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Minister, two basic rules of government: Never look into anything you don’t have to. And never set up an enquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.
– Yes, Minister
Australian PM Anthony Albanese has spent the last two years trying to pretend there’s no need to look into the tidal wave of anti-Semitic violence swamping Australia – until Bondi forced his hand. Even then, it took weeks and a sustained campaign by literally hundreds of eminent Australians to drag Albanese, kicking and screaming, into calling a royal commission.
At which point, he’s immediately applied rule number two, trying to set up the commission to fail.
Precision is essential when drafting instructions for a royal commission.
Royal commissions can only operate within their terms of reference and this gives mendacious governments plenty of scope to direct the outcome they want. For instance, Julia Gillard’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse operated under terms of reference that guaranteed it would focus on churches and not on government schools.
Albanese is all-too-obviously trying to steer this royal commission. First, by choosing a commissioner whose previous intervention in this debate was to overrule a NSW police application to stop a protest by a notorious hateful anti-Israel group.
Secondly, by steering it to promoting exactly the failed policies that led to Bondi.
That’s why we should be nervous about the mushy phrase, “social cohesion”, which sneaked its way into the terms of reference for the royal commission on anti-Semitism.
Social cohesion is a rhetorical sponge absorbing every social anxiety and squeezing them out in grey sludge. It is an invitation to moral equivalence that was quickly seized upon by those who didn’t want a royal commission in the first place.
Rule of thumb: if the Greens and Islamic groups like it, it’s almost certainly a bad idea.
The Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young declared the inclusion of the phrase a mandate to tackle “all forms of racism, including confronting Islamophobia and other extremist elements”.
Lebanese Muslim Association secretary Gamel Kheir said the problem should be addressed “holistically”, a word that serves as an excuse for addressing no particular problem at all.
This comes after Australian Muslim bodies failed in their first gambit: the standard Muslim operating procedure of trying to pretend that they’re the real victims of the latest Islamic atrocity. Peak Muslim groups demanded that the royal commission investigate ‘Islamophobia’. As if there’s the remotest equivalence between someone getting a bit shouty at a hijabi, and dozens of Jews being gunned down on Bondi beach.
They really are that shameless.
But even the government’s critics are wilfully blinding themselves.
The nature of Islam in Australia must be central to this inquiry. Far from marginalising Muslims, as Kheir fears, it is a way to build a firewall between the many decent Australian Muslims and the radical few. It will test our intuitive understanding that to judge every Muslim by the poison that spews from the radical mosques is like judging the sanity of Melburnians by the antics of Lidia Thorpe.
You have to be kidding. The ‘radical few’ are not that few at all. Anyone who saw the Muslim suburbs of Western Sydney erupt in spontaneous celebration on October 7, 2023, or thousands of Muslims chanting “Gas the Jews!” storm the Sydney Opera House, is truly living in La-La-Land if they think that sort of anti-Semitic hate isn’t mainstream among Australian Muslims.
Such idiotic Pollyannas also need to explain why two randomly selected Muslim nurses, in their uniforms at work, were so clearly comfortable going on camera, vowing to kill Jews. The ‘not all Muslims’ morons must also explain why radical hate preachers are so clearly welcome at the biggest mosques in the country. Or how nearly half of Sydney’s Muslims, according to reputable pollsters, are entirely comfortable with the thought of killing innocents (the very words of the survey) in the name of Islam.
Until even supposedly hard-headed conservatives can bring themselves to face these confronting but undeniable facts, another Bondi is inevitable.
And “Islamophobia” isn’t a ‘phobia’ at all. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. As ordinary Australians are all too aware, fear of Islamic violence is very far from irrational.
More than a third of Australians – 35 per cent – have a negative view of Islam, a rise of eight points in the past two years. Only 16 per cent of Australians view Islam positively, down from 24 per cent in 2023.
In 1976, then-PM Malcolm Fraser anticipated Angela Merkel by 40 years, and unilaterally took the decision that flooded thousands of Lebanese Muslims into an Australia that till then had a negligible Muslim population. Fraser ignored the frantic advice of senior advisors, who warned that he risked inevitable damage to Australia’s social fabric.
They were too right.
We have seen the growth of a cohort of migrants that barely existed 25 years ago: unpatriotic permanent residents who live among Australians but don’t want to become one.
Albanese’s royal commission, sadly, seems unlikely to do anything about it.
