The Lies Feeding the Monster

As the great Japanese comedy-adventure series Monkey once said, “The more we try to ignore monsters, the stronger they become.” A quarter-century after 9/11, we’re still trying to ignore the bloodsoaked monster slouching through our streets – and are only making it stronger.

When two Muslims brandishing an ISIS flag slaughtered Jews, per Islam’s express commands, at Bondi Beach last year, the Australian Federal Police commissioner and the ABC both immediately declared ‘no religious motive’. The Bondi royal commission, which the prime minister strenuously resisted even setting up in the first place, has been one of the shortest in Australian history. Worse, it has assiduously resisted naming the monster in the corner.

As recently as Monday in Perth, when asked did he support an extension of time for the Bondi inquiry, Anthony Albanese offered up his usual blather about royal commission independence, with soft words on antisemitism and, remarkably, references to neo-Nazis without even mentioning radical Islam. This is just not credible from any leader when even a cursory understanding of the issue and the global experience shows the greatest contributor to antisemitism, indeed the loss of Jewish life, and increasingly Christian life, is radical Islam.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was established eight months ago […] the 2014 Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption ran for 20 months; the 2021 Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was over three years; the 2018 aged care royal commission took 2½ years; the disability royal commission was 4½ years; and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was a mammoth five-year-long inquiry with six commissioners in total.

This is not an Australian peculiarity. It is the house style of the entire Western establishment. Canada’s taxpayer-funded CBC has just instructed its newsrooms, in a memo from Senior Director of Journalistic Standards Basem Boshra (surprise, surprise, a Muslim), to lie about the monster in the corner.

“Do not refer to the Sept 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”

Boshra states that all in bold letters, italicized, as if to emphasize the point. To make clear it is a directive, not a suggestion.

It goes on. “The hijackings led to passenger jet crashes,” it reads, again in italics. There is no recognition in the CBC memo – none – that “hijacking that leads to passenger jet crashes” is not a protest, or a vote. It is a terrorist act, full stop.

Nineteen jihadis, acting on Osama bin Laden’s explicit religious command, murdered nearly three thousand people. Two dozen of them Canadians. The government of Saudi Arabia, where the terrorists hailed from, calls it terrorism. Bin Laden called it terrorism. Only the CBC, and its cousins at the ABC and BBC, prefer the language of industrial accident.

This is not mere squeamishness. It is a systematic campaign to minimise the Islamic-ness of terrorism and, increasingly, to erase Jews from their own history. The BBC has repeatedly marked Holocaust Memorial Day by speaking of “six million people” murdered by the Nazis, omitting the word Jews until forced to apologise. The same broadcaster translated Hamas praise of “Jihad against the Jews” as fighting “Israeli forces”. Kindertransport stories air without mentioning that the children being saved were Jewish. Cable Street reports air without mentioning the Jews who actually stood on the barricades.

The pattern is not accidental. Muslims have achieved positions of real power inside Western institutions and are using that power to scrub the record. In Australia, Albanese’s own Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, has formally urged that “religious” motivation be stripped from the legal definition of terrorism. Police and intelligence agencies, who know that the overwhelming majority of terrorism convictions in this country have been Islamically motivated, are to be forbidden from noticing the obvious.

Going all-in on the lies, he asserts that there is “no religious justification for terrorism. None.” His own religious texts beg to differ. Those of us who can do the maths on where the terror attacks are coming from will just have to believe our lyin’ eyes.

The Bondi commission has been a masterclass in the same evasion.

To date, the antisemitism royal commission has received 20,000 submissions. Yet, as its website reports, it has heard from only around 340 witnesses. Incredibly, again, not one of those witnesses has been a political leader or cabinet minister. This is not just a terrible oversight but the derogation of the commissioner’s duty to properly inquire into what happened on that fateful day and the circumstances over many months that led to it.

Senior Islamic leaders were not called until August and then only two of them. Hate preachers went unexamined. The most vocal antisemites in academia and the arts (again, many of them Muslim) were not even asked to appear, even though the law allows the commissioner to compel witnesses. The $120 million deradicalisation industry went unexamined. The growing institutional alliance between Muslim organisations and the Labor Party went unexamined.

The inquiry you have when you really don’t want an inquiry. Clayton’s, as they used to say.

Words matter. Terrorism is a criminal act by non-state actors against civilians for political or religious ends. Pretending 9/11 was a series of unfortunate aviation incidents, or that Bondi was motiveless ‘antisemitism’, does not make the monster weaker. It feeds it.

The more we try to ignore it, the stronger it becomes.