Neither Muslims as a group nor our society are guilty

Curtis Cheng, the innocent police accountant shot and killed at ­Parramatta, was murdered in an act of terrorism.

The motivation for the killing was both political and religious. We should not speak ill of Muslims in any general way. Muslims should not be condemned or criticised in any guilt by association with violent extremists. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are as law abiding as anyone else. The co-operation of Muslim communities is vital in the battle against violent extremism. Australia is a successful immigrant society, probably the most successful in the world, with great diversity in its population.

Each of these plainly correct, truthful, unemotional, sensible statements has caused some consternation on the Left or the Right of the Australian commentariat. Each has also been made, ­almost in exactly these terms, by Malcolm Turnbull.

I agree with those who argue that the Prime Minister has so far got the substance of his comments, and of his leadership, on terrorism pretty much right. The key to this is the balance in his comments. There was nothing much wrong in Tony Abbott’s comments either. There was an occasional clumsiness, a clunkiness of repetition, and on one occasion only what seemed to be a general reflection on Islam. But let’s be clear. Nobody who has committed murder, who has signed up to an ideology of hate-filled violence, did so because ­Abbott’s rhetoric was imperfect. That is an insane proposition.

Nonetheless, there are real challenges in learning to speak clearly and well about these vexed issues.

The polarisers on both Left and Right get a good deal wrong, oversimplify things and, intentionally or not, say much that reasonable people could find offensive.

The Left has several narratives. One is that young Islamist extremist men who resort to violence have been pushed down this road by the iniquities they face in Australia and our failures as a society. This proposition is so frankly ­ridiculous that its survival — its ubiquity — on the ABC as a near orthodoxy defies common sense. If that were the case then why haven’t non-Muslim youth been affected in the same way? How come every other Western society faces the same youthful jihadist problem, and how is it that Muslim societies themselves produce the vast majority of violent jihadists?

It is normal for the Left to talk rubbish, but on these matters they should break out of their ideological paradigm and look at evidence. They should find a more intelligent and creative way to address these problems than simply blaming society, as though they were re-running sociology seminars from the 1970s, blaming society for any crime committed by any individual considered to be part of a victim group.

But there are right-wing narratives that are also foolish. To ­criticise Turnbull for urging ­people not to blame Muslims ­generally for the actions of what remain a very small minority of ­extremists is just silly.

People should not suffer guilt by association, nor guilt by membership of ethnic or religious groups. It is perfectly in order, indeed necessary, for our political leaders to make this point. To do so is not blaming the victim or succumbing to political correctness.

The key to staying in touch with reality is balance. Muslims as a group are not guilty. Nor is Australian society. Reflexively attributing blame to one or the other is factually inaccurate, analytically misleading, politically disabling and potentially damaging to ­society

When asked, Turnbull said that he thought the motivation of the terrorist who killed Cheng was both political and religious. This is true, difficult to say and the foundation point of sensible analysis.

In a more religious age, we believed that mankind was afflicted by the fall, that there was a tendency in all of us to evil. That more religious age also understood that the greatest evil is often a perversion of the good — that great idealism, without the balance of practicality, prudence, consideration for those who disagree with your idealism, can be the starting point for great evil.

These terms aren’t fashionable any more, so let’s express the same idea in more therapeutic categories. The human personality is vulnerable to wild enthusiasms, to the provocation of destructive pathologies, such as the appetite for ­violence or revenge.

People who hold passionate beliefs can recruit the impressionable. Most Australians behave every day with great good sense. But there is no end of crazy beliefs out there, magnified immeasurably by the reinforcement of self selecting digital silos.

Plainly destructive and deeply wicked ideologies have always been able to attract a serious following, provided the people preaching them do so with ­sufficient conviction. Communism and Nazism are the two great examples of the 20th century. They attracted millions of followers. Communism, when it was known to be behind the industrial slaughter of tens of millions of people, attracted tens of thousands of passionate followers even in Australia.

In the case of Islamist, extremist jihadism, this is an especially difficult case to discuss honestly. It is simply wrong, as well as being offensive, to define Islam as the enemy. By doing so we would define over a billion human beings as the enemy. Not only that, we would repudiate all those Islamic political leaders, like Indonesia’s former president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who spent every day combating Islamist extremism and who declared that such extremism was an offence to Islam and morally, ethically and religiously wrong in every way.

Do we really want to tell SBY and all the other politically active Muslims who think like him that they don’t understand Islam?

On the other hand, the terrorists do hold to a particular interpretation of Islam. Their interpretation is extreme and perverted. But their world view does contain a certain amount of overlap with mainstream Islam, especially in the view that Muslims are uniquely persecuted by a hostile West. Even if this were true, it would not justify terrorism. But the ethical challenge for Australian Muslim leaders is how much, if at all, do they reinforce the paranoia which is so often a stepping stone to violent extremism?

If our leaders gratuitously fanned Muslim paranoia, that would be foolish. On the other hand, they have an absolute obligation to speak to their society frankly. Our normal hectoring, partisan shout lines should be put aside on this issue. There is a special obligation here to speak the truth, calmly and respectfully.