Islamist terrorism must be confronted, not denied

“Every time there is a terrorist attack …” It is a telling phrase in contemporary Australia. It speaks of the brutal reality of what we too often confront. The senseless terror, random murder and shoot-to-kill finality of Melbourne’s Bourke Street assault last Friday was the sixth deadly Islamist terror attack in Australia in four years, while there have been two non-fatal stabbings and still more plots thwarted. Yet even while seeking to downplay the terrorism threat and draw false relativism to the scourge of domestic violence, Labor MP Anne Aly used that telling phrase more than once. “Every time there’s a terrorist attack they call on the Islamic leaders to do something,” Ms Aly said, “and every time there’s a terrorist attack the Islamic leaders … are the first ones to come out and make a statement.” Ms Aly, a Muslim, has academic expertise in the field and criticised Scott Morrison for demanding more of Muslim leaders. “They are doing more; they do more every time there is a terrorist attack,” she protested. Yet it seems obvious the task of eradicating Islamist extremism cannot be complete until we no longer experience terrorist attacks.

We applaud the Prime Minister for his sensible and accurate statements in the wake of the Melbourne horror. “We would be kidding ourselves if we did not call out the fact that the greatest threat of religious extremism, in this country, is the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam,” Mr Morrison said on Saturday. “I applaud … the brave and passionate Australians in the Muslim community who know that their children and their communities are at risk from these evil thieves who will come in and prey on their community, on their vulnerable people, on their children.” That anyone could take exception to those words is difficult to fathom yet it is what we have come to expect. There is a reluctance, especially on the so-called progressive side of politics, to openly identify the insidious ideology that inspires terrorism across the globe. Even after attacks occur, we see attempts to reclassify them by citing mental health issues rather than the Islamist inspiration, as if they are mutually exclusive. The cowardly phenomenon of “jihad denialism” is alive and well. Even in the wake of the Melbourne killing, as police confront a lack of co-operation from the deceased attacker’s radicalised relatives, there have been attempts to blame drugs or mental illness rather than concede the violent Islamist motivation.

As the Victorian capital deals with this trauma it is reminded too, through court processes, that innocent people have been killed in another random attack fuelled by drugs and psychosis without the prod of ideology. This demonstrates the point. We do not falsely label attacks. It is important to understand what is behind heinous crimes. It makes no difference to the dead — whatever the motives, their lives have been snuffed out cruelly — but it does to the living. For law-enforcement, security, intelligence and mental health authorities there is a world of difference between identifying and treating crazed individuals and combating a global subterranean movement dedicated to recruiting, radicalising and inspiring actors to kill in the name of Islamist extremism.

This is why the ugly duck-shoving by Sheik Mohammed Omran is dismally disappointing and dangerous. He is the emir of the Hume Islamic Youth Centre, where the Bourke Street attacker prayed and where previous known Australian jihadists have assembled. Yet Sheik Omran was quick to blame Bourke Street on the police and Mr Morrison. “This bloody Prime Minister, instead of turning the heat on somebody else, he should answer us about what he did,” Sheik Omran said.

Of course security authorities, and all Australians for that matter, share responsibility for tackling this terrorist threat but, given its extremist religious genesis, the Prime Minister has made the right call. “There is a special responsibility on religious leaders to protect their religious communities and to ensure that these dangerous teachings and ideologies do not take root here,” he said. “They must be proactive, they must be alert and they must call this out, in their communities and more broadly for what it is.”

Denial and dismissal are just not acceptable — not from our politicians or from religious leaders. It insults the public’s intelligence to pretend this threat away and it is especially insulting to Muslim Australians, who understand all too well the dangers of extremism and the tragedy and schisms it fuels. Thankfully, Sheik Omran does not speak for all Muslims or even, perhaps, many. Other community leaders such as Sydney’s Jamal Rifi openly support the Prime Minister’s direct language. We owe it to the six innocent lives lost on home soil since 2014 — Sisto Malaspina, Kai Hao, Curtis Cheng, Zeeshan Akbar, Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson — to ensure that Muslim and non-Muslim Australians co-operate to effectively combat and defeat what is plainly a curse of violent and malignant Islamist extremism.