Just consider these two facts side-by-side.
At the University of Sydney, young children, perhaps seven to 10 years old, were chanting “Israel is a terrorist state” and calling for intifada against Israel.
It’s true the word intifada can have various shades of meanings, but in the context of Israel it normally means the waves of Palestinian protest and violence against Israelis. Some such protests can be regarded as legitimate. But explicitly, undeniably, clearly, without any ambiguity, intifada also included savage, murderous acts of deliberate terrorism in which innocent people, including many children, were deliberately killed.
In the same week, NSW Police presented a fact sheet to a court showing that a group of teenagers they arrested, some of them not 10 years older than the children chanting the slogans of hate at Sydney University, had a plan to get weapons and kill Australian Jews.
One event didn’t cause the other. But Albanese government ministers avoided condemning the wicked exploitation of children. The Albanese government has been grossly, morally and politically negligent in failing to make a serious effort to combat the wave of hateful anti-Semitism sweeping across our universities and many other parts of our community.
The Albanese government can have its views about the Middle East, but it has an absolute duty to provide for the security and safety of Australian citizens. Its failure, root and branch, in season and out, to condemn the shocking anti-Semitism displayed every day is a grave mistake – morally, politically and in terms of national security.
A related development last week was the call by a group of peak Islamic bodies for the term “religiously motivated violence” to be removed from Australian counter-terrorist legislation and from all official government references to terrorism.
The initial decision of the NSW Police and ASIO to label the alleged knife attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney’s southwest an act of terrorism was also widely criticised by Muslim leaders.
In their subsequent statement, the peak Islamic bodies also criticised ASIO director-general Mike Burgess for using the term “religiously motivated Sunni violent extremism”.
The Islamic peak bodies are wrong to make the general call and wrong in their specific criticisms of Burgess. With the Albanese government now apparently permanently out to lunch on national security, it was left to NSW Premier Chris Minns as usual to express common sense and moral decency. He rejected the call by the Islamic peak bodies and said: “We need to confront religious extremism.”
Minns deserves a kind of Victoria Cross for political leadership for this simple and straightforward statement. He didn’t take refuge in a bureaucratic dodge, like saying police needed to declare an incident a terrorist incident to activate certain investigative powers.
That’s true, but it avoids the issue of principle. Islamist terrorism is religiously motivated. That is not to defame Islam. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia are law-abiding citizens. Most Muslims in the world are moderate in their outlook.
But the idea that Islamist terrorism is not related at all to particular interpretations of Islam is plainly absurd. The Albanese government is now in such a ludicrous psychological straitjacket that it cannot speak against anti-Semitism without also denouncing Islamophobia. In fact, within Australia there is not the slightest comparison between the two.
The Islamic minority in Australia stands at nearly a million people. It is extremely effective politically and already has secured a high degree of mealy-mouthed equivocation by our institutional and political leaders that doesn’t serve us well in any way.
Far from sly dog-whistling, most of our political leaders have been careful and solicitous of Muslim sensitivities in their discourse on terrorism. Former prime minister Tony Abbott always referred to Islamic State by the Arabic acronymic term Daesh. He did this solely to avoid saying the word Islamic when referring to the Islamic State group.
Malcolm Turnbull, who was always at pains not to demonise Islam, nonetheless frequently referred to “Islamist terrorism”. After one foiled attack, Turnbull declared: “Islamist terror is a global challenge that affects us all.”
Islamist terror is the right term and I wish all our authorities had stuck with it. Islamism is distinctly different from Islam. Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose a particular, very conservative, interpretation of Islam as the guiding philosophy, and basic law, of the state. Naturally Islamists oppose secularists and pluralists.
However, Islamism isn’t necessarily violent. You can propose an Islamist government program at an election, without any violence. The world’s major terror groups, ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, Hezbollah, Hamas are all explicitly Islamist. But they also add the practice and belief in terrorist attacks to achieve their aims.
There is a philosophy, Catholic integralism, that similarly argues that the state should be explicitly subservient to Catholic teaching. None of its tiny number of adherents proposes violence to achieve its aims.
I have the greatest admiration for the head of ASIO, Burgess. But in 2021 he actually announced that he was moving away from terms such as Islamist terror and embracing instead the more neutral term “religiously motivated violent extremism”. When a particular attack, group or threat comes from a Sunni Islamist group he sometimes adds the word Sunni.
Much as I admire Burgess, I think this was a very serious mistake. The Islamic peak groups are demanding now that under no circumstances can any security agency or government minister ever use any word that has any derivation of Islam when referring to terrorists and further demanding that they not even use the word “religious” as in religiously motivated terrorism.
This is because, they say, Islam is opposed to terrorism.
Leave aside the hundreds of thousands of people, in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and elsewhere, who actively support Islamist terror groups, from the Muslim Brotherhood through all the groups listed above. As I say, this is a small minority of Muslims. But it’s absurd to claim no connection with Islam at all.
I’ve never heard any serious objection to the term “Catholic pedophile priests” when describing those monstrous priests, surely the tiniest minority of Catholics you can imagine, who, against all Catholic teaching, abused children. Identifying a white supremacist group doesn’t imply most whites are racial supremacists.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s hero Winston Smith claims the ultimate freedom is to say that two plus two is four. Every day British politicians recite the mantra that Islam is a religion of peace. These many pronouncements haven’t stopped terrorism. There is no good policy that proceeds from a refusal to tell the truth. Islamist terror is Islamist terror.
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