The jewels emerging from the mouth of the Mufti of Australia Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali were a part of a speech that he has delivered last month in Sydney. To be amused you can read the following quotations from his speech:

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside... and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat?"

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred"

So the Mufti has reduced gender relations in a secular society to forage behavior by animals seeking to satisfy their basic instincts with no mind or values to control.

Well, I do agree with the Mufti in one thing; meat is the problem. In this case, the biggest problem for some men like that lunatic is one certain piece of boneless meat that is situated under the bellies of men. Some cannot control this meat, and let it orchestrate all their dirty thinking and behavior and it is obvious our dear Mufti is one of those guy, especially at the tender age of 65.

Unfortunately, the problem is bigger than the Mufti and his Tom & Jerry way of describing social ethics.   

It is becoming more crystallized on daily basis that the forces of confrontation are gaining momentum in their attempt to create and maintain a wall of mistrust and struggle between the west and the Muslim world, as well as between Muslims in the west and their surrounding communities.

This year has witnessed a lot of disappointing events starting with the notorious drawings of the prophet Mohammad in Denmark and maybe not ending with the statements from the lunatic Mufti of Australia last week.

In between those two clear cases of insanity and provocations we had many incidents of misunderstanding including the Pope's speech in September and the statements by Jack Straw about the "difficulty in communication" with Muslim women who wear the Niqab. As far as I am concerned, Straw's remarks are completely justified.

In the conspiracy theory infecting the collective Muslim and Arab mind every criticism to their culture is related to Zionist and imperialist factors with virtually no room for self assessment. Muslims are overvictimizing themselves and by this simplifying a very complex nature of the western-Islamic cultural interaction and diversity between mindsets.

Many Muslims, albeit living in the west for many years have never accepted the facts that the West has parted with religious domination of culture since more than 200 years ago. The same secularism that is refused by Muslims has been the only factor in granting them equal rights in the West. If the West imposes Christian values on Muslims the same way Muslims want to impose their culture on the West a definite confrontation will happen. The only framework to bring together people from various religious and cultural backgrounds in a true sense of citizenship is secularism.

Secularism has many aspects including the freedom to criticize religions, and if Muslims want to exploit the benefits of secularism in the West that should also be able to adapt to its many aspects.

Secular Europe allows Muslims to practice their religion freely but does not give them the complete immunity to practice fundamentalism as in Muslim countries. A women who wants to wear Hijab-Veil in Europe and the West is free to do so unless she is in a secular system in education (France). Hijab is a religious necessity for most Muslims and those who make the conscious decision of not wearing Hijab practice personal freedoms that should be maintained. However, Niqab is not an Islamic necessity and is a source of fundamentalism. If it is supported in Saudi Arabia and Iran this does not mean that the UK should carry the same position.

As much as the West needs to understand Islam, Muslims must make genuine efforts to respect the secular mindset of the West. One of the most amazing cases of the failure to understand and respect other opinions was reflected by the so-called Mufti of Australia who accused women without veil of "facilitating" conditions of rape and then declared his ignorant statement that if the woman was in her house in her veil no sexual offence can occure. Well, the Mufti can easily force his wife to stay between 4 walls all her life but he can never force the women of Australia to do so. This is in addition to the inhuman and insane justification he has presented.

Facing such statements, it is not peculiar to see some moderate westerners losing their tolerance to Islamic values and anyone who read comments and articles in European newspapers about the Muslim-Western clash of value will notice that it is not only the right wing and pro-Israeli streams that are casting doubts on the ability of Muslims to integrate in Western societies.

The end result will be more distortion of the image of Islam and more difficult livelihoods for Muslims in the West.