You can’t preach ‘social cohesion’ while you’re simultaneously doling out tens of millions of dollars to Islamic hate-preachers spewing the sort of violent invective against Jews that led directly to Bondi. Unless, of course, you’re a Labor government vitally dependent on the Muslim vote. Then it’s all the money they could want and no questions asked.
To damn them with faint praise, the Albanese government has pulled just one – count ’em, one! – grant. But only when the spotlight on its hate-funding got too intense. But the real question is just why the money was ever being handed out in the first place. Not to mention the hundreds of millions – in fact, the bulk of the government’s ‘social cohesion’ and ‘multicultural’ grants – handed out to groups representing less than three per cent of the population.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Pauline Hanson was vilified for questioning whether the billion-dollar ‘halal-certification’ industry was channelling funds to terrorism. Yet, it was a perfectly reasonable question, given just how much secrecy surrounds where the money actually goes.
But when it comes to pouring money into Islamic groups, secrecy is the operative principle.
The Albanese government has just been forced to cancel the $308,000 grant given to a Western Sydney Islamic media organisation, but serious questions remain. Why was this Islamic body, OnePath, given money despite a finding that it had spread antisemitic material? And what sort of due diligence is being done by officials more broadly when it comes to multicultural grants programs?
Well might we ask. The machinery of bureaucratic oversight in this country appears to function with all the rigorous discernment of a perpetually pickled tavern keeper. When an outfit named OnePath, purveyors of various digital sermons and cultural commentaries, receives a taxpayer-funded windfall despite a well-documented penchant for broadcasting rancid hatred against Jews, we are expected to swallow the absurd notion that it was all a dreadful administrative oversight. Just a misplaced decimal point in the Department of Home Affairs, nothing to see here, move along. Especially pay no attention to the would-be terrorist pilot who got radicalised in the febrile stew of Muslim Australia.
It gets murkier still, naturally.
According to the UAE Attorney-General, the accused co-pilot became acquainted with individuals associated with a Melbourne Islamic organisation known as MyCentre while studying in Australia at Melbourne RMIT.
Down in the Garden State, the hub known as MyCentre, sharing an address and a rather robust ideological lineage with the grandly titled Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia, finds itself tangled in the rather unpleasant business of international aviation terrorism. The authorities in the United Arab Emirates, possessing a rather firmer grasp of reality than our own somnambulant security apparatus, pointed a rather direct finger at connections forged right here in Victoria by an aspiring suicide pilot.
Naturally, the man pulling the strings, Samir Mohtadi, better known to his admirers as Sheikh Abu Hamza, has issued the customary, pious protestations of absolute innocence. How profoundly touching.
What he can’t deny are antisemitic attacks on his own social media accounts, referring to Zionists as “scavengers” and “bloodsucking human beings”. Nor can he dispute evidence that he gave in court, in the 2008 trial of convicted terrorist benchmark figures, that many Muslims, himself included, regarded Osama bin Laden as a good man.
Try as jihadis caught with their hands in the terror till might, they cannot simply wave away such charming conversational highlights. When a gentleman casually informs a court of law that mass-murdering architects of global jihad are ‘good men’, we would hope that red flags would flutter frantically across every government department in Canberra and Spring Street. But no. Instead of an immediate, forensic investigation into why public funds were flowing into an operation governed by such extremist perspectives, we find financial audits riddled with missing documentation, mysterious seven-figure internal loans, and a neat little family monopoly where four out of seven directors conveniently share the surname Mohtadi.
And what are they building with this bounteous largesse? A sprawling mega-mosque in Mickleham, complete with gender-segregated schools and all the trimmings, sitting squarely on the desk of Victorian Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny. With an election looming, the political class is no doubt sweating through their tailored suits, desperate to push the project through before the long-suffering electorate gets a word in edgeways.
It is a sordid comedy of bureaucratic cowardice, funded entirely out of the pockets of the hapless Australian taxpayer. We are financing our own ideological dismantling, handing millions to institutions that hold our civilization in utter contempt. Until our political masters find a spine, or are forcibly relieved of their duties by a fed-up public, the gravy train for radical operatives rolls merrily on.
