News organisations, politicians and police may need to rethink engagement strategies with local Muslim communities put in place in Australia after al-Qaida’s 2001 World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks in the US.
ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and state police services built connections with Islamic communities to guard against radicalisation of young Muslim (mostly) males attracted to the anti-American message of Osama bin Laden. Several domestic terror plots were foiled thanks to such work.
Not since the collapse of Isis in 2015 has the West seen the sort of violence in large cities that broke out in Amsterdam on November 8, as groups of young Dutch Muslims attacked Israeli soccer supporters in town for the Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv.
The danger today sits not with a radical Islamist ideology that in Sunni Arab lands traces its origins back to the late 19th century and in the Shia world to the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The Dutch violence has not much to do with Islamism. It is partly inspired by a much older hatred in the Middle East – the anti-Semitism that has thrived there for 1500 years and crippled western Europe under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany until the end of World War II.
Remember many Middle East leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, supported Hitler. Much of the fiercest anti-Israel media commentary in the region today still echoes support for a modern-day genocide against Jews.
Iran-based Lebanese academic Hadi Dalloul discussed the events in Amsterdam on November 8, suggesting that after the liberation of Palestine there would have to be either another genocide against Israel’s Jews or they would have to be allowed to flee to Europe. He claimed Europeans would be unwilling to accept them. What happened in Amsterdam was a pointer to their likely fate if they were accepted.
This is the mindset of many in the Middle East media.
This column has had dozens of briefings over the years about strategies to build bridges into our Muslim community. Yet only a decade ago many people well known to the security services went illegally to Syria to fight with ISIS.
It’s one reason this newspaper made western Sydney doctor Jamal Rifi its Australian of the Year in January 2015.
Rifi was instrumental in helping parents and families counsel young Muslims thinking of following now dead former criminal Khaled Sharrouf and his family and friends to Syria. Sharrouf and his son were pictured holding a severed head on this masthead’s front page in August 2014.
The impulse to fully fledged jihad has never been mainstream here in the Muslim community. Attacks inside Australia were by young males who had self radicalised watching terror propaganda online.
Think the 2014 Melbourne stabbing attack on two counter-terrorism police by 18-year-old Numan Haider, the 2015 shooting of police worker Curtis Cheng at Parramatta by 15-year-old Farhad Mohammad Jabaror, and last April’s stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, allegedly by a 16-year-old during a mass at Wakeley in western Sydney.
What’s different today in Australia, and in much of the Western world, is the mainstreaming of Islamic activism in response to the 14-month toll on civilians by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza after the attack by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7 last year.
While military experts blame the civilian toll on Hamas for hiding in tunnels beneath hospitals and schools, this cuts little ice with Muslims around the world who have been flooded with photos and stories of the heartbreaking tragedy hitting ordinary Gazan families.
This is where Amsterdam is a warning shot to governments, law enforcement and media often more concerned about Islamophobia than anti-Semitism.
Many journalists in the left-leaning media initially denied anti-Semitism motivated the Amsterdam attacks, claiming what happened was football hooliganism kicked off by Tel Aviv supporters who had ripped down a Palestinian flag, chanted anti-Gaza slogans and committed some acts of vandalism.
It was only later after evidence emerged of social media co-ordination for a “Jew hunt” and subsequent apologies by city mayor Femke Halsema, Prime Minister Dick Schoof and King Willem-Alexander, that left-wing media began to accept this was indeed a pogrom in the city where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis.
The Times of Israel quoted from a call by the King to Israel’s President Isaac Herzog the Friday morning after the attack. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II and last night we failed again,” the King said.
Protests globally since the “where’s the Jews” demonstration at Sydney Opera House on October 9 last year will eventually necessitate a new law enforcement paradigm that needs to account for modern-day calls for genocide against Jews.
Where al-Qa’ida and ISIS sought a caliphate and preached against what they saw as Western imperialism, Hamas openly called for genocide against Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel. Its racism is served by social media feeds flooding websites with images of child victims and by the pro-Hamas Al-Jazeera news service.
The Somalian-born former Muslim and once Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on her website, summed up what Amsterdam will mean for law enforcement in the Netherlands and globally. “Globalise the Intifada is one of the slogans of pro-Palestinian organisation in the United States. We now see what it means as a brutal pogrom fouls the streets of Amsterdam.’’
She goes on to describe 20 years of writing books warning about the dangers of “large scale migration from Muslim-majority countries, especially when combined with the naive politics of multiculturalism rather than integration”.
She says Islamists have been able to infiltrate Amsterdam’s “internal security apparatuses” because of deliberate policies to address perceptions the Amsterdam police service was too white. Entry standards were lowered so the police represented all groups in Dutch society.
“Today a large part of the force is made up of second-generation migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Since October 7 last year some officers have already refused to guard Jewish locations such as the Holocaust Museum.”
Now reflect on evidence from an investigative journalism project, details of which were published in The Jerusalem Post on November 10. It reveals one of the organisers of the Amsterdam attacks, Ayman Nejmeh, had declared on his social media that he was a former teacher employed by UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. He works as a social media co-ordinator for a Dutch branch of Hamas that helps organise regular protest marches.
As one former senior security expert told this column on Wednesday about Palestinian protests in Australia, some organisers are clearly professional protesters rather than ordinary community members.
Think the cancellation by Myer of the launch of its annual Christmas windows display on Sunday after Victoria Police allowed a pro-Palestinian protest in Bourke St Mall. The protest group, Disrupt Wars, immediately cancelled its march in response to Myer’s cancellation. The group posted on social media: “Christmas is cancelled and there will be no joy or frivolity while children in Gaza are massacred.”
As Premier Jacinta Allan said: “Blocking Christmas windows won’t change a thing in the Middle East, but it will let down a bunch of kids in Melbourne.”
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