Waleed Aly is a propagandist, not a journalist

Waleed Aly’s chat with Scott Morrison was a classic case of trying to smear by association, writes Peta Credlin. It was typical tabloid television; loaded with inference and interruption and peddling old untruths.

This much is abundantly clear from his aggressive, and insinuating, interview with the Prime Minister last Thursday night: Waleed Aly is a propagandist, not a journalist.

It was typical tabloid television; loaded with inference and interruption and peddling old untruths. And whatever Scott Morrison’s faults and mistakes may be, despite Aly’s disdain, he was courteous, forbearing and decent.

At almost any time after Aly’s second question, he would have been entitled to say that the interview was a thinly veiled exercise in abuse, not a discussion with our nation’s leader about an atrocity which has rocked Australia, as much as it has New Zealand.

Aly’s basic thesis, you see, was abundantly clear: Islamophobia caused the Christchurch attack, the Liberal-National parties have a problem with Islamophobia within their ranks, therefore conservative politicians were to some extent responsible for the gunning down of 50 innocent people.

Waleed Aly and Scott Morrison on the Project last week. Picture: Network TEN

It was a classic exercise of guilt by association. In its own way, Aly’s conflation was just as crude as the “Muslims perpetrate terrorism, you are a Muslim, therefore you are a friend of terrorism” smear that he would rightly condemn in the mouth of someone such as Senator Fraser Anning.

As we all should. And in the case of Anning, as we all did. Including Pauline Hanson.

For reasons of free speech, and the fact that she believes it’s dangerous for MPs to sit in judgment of each other when that’s the job of the voter, on my show last week, Hanson condemned Anning’s comments in the strongest possible terms (not that many will have reported it because being able to put the NZ terrorist, Anning and Hanson into the one story is just too exquisite for her critics).

As people like Morrison — and his colleagues Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott, whom Aly cited as exemplars of Islamophobia — have long made clear, the problem is not Islam. It’s a handful of people who take extreme forms of Islam as a justification for terrorist violence and it’s the strain of Islam that believes quite literally in “death to the infidel”.

And calling it out is not “Islamophobia”, it is fact as evidenced by the reality that almost every terrorist currently jailed in Australia comes from the Muslim faith. Before the haters explode, read carefully what I just said, it is not the same as saying all Islamic believers are terrorists, but it does not deny there’s a problem.

Similarly, the problem is not with conservative politicians (and it’s noteworthy that the Christchurch killer called himself an eco-fascist, whatever that means) but with anyone whose ideology justifies terrorism; white supremists, neo-Nazis or any of the groups that hide in the darkest reaches of the internet and breed their hate.

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Mainstream conservative politicians should no more be bracketed with terrorism than should ordinary mosque-goers.

As Morrison gently pointed out near the start of his half hour-long interrogation, as a society, we have a huge problem: we have forgotten how to have a civil disagreement.

These days, if you disagree with me, you’re not just wrong, you’re bad. “I wish we could disagree better,” he said.

It’s a problem everywhere, but it’s a particular characteristic of the political left that their opponents are not just misguided but immoral.

At every stage of the interview, Aly’s questions were loaded with scorn for a politician whom he clearly thinks has exploited anti-Muslim sentiment for political gain.

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He spent much of his commercial-free time rehashing a report to this effect out of shadow cabinet meeting in late 2010 based on nothing but unnamed “sources”.

“Does the Coalition have a problem with Islamophobia?” Aly asked so often and so pointedly that it was an accusation rather than a question.

In response, Morrison referred to the work he’d done to build bridges in the aftermath of the Cronulla riots in 2005 and his work as a government minister with the Muslim community leader Dr Jamal Rifi.

The Prime Minster met with Islamic community leaders, including Jamal Rif, following the terror attack in Christchurch. Picture: AAP/Dan Himbrechts

I can vouch for the closeness of that association from my time in government. As the then-opposition leader’s chief of staff, I was present at all shadow cabinet meetings and was the official note-taker; I can confirm that any suggestion that Morrison urged the Coalition to “capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns” about Muslim integration is, as he told Aly, a “smear and a lie”.

It’s a sad indictment of party politics that someone at that meeting wanted to damage the then-rising star with a character hit.

And nine years on, the mistruth continues to have a currency that it does not warrant. The problems of contemporary politics, alas, are not confined to activists pretending to be interviewers, or the general inability of antagonists to recognise an opponent’s good faith.

There’s also the chronic tendency of people supposedly on the same side to use leaks, and lies, to damage their rivals.

It’s not that too many people’s convictions are too strong. It’s that too many people’s characters are too weak.

Watch Peta Credlin weeknights from 6pm on Sky News.