How is it that Australia produces more IS fighters per capita than the USA?

The ghettos should be a hotbed for young Muslim extremists with access to guns, yet Australia produces more IS fighters per capita than the United States. How is this happening?

It remains a mystery why Australia has produced per capita more foreign fighters for the Islamic State than the United States. It is especially surprising given the levels of discontent in the American ghettos, where people are self-trained to use combat rifles and could be transformed into instant fighters.

It is further confounding given the Nation of Islam has been a visible presence in American life for decades. But this organisation, described as “deeply racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay” by Alabama’s Southern Poverty Law Centre, America’s key monitor of hate groups, has never been linked to terror.

On a recent trip to the US looking at gun culture, we met young black men in the ghettos with connections to the Nation of Islam. They were taking on some basic Muslim practices, such as not drinking alcohol, not smoking cigarettes and declining pork.

Australian rapper Neil Prakash converted from Buddhism to Islam around 2012 and in 2013 he travelled to Syria and changed his name to Abu Khaled al-Cambodi. (Pic: News Corp)

This is cause for concern to some, but the recruiting has been going on for many years and the best known affiliate of the Nation was — for a time, until a falling out — Muhammad Ali.

The young black men of the ghettos would appear to be the perfect Islamic State recruits: they are angry at authority, and angry that — they argue — they are victims of a deliberate strategy to keep them poor and broken in the ghettos.

On the face of it, men from the neighbourhoods of Chicago, New Orleans or Memphis could raise a better explanation for turning to jihad than most of those who have left the affluence of Australia to fight.

Yet stories of black Americans fighting for ISIS are few; and apart from the recent lone-wolf vigilante attacks on police, do they not feature in homegrown terror attacks.

There are significant differences between the Nation of Islam and organisations such as the Parramatta Street Dawah, which is said to have produced up to 30 pro-Sunni foreign fighters and homegrown extremists.

The Nation of Islam do not see themselves as Sunni and Shia: they are generic Muslim. This means they do not automatically align with either Sunni or Shia factions in Iraq and Syria.

Furthermore, they are more disciplined than the street thugs of Sydney and Melbourne, who are (or were, before things started going badly wrong for them in Syria) attracted to murdering with impunity.

Brother Willie Muhammad, from the Nation of Islam’s New Orleans chapter, recently talked about their work going into the poor black neighbourhoods to offer conflict-resolution services to prevent escalating turf wars.

Brother Willie Muhammad, from the Nation of Islam’s New Orleans chapter. (Pic: Gary Ramage)

“It’s easy to get a gun and shoot somebody,” he said. “It’s harder to talk about it. If you don’t have a correct view of manhood, you will live your life thinking it’s about how many women you sleep with, how much money you make, how many people you have afraid of you in your neighbourhood.

“How do you do that? By making people afraid you will pull the trigger.”

In Australia, where there are far fewer guns, so-called discontented young Muslim men have used Islam as their weapon — at least until they get their hands on a real one.

Members the Nation of Islam are not permitted to carry guns or knives. They receive instruction in ways to avoid conflict and aggression.

While there is an extreme Muslim element converging on Black Lives Matter protests, the majority are simply citizens protesting police shootings.

Calvin X, another black Muslim conflict mediator from New Orleans, says young black men are preoccupied with surviving on their streets, where “their bodies are torn up from bullets”.

Coming from slavery, he says: “We as a black people know nothing about ourselves. But I don’t believe we were put here to shoot and kill people. When people don’t have knowledge of themselves, they act like savages.”

Comparing the American experience to the Australian, where fighters are reportedly now trying to find their way home having all-but lost their war, it becomes apparent how self-indulgent their murderous adventures have been.

The same excuse of a lack of generational self-knowledge cannot be made for them. It is hard to claim yourself as a disenfranchised outcast when you are a member of the second-biggest religion in the world.

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