If you’re terrified that identifying the ideologies behind terrorism is going to reflect badly on your religion, then it seems pretty obvious that your religion has a problem.
Islamophobia envoy Aftab Malik’s submission to the Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission […] said defining terrorists by their motive did not work and argued 25 years of “hyper-securitisation” had punished Muslims as he urged federal cabinet to stop using “ideological labels” when it tackled terror crises.
Except that terrorism is literally defined by ideology.
He had previously advocated for the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor to remove religion as a motivation for terrorist acts as part of the first review into national terror laws since 9/11, which is ongoing.
And what motivated the 9/11 terrorists? Anyone? Anyone?
What does he have to hide?
Former Australian Federal Police counter-terror cop David Craig lashed Mr Malik’s submission, saying any move away from identifying terror ideology would be “a way of covering over crime and making it even more nebulous to try and manage, handle, and confront”.
“He’s written the perfect guise for hiding crime,” Mr Craig told the Australian.
“How are we meant to deal with this new problem if our leaders can’t even describe it properly?
Craig is dead right. This is a deliberate attempt to obscure Islamic terrorism. Strip out the motive, strip out the ideology, strip out the inconvenient bits of scripture and suddenly every beheading, truck-ramming and Bondi Beach massacre becomes just another random act of extremism’ with no particular source. Handy for the people whose sacred texts contain the explicit marching orders.
The Australian last month revealed the Albanese government agreed only to establish an antisemitism envoy role if an equivalent Islamophobia position was instituted, according to Jewish community leader Daniel Aghion.
Lebanese Muslim Association secretary Gamel Kheir said Labor’s neglect of Mr Malik’s report suggested the Islamophobia envoy role was not being taken seriously.
Of course the ‘Islamophobia envoy’ role isn’t being taken seriously. So-called ‘Islamophobia’ is a chimaera cooked up by Muslims to distract from Islam’s relentless violence and hate. Kheir admitted as much when he complained that Labor only created the post as a sweetener after Jewish leaders forced an antisemitism envoy.
“I think Aftab’s position was really a symbolic act to try and just appease the Muslim community, with the main point being really the antisemitism envoy. That was the one they were really interested in,” he said.
Well – no shit, sharif.
One is a response to actual pogroms, synagogue firebombings and the deadliest antisemitic massacre on Australian soil. The other is a taxpayer-funded grievance machine for a community that keeps producing the people who commit them.
Kheir then delivered the money quote with zero self-awareness:
“It’s the religion that gets attacked, not the person, and it’s exclusively to the Muslim community.”
Because so is the terrorism, 90 per cent of the time.
Because it’s the religion that drives the terrorism. Literally. Islamic scripture urges its followers to commit acts of terror. Its ‘best example of humanity’, the Prophet himself, was a terrorist warlord, slave-taker and assassin of critics. The same texts that produced the Bondi butchers, the Opera House ‘Gas the Jews’ mob and every other atrocity still echo through certain suburbs and mosques. Pretending otherwise is not ‘social cohesion’: it’s gaslighting.
Michael Gencher, former NSW Jewish Board of Deputies boss and soon-to-be royal commission witness, called Malik’s stunt “opportunistic” and a transparent attempt to reframe the entire inquiry away from antisemitism.
When it comes to antisemitism, ideology does matter. You cannot properly understand Islamist antisemitism, far-right antisemitism, or extreme anti-Zionist antisemitism if you deliberately strip away the beliefs that are driving that conduct.
The government, naturally, ran for the usual bureaucratic bunker. A Tony Burke spokesman bleated: “We need to let the royal commission do its work… We have full confidence in our law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies.” Those would be the same agencies that filed credible warnings about the Bondi shooters under ‘too hard’, stood by while Hamas flags flew over the Opera House and still can’t bring themselves to say the quiet part out loud.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Bali, London, Paris, Manchester, Bondi and a thousand other ‘isolated incidents’, the official line is still that we mustn’t notice the common thread. Call it “hyper-securitisation”. Call it “Islamophobia”. Call it anything except what it is.
Because if we ever start naming the ideology, some very awkward questions about the religion that produced it might get answered. And Aftab Malik’s entire job is to make sure that never happens.
