Attack on latter-day Orwell exposes busted moral compass

IF you want to know how busted the West’s moral compass is, look no further than the Matthew Gardiner scandal.

Gardiner is the former president of the Northern Territory branch of the Labor Party who a few weeks ago made the arduous trek to Syria to join the Kurds in taking up arms against the Islamic State. After Facebook-friending a woman who has links to Kurdish rebel groups, Gardiner apparently decided to swap pen-pushing for trigger-pulling, abandoning the airless committee rooms of Territory politics in favour of the dangerous deserts of Syria.

He did what virtually none of the manicured, risk-dodging politicians of the 21st-century West would ever dream of doing: he went to fight physically, rather than just academically, against a warped and backward political group. Most Western politicos talk a good fight against the medieval militants of Islamic State, but Gardiner wants actually to fight one, to make good on what we can presume to be his Kurd-backing, Islamic State-hating convictions.

And what has been his reward for taking this brave, continent-crossing step, for ditching Western comforts in favour of gearing up for battle against the profoundly illiberal, intolerant, misogynistic militia? He’s been criminalised. He’s been informed — if he has access to the internet — that if he ever returns to Oz he risks being arrested and jailed.

Labor leader Bill Shorten says Gardiner has “made a mistake”. George Brandis’s office has pointed out that under the new foreign-fighter laws it is illegal for Australians to fight on any side in the Syrian conflict, and thus Gardiner could be imprisoned for 10 years if he comes home. This is nuts. What is effectively being said here is that Gardiner is indistinguishable from those Westerners who run off to join Islamic State and make grotesque videos of themselves chopping off other Westerners’ heads.

Gardiner is just like them, apparently: an illegal foreign fighter who’s made a grave mistake.

This blanket condemnation of any Australian who fights in Syria — whether they’re fighting with the West’s allies (the Kurds) or the West’s implacable foes — speaks to a colossal moral disarray, and possibly even moral cowardice, in the modern West.

Tony Abbott has said Australia should be “utterly unflinching” in its opposition to Islamic State. The group goes “against our common humanity”, he says. And yet when an Australian citizen unflinchingly travels to Syria to face down this threat to our humanity, he is condemned, made instantly criminal by the new laws.

It isn’t only in Australia that citizens who want to fight Islamic State are treated as suspect. An 18-year-old Kurdish woman from London who went to Syria last October, allegedly to fight with female Kurdish militants against Islamic State, was arrested by counterterrorism police when she arrived back in Britain this month.

She’s currently on bail. Yet last week, London Mayor Boris Johnson got the media super-excited when he posed with an AK-47 during a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, pointing the unloaded gun in the direction of Islamist positions. So it’s OK for Western politicians to pretend to fight Islamic State, but not for citizens to do it for real.

Punishing those who fight with the Kurds in the same way we punish those who fight with Islamic State suggests a spectacular collapse of moral judgment. Western societies seem incapable of sorting foreign friend from foreign foe, right from wrong, right-minded citizen from globetrotting ­jihadist. So instead, every Westerner who fights in Syria is branded “BAD”.

In our desire to avoid using our moral compass, we end up behaving immorally, demonising those who are actually quite heroic. If Australia’s foreign-fighter laws had been around in Britain in the 1930s, George Orwell would have been collared and maybe even jailed on his return from the Spanish Civil War.

The politics of risk-aversion is important here, too. In this era of no-boots-on-the-ground, when our leaders make fiery speeches and fire a few missiles but insist no Western soldier will be put in harm’s way, we look on Westerners who do want to take risks in the struggle against Islamic State as alien, weird, reckless. What might once have been looked upon as pluck and guts is now considered pathological behaviour, possibly requiring therapeutic treatment. “What’s wrong with that Gardiner bloke?” people whisper.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with him. Maybe he’s just a decent guy who wants to play his part in a war against bad people. If Gardiner is accessing media and getting the message that he can never return home, that will be an outrage — a brave Aussie fighting on the side of Australia’s allies and yet abandoned by Australia.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked online.