Following last week’s terrorist attack in Melbourne by Somali-born Muslim Hassan Khalif Shire Ali that resulted in the murder of beloved Pelligrini’s co-owner Sisto Malaspina, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said something most of our politicians and commentators are too gutless to say.
“The greatest threat of religious extremism in this country is the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam, he said.
.@ScottMorrisonMP: The greatest threat to our way of life is radical, violent, extremist Islam. I, however, applaud the brave and passionate Australians in the Muslim community who just want the best for their families.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) November 10, 2018
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“There is a special responsibility on religious leaders to protect their religious communities and ensure that dangerous teachings and ideologies do not take root here. They must be proactive, they must be alert, and they must call this out in their communities and more broadly for what it is.”
If anything, he was diplomatic. Put bluntly, if you are a religious leader and aware of impressionable simpletons whose idea of making the world a better place is to stab innocents and try to blow up the city in the name of Allah, you have an obligation to notify the authorities and denounce these mediaevalists for what they are: terrorists. If your faith really is a “religion of peace” as the public relations jingle goes, how about reinforcing this with actions as well as words?
Common sense really, but it upset Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran of the Hume Islamic Youth Centre, where last week’s killer had attended prayer sessions. “If [Shire Ali] was a Christian he would not be called a terrorist,” insisted an obtuse Omran, who also blamed police and security agencies for not preventing the attack and claimed his ability to intervene was limited to dialling triple-0 in the event of a threat. He could not have better vindicated the PM had he tried.
But it was not just Omran who was obfuscating. “I think the Prime Minister needs to do a little bit of Terrorism 101 before he starts talking in short phrases and catch phrases and know what he’s talking about before he starts dividing communities and pointing fingers at radical Islam,” said a smug Dr Anne Aly, Federal Labor MP, Egyptian-born Muslim and former counter-terrorism academic. “The biggest victims of violence in Australia aren’t victims of violent terrorism: they are victims of domestic violence.”
Anne Aly: @ScottMorrisonMP needs a little terrorism 101 before pointing fingers at radical Islam. Yes, violent Jihadism has been a predominant aspect of religious terror but the biggest threat in Australia is domestic violence.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) November 10, 2018
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It raises the question of which religion, if not radical Islam, is fostering terrorism. The Mormons or Hare Krishna perhaps? And to evaluate the consequences of terrorism solely on the number of deaths caused is chronically myopic. For example, assume in the month after the outbreak of World War II no Australian had yet been killed in action, yet five were murdered in domestic incidents. Based on these numbers, Aly’s reasoning would dictate that countering domestic violence took priority over fighting the war.
She also disregards the fact that the enormous resources in Australia devoted to counter-terrorism have thwarted numerous atrocities, including bombings, stabbings, beheadings, and allegedly in one case, an attempt to bring down a plane carrying hundreds of passengers. As I write this reports are coming in of three Muslim men — Ahmed Mohamed, Abdullah Chaarani, and Hamza Abbas — having been found guilty of conspiring to carry out a mass slaughter in Federation Square in retaliation for Australia’s opposition to Islamic State. Would it be unreasonable to conclude radical Islam may have had something to do with their motivation?
Later conceding her “choice of words” was poor, Aly said this had been “a learning experience”. You don’t say. Maintaining she had not intended “to conflate domestic violence with terrorism,” she insisted she did not want to “diminish the significance of the Melbourne terrorist attack”. It was the occasion for remorse, yet she could not resist verballing the PM by playing victim straw man. “I do take issue with calling out that behaviour by wholly and solely blaming an entire community and putting the responsibility of terrorism on an entire community,” she said.
The PM never did this. How hypocritical of Aly, who told parliament in her maiden speech: “The fight against terrorism is a fight for reason, and we cannot afford to let it be hijacked by populism or by party politics.” It also appears the member for Cowan rates herself highly, as by her making it known in the same speech her academic career culminated “in being asked to speak at the White House, at President Obama’s countering violent extremism summit, and, more recently, receiving the prestigious Australian Security Medal”.
This expertise is not reflected in her recent outburst, and her credibility has been badly damaged. ALP officials must be wondering whether Aly — who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate as a Greens candidate in 2007 — can retain Cowan, which she holds by a margin of only 0.68 per cent.
Her remarks last year on section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person based on their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, embarrassed the Opposition. Despite Labor’s stance that there was no need to amend the section, Aly said there was “scope to assess” extending 18C to cover religion. “I think we have definitely seen an increase in anti-Islamic rhetoric,” she said, effectively asking for a restoration of blasphemy laws. Asked if the Turnbull Government’s attempt to water down 18C could affect national security, she said “Absolutely”, adding that she had “been subjected to racism time and time again, as I was growing up, and even in my life now”.
In 2014, then an academic, she described sharia law as “guidelines for life”. Commenting in 2015 on impressionable young Muslim men lured into fighting jihad, she clumsily said “I think we have to get our heads round the fact that there might be something nice about ISIS that these people are attracted to.” That same year she claimed the government’s response to countering violent extremism had “disproportionately focused on the Australian Muslim communities”.
“The developing discourse on national security and terrorism continues to define them [Muslims] as the objects of terror,” she wrote.
In 2015, then PM Tony Abbott’s remark “I’ve often heard Western leaders describe Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ — I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and mean it.” prompted Aly to remonstrate with him in a petulant and self-centred open letter in her capacity as founding chair of People Against Violent Extremism. “I am deeply disappointed that my elected leader, a person to whom I should be able to look up to, considers my work not only insignificant, but even worse, insincere,” she wrote. There is that straw man again. As Gerard Henderson of Media Watch Dog observed, it was the Abbott Government that funded Aly’s centre.
That same year Aly addressed the University of Western Sydney’s National Advancing Community Cohesion Conference — Towards a National Compact conference. “Violent extremism isn’t just a Muslim problem in Australia,” she said. “The numbers are staggering and growing in right-wing extremism.”
“While we continue to wrestle with the very real threat of violent jihadist extremism perpetrated by those who identify with Daesh (Islamic State), wrote Aly in a Guardian column days later, “we should also remain aware of the emergence of other forms of extremism that are equally threatening.”
Referring to a rally that month by the far-right group Reclaim Australia, Aly criticised Australia’s leaders for not speaking out, she wrote: “The dome of silence that has descended over our political leadership and the failure of Tony Abbott to condemn the Reclaim movement speak volumes.” This is where Aly’s enormous double standard becomes obvious. On one hand she demands our leaders condemn anti-Islamic movements, yet when two prime ministers do the same against radical Islam and appeal for the co-operation of Muslim leaders, she accuses them of being divisive.
“There is actually no empirical evidence to support the claim that religion (any religion) and ideology are the primary motivators of violent extremism,” she wrote in 2015. Seriously? In the aftermath of Sydney’s Lindt Café siege at the hands of Man Haron Monis, she asserted “These modern-day lone-wolf terrorists may be more like lone gunmen than terrorists.” On the day this siege ended she said of Monis “from all reports he was mentally unstable”.
Contrary to Aly’s premature assurances, a coroner would later find Monis “acted in a controlled, planned and quite methodical manner marked by deliberation and choice” and that he “was not suffering from a diagnosable categorical psychiatric disorder that deprived him of the capacity to understand the nature of what he was doing”.
Considering all these examples, you wonder whether she is more apologist than academic, a label that could quickly result in her own party deeming her a liability. As for her confected outrage over the PM “pointing fingers at radical Islam”, here is a suggestion for Dr Aly. You might need to do a little bit of The Bloody Obvious 101.
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