Last week, while I was leaving a protest I was covering in Melbourne, I came across a stand promoting Islam. So I thought I'd have a chat with the man running it. And boy, I haven't been gaslit like this in a while.

He said he was doing "dawah", which he explained as conveying "a message about Islam" so people can "choose by themselves".

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So I put the most obvious questions to him that most Australians would ask. Does he want Australia to become an Islamic country? Does he want Sharia law here?

His answers to the Islamic country question were vague, and he would not commit to a simple answer, falling back on "I need to convey the message" and "people can choose by themselves". On Sharia he was just as slippery. "Have you seen Sharia law here?" he asked back. Pressed on what it means, he claimed not to know, then insisted "There is zero country follows Sharia law".

That one is easy to check, and we did it live in front of him while answering his questions. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Brunei all run strict Sharia systems. Look it up for yourself.

Then I asked about violent verses in the Quran. "There's nothing," he told me. "It doesn't exist."

So I looked them up and read them to him myself. Surah 9, verse 5: "Kill the polytheists wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them and lie in wait for them at every place for ambush."

Suddenly the verse that didn't exist had a translation problem. "It's not the right translation," he said.

I kept going with verse 9:29: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the last day from those who were given the scripture until they give their jizya willingly while they are humble."

"No, there's nothing, my friend," he insisted. Then he reached for wartime: "This is the time of war, if there is two war between two groups, yeah? If someone come to attack us."

In a few minutes the verses went from not existing, to being mistranslated, to only counting in wartime. You really have to watch the full exchange for yourself to believe it.

 

 

But the most powerful moment didn't come from me. Watching the exchange was an Aboriginal Australian activist known online as Kangaroo Jack, and he wanted a word.

"I'm an Aboriginal man," he told the Egyptian man. "When did Aboriginal people agree with Islam coming to Australia?"

He said he'd just challenged a group of activists down the road over why they were waving the Aboriginal flag. "Why are pro-Islamists using the Aboriginal people to legitimise whatever you're trying to do?" he asked. "All you guys on the left are doing is using blackfellas to go against white people, to legitimise their cause."

He had a message for Lydia Thorpe too: "You hate the colony, but you get paid by the colony."

And he finished with something the activist class never says: "I don't hate anybody. I don't hate Muslims, and I don't hate Jews, but you all should love each other more and love Australia, because without that, we're nothing."

The Egyptian man told us he'd been in Australia for ten years, and when asked whether he came as a refugee he refused to say, calling it "personal". Yet he was happy to lecture us that everyone here is a migrant except Aboriginal people, minutes after an Aboriginal man asked him when his people ever agreed to Islam coming here.

If you come to Australia, it should be to integrate and contribute, not to change the country's moral foundations. If you want to live in a Muslim country, there are more than 50 that share those values. Australia is not one of them.

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