Two words from a teenager finally exposed the daily reality for Australian Muslims

Why this one? Was it the language? Does reading that someone told a western Sydney mosque he wanted to “christ church 2.0 this joint [sic]” focus the mind in some unique way? Is it the fact, referenced by NSW Premier Chris Minns, that the threat was made in Ramadan, when mosques are full, that captured the imagination?

Whatever it was, here we are: a 16-year-old West Australian kid arrested, government and police declaring they are “taking this very seriously”, the prime minister issuing a statement, Peter Dutton posting on X, and Strike Force Pearl – which hitherto seemed only to focus on antisemitic hate crimes – ramped up patrols in response.

Illustration by Matt Davidson

Welcome, sure. But I’ll admit to being caught by surprise because amid the torrent of attacks on Muslims in the past 18 months, this didn’t even strike me as especially stark. Online threats happen all the time. I’d guess every day. Even as I write this, a new story is developing about an online bomb threat against a school in a Muslim area of Sydney. They aren’t nice to receive – I know because I’ve received some quite graphic ones that have occasioned 24-hour security – but they are so often the empty bravado of someone very young, very lonely, very disturbed, or all three.

None of that is to say this stuff shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s more to wonder why so little has been done before. There have been plenty of opportunities. Arson? There’s the person who yelled “f--- Muslims” and “torch them all” before proceeding to torch a Palestinian man’s truck, which bore a Palestinian flag. Graffiti? Take the toilet stall at a children’s playground on which was scrawled “HANG ALL MUSLIM SCUM!” and “KILL A MUSLIM” followed by a checklist: “PEDOS✓ UGLY✓ STUPID✓ LAZY✓ FILTH✓”. Assault? Two hijab-wearing women were hospitalised after allegedly being variously punched and choked while minding their own business about three weeks ago. Assault with cars? A man yelled “f--- off you terrorist dogs” to a group of Muslim men praying outdoors, then drove his car back at speed and tried to run them over. A woman allegedly tried to run over an imam.

All this is merely a fraction of what has been reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia in the past three months. It’s easily discoverable to any journalist or politician who wanted to give them a call. Had they done so, they’d also have discovered that this sort of thing has been regularly occurring since late 2023. It is punctuated by particular events – for instance, the register is now reporting a surge in verbal abuse of Muslim doctors and nurses in the wake of the Bankstown nurses story – but the underlying condition is constant. There simply isn’t the space here to detail the parade of stories of graffiti, of hijabs being ripped off, of physical assaults, of spitting attacks, of death threats.

Even non-Muslim and non-Palestinian victims get sucked into this vortex. Like Rita Manessis, whose car and home sport “Free Palestine” stickers, and who discovered graffitied swastikas on her driveway alongside “Death to Palestine” and “Get out Muslim c---“. Or Theo – last name not published for security reasons – who displayed a Palestinian flag on his house before he discovered a home-made bomb on his car, with an attached note warning: “Enough! Take down flag! One chance!!!!” The perpetrator, David Maurice Wise, was ultimately sentenced to 12 months’ prison.

Amid all this, here’s Liberal senator Dave Sharma in December: “Any time any senior minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.” Lest that be dismissed as an isolated stance, here’s his colleague, Sarah Henderson: “Frankly, there is no issue with Islamophobia”, before adding later, “I really reject any argument that there is some sort of equivalence between antisemitism and any other form of racism, including Islamophobia, at the moment on Australian university campuses because that is simply not the case.” This as Muslim and Palestinian students were reporting instances of verbal and physical assault to the Register. Or here’s Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie: “[The government] seem[s] to think there’s a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism [but] there absolutely isn’t. And it needs to be called out.” No moral equivalence? Let me think well of McKenzie: perhaps she misspoke.

We should have no qualm with the intense focus antisemitism has received of late. The scourge is real, the outrage justified, and the recent escalation terrifying. The possible involvement of organised crime and overseas actors raises the stakes considerably. Rather, the trouble is when this morphs into a discourse, pushed by powerful actors, that seeks to make antisemitism and Islamophobia opposites, caught in some zero-sum relationship. In that world, to acknowledge Islamophobia is to deny antisemitism. But also, to emphasise antisemitism is to deny Islamophobia, it turns out, explicitly. In the process, what should be a problem in common becomes tawdry competition.

The results are profound. A January survey published in this masthead found only 9 per cent of Australians believe Islamophobia has increased. And, frankly, why would they? Until now, most of the stories I’ve referenced have received comparatively little media coverage or none. They’ve attracted little passionate political comment from the major parties, Labor’s Julian Hill – an assistant minister – a notable, oft-overlooked, exception. The alternative government has denied it and attacked those who raise it. Islamophobia has an envoy most voters wouldn’t have noticed, but no dedicated task forces, no parliamentary inquiries, no attached sense of crisis.

The consequence is the conviction, now deeply entrenched in Muslim Australia, that the country simply doesn’t care about anything that happens to them. That Australia recognises them only as perpetrators, but never as victims.

Perhaps that’s why the reference to Christchurch 2.0 struck a chord. Perhaps the reminder of 51 Muslims gunned to death in their mosques by an Australian revived the possibility of Muslims being victims in the public imagination. Perhaps it’s the fact this moment comes so soon after the hospitalisation of those two women (slowly) filtered into the news, and therefore into the non-fiction section. It’s a terrible way to reset things. But perhaps that’s what it takes when things were set so wrongly in the first place.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

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