FIREBRAND Muslim cleric Mohammad Omran has blamed the Howard Government for radicalising young Muslims, claiming that demonising Islam was driving its followers towards a terrorist mentality.

"The Government is pushing the people to believe they can do all these major disaster things," Sheik Omran told The Australian in his first major interview since 18 men, including a number of his followers, were arrested last month in Sydney and Melbourne, accused of plotting acts of terrorism.
The defiant imam, regarded as one of the most radical senior clerics in Australia, lashed out at critics who linked his teachings to alleged homegrown terror cells, insisting: "This is a public place, anyone can come to pray."

He likened the case to that of executed Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van. "He's linked to a church, what does the church have to do with that? Would you say the priest is a drug dealer?"
Sheik Omran, who has repeatedly come under fire from other clerics and John Howard for espousing extreme views, including denying that Muslims were to blame for the September 11 attacks on the US or the London bombings earlier this year, defended his approach.

"When I say the Muslims didn't do it, then I am taking the terrorists out of the Muslims. I say we don't do that, and you say you do that. So which one makes us terrorist?"

Sheik Omran said the Howard Government's focus on terrorism was making the "naive" Australian public paranoid about Muslims and the likelihood of a terrorist attack in Australia.

"The problem here is our people. When I say our people, I say Australians in general, my beautiful people, they are so naive about the threat of terrorism because they have never had to deal with any great disasters on home soil," he said.

In his Michael Street prayer centre in Melbourne's inner north, Sheik Omran said he was no more radical than the 13 other Melbourne imams, but unlike them, he was not afraid to openly express his opposition to the war on Iraq and his support for jihadists who were fighting the coalition forces in the country.

The head of the Melbourne-based Ahl Sunnah Wal Jamaah Association said terror attacks around the world, including September 11 and the London bombings, were predominantly Western conspiracies concocted to sully the image of Islam.

He said he wanted to "wake people up to the fact" that Osama bin Laden's involvement in September 11 "is not true" and in so doing attempt to turn them away from terrorism.

People were more inclined to turn to terrorism when they were convinced they had the capacity to do so, and less inclined to turn to such extreme acts when told they did not have what it took.

"When I say this wasn't a bin Laden job and bin Laden can't do that and he doesn't have the ability to do that ... which one is encouraging terrorist action -- the one saying you have the ability, or the one who says you don't have the ability?" Sheik Omran said.

He said his opinions on global terrorism, and especially bin Laden, were largely shaped by his research on the internet and in print. "I am a man of common sense -- I am not an idiot who hears what people say and take it and go. I don't talk from nonsense ... I study and I put so much effort (in) before I talk."
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