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=== News Update ===
Australian town rejects Muslim school
Tue May 27, 2008
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian authorities rejected the development of
a 1,200-student Islamic school on the outskirts of Sydney on Tuesday
saying it was inappropriate for the small town where anti-Muslim
protesters opposed the school.
Camden Council voted against the school being built based on concerns
over the impact on traffic flows, loss of agricultural land, but not
on religious grounds.
"It is a site issue ... we said all along religious issues,
nationalistic issues, will not be entered into," Mayor Chris
Patterson told local media.
The school was planned for Muslim students and would have taught the
standard Australian education programme but also conducted religious
classes just as Catholic and Anglican schools in Australia do.
However, the school development has sparked anti-Muslim sentiment in
Camden, with pigs heads being planted on spikes and threats to attack
any Muslims attending the school.
"We just don't want Muslim people in Camden, we don't want them not
only here, but we don't want them in Australia," one woman, wearing a
cowboy hat with an Australian flag wrapped around it, said at the
council meeting on Tuesday.
But other residents said opposition to the school was not based on
religion. "Its nothing to do with being Islamic, if it had been a
Catholic school, Buddhist, whatever, it is not an appropriate area
for a 1,200-student school," a male resident told local television.
Camden Council received 3,000 submissions opposing the school and
only 100 in favour of the development.
Relations between non-Muslim Australians and Muslims have been
strained since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Australia has deployed troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Race riots erupted at Sydney's Cronulla Beach in 2005 as the
predominately Anglo-Saxon residents attacked anyone of Middle Eastern
appearance, believing they were Muslims intent on taking over their beach.
Muslims have been in Australia for more than 200 years. The country's
first Muslims were Afghani camel drivers who helped to open its vast outback.
Today there are about 280,000 Muslims in the 21 million population,
more recently from the Middle East, Asia and Fiji, living
predominantly in Sydney and Melbourne.
(Reporting by Michael Perry; Editing by Valerie Lee)
source:
<http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKSYD3619320080527>http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/<http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKSYD3619320080527>idUKSYD3619320080527
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-muslim voice-
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