A local Muslim leader and former President of the Islamic Society of the ACT is furious at the US embassy after a recently released diplomatic cable named him as a source.
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Mohammed Berjaoui said the US embassy in Canberra tricked him or lied about the statements which appear in the cable.
The cable was released via the file-sharing platform bittorrent after WikiLeaks lost control of 251,000 US diplomatic cables this week.
''I never met with anyone from the American embassy ... It's against my principles and guidelines and rules, I will never meet with the Israeli and American embassies,'' Mr Berjaoui said yesterday.
The cable states,''We met with the President of the Islamic Society of the Australian Capital Territory [ACT], Mohammed Berjaoui,'' and attributed a number of comments to Mr Berjaoui, including criticisms of both Islamic extremism and the so-called US-led ''war on terror''.
Mr Berjaoui speculated embassy staff may have met with him in the guise of journalists and did not reveal their identities. The meeting is said to have occurred on August 1, 2005.
Yesterday, Mr Berjaoui stood by the statements attributed to him.
''I didn't say anything wrong, and I stand by it,'' he said.
The cable claims Mr Berjaoui thought those who advocated violent Islamic extremism were ''idiots''.
Mr Berjaoui criticised Islamic firebrands Sheik Mohammed Omran and Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakr, and said, ''they had no credibility in the Muslim community''.
Mr Berjaoui reportedly also had strong opinions on the US-led occupation of Iraq. ''US involvement in Iraq had put America and its allies at greater risk for terrorist attacks and he blamed the US alliance with Israel for many of the attacks the US suffered in Iraq and elsewhere,'' the cable reports Mr Berjaoui as saying.
''[Mr Berjaoui] argued that 9/11 had been the fault of the US insofar as it had trained Osama bin Laden to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s.''
