Getting it wrong on right-wing extremists and jihadists

THE ABC’s favourite counter-terrorism “expert”, Dr Anne Aly, an apologist for the ­deluded convicted criminal and terror sympathiser Zaky Mallah, claims violent right-wing extremism in Australia is rapidly reaching dangerous levels.

“Violent extremism isn’t just a Muslim problem in Australia,” she told a conference on social cohesion this week. “The numbers are staggering and growing in right-wing extremism.” Though she received some mild support from NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas, who identified far-right extremism and rallies “which encourage divisive ­notions of us and them” as some of the biggest challenges facing his troops, Aly pushed her claims beyond the limits of plausibility when she said violent extremism in Australia is beginning to mirror that of the US. In an attempt to support her case, she cited a study by a group called the New America Foundation, released last month, and highlighted data which she claimed showed that in the US right-wing extremists had killed twice as many people there since September 11 (it excludes those 3000 victims) as jihadists. But that’s not what the data showed at all. What Aly critically failed to tell her audience is that the survey specifically said that those identified as non-jihadis were of “right-wing, left-wing or idiosyncratic beliefs”. Not surprisingly, Keysar Trad, the ubiquitous self-­anointed self-promoting mouthpiece for at least some of Australia’s Muslims, was also at the Western Sydney University conference and he took the opportunity to blame right-wing columnists and ­so-called shock jocks for creating community unrest, saying they “take no responsibility for the hostile environment they have created” and had moved on from demanding assimilation from Muslims, to saying ­Muslims “had become unassimilable”. “Blaming minorities is the laziest and nastiest form of ­deflection,” he said. Deflection, would that be like claiming right-wing groups in Australia pose as great a threat to public safety as jihadists? The Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane was quick to agree with Aly, saying there had undoubtedly been a rise in far-right extremist organisations and expressing his concern that “they are coming out in public and not confining their activities underground (as they may once have done)”. But surely it must make Deputy Commissioner Kaldas’ job a lot easier to monitor these frightening right-wingers if they are advertising their rallies and seeking permits, or perhaps Commissioner Soutphommasane didn’t actually check the number of jihadists jailed for serious crimes in Australia compared with the number of right-wing extremists before tacitly endorsing Aly’s curious and spurious claim? The figures, derived from convictions, are difficult to pin down but it would appear that there are more than twice as many would-be jihadis who have been convicted of terrorism charges than there are right-wing extremists, including those individuals who have been jailed for attacks on abortion clinics. As for assimilation, in ­Victoria there are more Muslims in jail than there are Aboriginals, who usually claim to be disproportionately represented in the jail population. Without making excuses for anyone who resorts to violence, it is worth pointing out the flaws in Aly’s alarmist reasoning. According to the New America Foundation study she cited, there were 496 extremists charged with a terrorism-related crime in the US since 2001, including a small number who either died or were killed without being charged but were widely and credibly ­reported as having engaged in violent extremist activity. Add Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, 24, the terrorist behind Friday’s murder of four US marines in Tennessee, taking the study’s total to 497. Of those, 314 (including ­Abdulazeez) were identified as jihadists. The study identified 183 non-jihadists. Where Aly gets it almost right — though she draws the wrong conclusion — is that the US jihadists have killed 30, as of last week, since 9/11 and the non-jihadis have killed 48. The study didn’t explore the beliefs of those non-jihadis ­except to say that they were ­either left and right-wingers or idiosyncratic in their views. That’s a pretty broad sweep of the ideological spectrum but what may be said is that the ­jihadis were more likely to be easier to identify in the general US population than the non-­jihadis. That would probably be ­because the overwhelming number of jihadis were non-caucasian, and the non-jihadis were caucasian. Almost exactly half (156) of the 314 jihadis were of Arab or Middle Eastern, Somalian or South Asian descent and just 35 were caucasian. Of the 183 non-jihadis, 166 were caucasian. And, despite Aly’s fearmongering attempt to distract attention with her alarmism about right-wing extremism in Australia, the trend in the US since 2013 clearly shows that ­jihadism is in the ascendancy. In 2013, 16 jihadis were killed or indicted and just two non-jihadis. Last year, there were 24 jihadis killed or indicted and five non-jihadis and, as of Friday, there have been 54 jihadis killed or indicted and just one non-jihadi. Before claiming that there is a rising threat level from right-wing extremists parallel to the situation in the US, Aly, Trad, Kaldas and Soutphommasane should actually have taken the time to take a closer look at the New America Foundation survey’s statistics. They do point to a problem which mirrors developments in Australia, though not the problem Aly claims to have discovered. They show that there are more jihadi than non-jihadi terrorists in the US and that they are now the greater threat. Drawing faulty comparisons between US and Australian situations is dangerously misleading scholarship.