice against Muslims, he suggests, is the long period of colonial rule in Muslim societies, where the population was kept ignorant “in order to control them”.
But this poisoned many people’s attitudes towards the “primitive” colonised people whose women were repressed and who knew little about their own faith.
Muslims’ ignorance of true Islam, he says, has helped the rise of Isis.
Arafeh would like Prime Minister Bill English to visit a mosque, just as he would have liked “the honourable John Key” to do so (Key didn’t).
“We don’t want to be marginalised, we want to feel that we are part and parcel of the New Zealand diversity,” he says.
“We don’t want to find ourselves one day living in a big prison, like what happens in France. There are five million completely marginalised Muslims there.”
What would a non-marginalised Muslim look like?
Very like Hazim Arafeh.
