Meet Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric

Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, has just compared uncovered women to uncovered meat..

"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?" he asked.

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

OK, since he obviously failed to notice any of this in his 24 years in Australia, let's explain this to him very slowly: most women in Australia do not wear hijab, nor do they stay home all the time. If you are bothered by this fact, I am sure you will be more comfortable in some other country. For example Pakistan, where I am sure all the women are happy and safe due to the widespread wearing of hijab.

After a number of officials publicly expressed rather strong disapproval of the sermon, the cleric apologized to all women and said that his remarks were taken out of context. Here is a lovely selection of his other comments taken out of context. And here is a bit of the actual context.

Both officials and people are calling for the man's deportation. I am, for obvious reasons, a bit concerned about the idea of countries starting to deport their own naturalized citizens, but I can understand the feeling.

I think somebody should take a closer look at how the man got to be an Australian citizen to begin with. People should know their heroes.

Taj el-Din al-Hilali arrived in Australia in 1982 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed. Why anyone would give a tourist visa to a member of Muslim Brotherhood will forever be a mystery. People, if a place like Egypt is persecuting someone for Islamic extremism, chances are that the person is indeed an Islamic extremist.

They have repeatedly tried to deport him for inciting hatred, but failed. Inquiring minds want to know: how do you fail to deport a person? You grab the guy, who is not exactly hiding, and put him on a plane to whatever he is a citizen of (Egypt, in this case), or, if he is stateless, to wherever he came from. What's there to fail?

The quote from that period: "The Jews try to control the world through sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason, and economic hoarding." That was said while delivering a lecture to a group of Muslim students in the University of Sydney.

Jewish sexual wiles have obviously proved insufficent to get him deported, and in 1990 he was given a residence permit. The minister of Immigration at the time was Gerry Hand. A few years later al-Hilali has applied for and received the citizenship.

His achievements since then have included smuggling, driving uninsured and unregistred car, supporting suicide bombings in Israel (by children, no less), praising 9/11 as the work of God and calling Holocaust a Zionist lie. For the latter he finally for kicked out from Prime Minister's Muslim Community Reference Group.

Now it looks like he's finally done it with his rape comments, and even though he is unlikely to be kicked out of the country, with a little bit of luck he might be kicked out of every position of authority.