Senior Labor frontbencher Tony Burke personally lobbied the government in support of a business visa for an Islamic extremist and hate preacher who advocated the execution of homosexuals and subjugation of women, but was later denied entry to Australia.
Mr Burke, a former immigration minister, made personal representations on behalf of Mohammed Rateb Abdalah Ali al-Nabulsi, whom Australian intelligence officials had declared a hate preacher and whose views on women in particular, an internal report claimed, would be “abhorrent” to most Australians.
The Australian has confirmed Mr Burke, the member for Watson in southwestern Sydney, wrote to the Australian embassy in Amman, Jordan, on July 21 last year claiming to be acting on behalf of The Voice of Islam radio station, which had invited Mr Nabulsi, a Syrian, to Australia as a guest speaker at a charity event and to do talkback radio shows.
It is understood Mr Burke’s office had called Immigration to inquire about the status of the man’s visa application before writing to the department.
Mr Burke’s intervention came ahead of a Labor and Greens- backed Senate inquiry into the so-called au pair scandal embroiling Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, which today will hear evidence from AFL chief Gillon McLachlan and Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo.
The Australian understands Mr Nabulsi had been granted visas in 2004, 2006, 2012 and 2013 but was red-flagged last year by Australian intelligence officials
An Intelligence Division assessment in July last year found his views against Western values and women — including suggestions they were creations of “Satan” — and defence of a death sentence for homosexuality “were likely to be abhorrent” to sectors of the community.
Mr Nabulsi said in a 2011 television interview broadcast by Hamas: “Homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual. That is why, brothers, homosexuality carries the death penalty. When the head of the (Islamic) community in Australia came to bid me farewell ... he began to cry, and said: ‘Tell our brothers in Syria that the garbage heaps of Syria are better than the gardens of Australia.’ When I asked him why, he said: ‘There is a 50 per cent chance that you will see your son with an earring in his right ear.’ This means he is a homosexual.”
The intelligence assessment also cited a book allegedly written by Mr Nabulsi,
The Muslim Youth, in which women are depicted as the “devil’s temptation”.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/na...r/news-story/1a976c9193fc60b7811569ce662b5768
