That's My Team.

Allow me to pose a hypothetical here. Suppose you're a mad supporter of a certain football team. Suppose the coach of that team appeared on TV and said it's fun to tie puppies to your tow bar and drag them along the road. Would you defend him just because he coached your team or would you think "Fuck...I can't believe that psychopath is in charge of my team"?

The man in the photo is named Keysar Trad and he's a dick.

By now everyone will have heard about little tirade last week from Australia's most senior Muslim Cleric Sheik Hilaly in which he suggested that immodestly dressed women are to blame if they are sexually assaulted. In his own words the Sheik said women who dress in revealing clothes are akin to uncovered meat left lying a park which will eventually attract animals. It's an inventive simile without question but the implications behind it are the stuff of medieval nightmare.

Keysar Trad is the big cheese of an organisation known as the Islamic Friendship Association. He has repeatedly insisted that Hilaly's comments were not unreasonable and maintained that Hilaly is a respectable and worthy man and that the flurry of controversy surrounding the comments is a result of misquotation and media conspiracy.

I swear some poison spitting mufti could clamber up into his pulpit and declare that westerners in general and women in particular are evil in the eyes of Allah and should be beaten about the head with claw hammers and left dangling in the sun and Keysar would blame the ensuing outrage on misinterpretation and media bias.

I'm a big believer in free speech and if some random guy came out with those type of comments it wouldn't be such a big deal. The problem here is that Hilaly is a highly respected and senior representative of the Islamic faith and are large number of people hang on this clown's every word. Sure, he still has the right to say those things, but we also have an equal right to declare him a bigoted fuckwit when he does so. Unfortunately, Keysar Trad seems to think Hilaly should be free to say what he wants and nobody should dare criticise him.

You're supposed to be fostering relations between Islamic Australians and the wider community you moron. Defending some Koran humping reprobate when he says things like that is not the way to go about it. Defending the indefensible is neither admirable nor a sign of devotion to your people. It just makes you look like a half baked hardliner with his head in the sand. Jesus Christ, get with the fucking program.