The Australian government pressured local Muslims at the weekend to denounce terrorism, learn English and accept women as equals, as fears grew of a first attack on home soil.
Prime Minister John Howard led with calls for the country's 300,000 Muslims to integrate fully into Australian society and adopt its values, sparking warnings that he was inciting racial violence.
Howard's remarks came at the end of a week which saw 11 local Muslim men committed for trial on terrorism charges and a Muslim convert subjected to the first control order issued under controversial new anti-terror laws.
They also coincided with the arrest of 14 terror suspects in Britain, where the July 7, suicide attacks last year by young British Muslims that killed 56 people prompted Howard to express the fear that the same thing could happen in Australia.
"Fully integrating means accepting Australian values, it means learning as rapidly as you can the English language if you don't already speak it," Howard said in a radio interview. "People who come from societies where women are treated in an inferior fashion have got to learn very quickly that that is not the case in Australia."
The head of the government's own Muslim advisory committee, Ameer Ali, said Howard risked inflaming tensions seen in rioting between whites and Arab-Australians in Sydney last December.
But the prime minister refused to apologize and repeated his comments in an article written for Sydney's Daily Telegraph tabloid on Saturday.
Yesterday, his heir-apparent, Treasurer Peter Costello joined the attack, saying that Islamic leaders needed "to make it clear that terrorism is never justified under the cover of religion."
A minority in the Islamic community had been radicalized and was preying upon young people with dangerous ideologies, he said.
"It is very, very important that the leadership of Australia are very clear and very precise that this is not real Islam, that terrorism is always wrong," he said.
The leader of the Islamic Friendship Association, Keysar Trad, said the government was engaging in "gratuitous Islam bashing."
"On the radicalism issue, they have acknowledged that it is a small fraction of less than one percent," he said.
But Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said yesterday the government believes Australia is vulnerable to terrorist attacks similar to those in Britain.
"What we're seeing in the UK is that there are numbers of groups, who it is believed, are intent on carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK," Ruddock said. "This is of course the situation that we face. I think we became very complacent about these matters because we've not had on our own soil terrorist attacks."
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