Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Australian police and the leftist government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finally conceded Tuesday that the father-son jihadist team who “allegedly” executed 15 people and wounded dozens more at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration in Sydney on Sunday were motivated by “ISIS ideology.”
As always in the wake of an attack which everyone else immediately recognizes as Islamic terrorism, authorities initially were reluctant to assign the true motive. The day after the attack, PM Albanese blathered more than 5000 words in press conferences, interviews and statements. Not once did he say the words “Muslim”, “Islam,” or even “Islamic extremism.” He did, however, twice raise the threat of “right-wing extremist groups,” because that’s the go-to boogeyman for Left-wing politicians.
But New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed on Tuesday that the suspects had “two homemade ISIS flags” in their car at the scene of the attack, and as far back as 2019 Australian security services had investigated the younger jihadist over ties to ISIS groups (he also reportedly was photographed waving an ISIS flag during the pro-Hamas march across Sydney Harbour Bridge after the October 7, 2023, slaughter in Israel), but they dismissed him as not a threat.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Naveed Akram was on a terror watchlist because he had been a member of an ISIS-linked Muslim street preaching group in Sydney, which included radicals who would go on to fight for the Islamic State. According to ABC, father and son may have received “military-style training” during a trip last month to the Philippines, home to one of the major ISIS networks in East Asia.
So much for the effectiveness of terror watchlists. It’s long past time to ask ourselves just what use terror watchlists are. How often have we learned, after a terror attack, that the perpetrators had been on the authorities’ radar for years? What is the point of such watchlists when they allow suspects access to guns, or allow them to travel to jihadist-infested swamps like the Philippines where they are likely attending training camps and/or receiving material support to commit terror attacks back home? What use is a government that will not take the necessary common-sense measures to protect its citizenry, but simply shrugs its shoulders after allowing yet another preventable mass casualty event? How many more innocents must die?
PM Albanese, like all Left-wing government leaders, is under the delusion that ever-tighter gun restrictions is the answer to all crime and terrorism involving guns, so his solution to the terror attack was to call for – wait for it – stricter gun control. The leader of the right-wing National Party, David Littleproud, slammed this: “This isn’t a gun problem, it’s an ideology problem.”
Indeed it is, but the problem is the official reluctance to name that ideology, especially in the aftermath of an Islamic terror attack, when Left-wing authorities reflexively circle the wagons around the Muslim community and issue warnings about an “Islamophobic backlash.”
Just last September, the Australian government’s Office of the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia (yes, there is such a department) released a strategy report titled A National Response to Islamophobia*, which serves up all the standard fare we’ve heard so often from multiculturalist elites: Islam has been a part of Australian history since “long before the arrival of Europeans,” Muslims in Australia suffer from the oppression of “negative stereotypes,” etc.
To be clear, bigotry does exist and should be called out and stamped out wherever it rears its ugly head. But there is no such thing as “Islamophobia” – an “irrational fear” of Islam. There are, on the contrary, perfectly rational and legitimate concerns about the demonstrable threat Islam poses everywhere in the world.
Albanese has previously issued statements in defense of the Muslim community in Australia and/or slamming the purported threat of Islamophobia. On the International Day to Combat Islamophobia (yes, there is one) last March, for example, in a statement brimming with the usual flowery, multicultural assertions that Islam “has long been a part of the breadth and richness of the Australian story,” he condemned all forms of prejudice against the Muslim community and emphasized Australia’s commitment to “oppose anything that threatens” “our shared identity.”
If Albanese would take off his blinders long enough, he would recognize that Islam is not interested in a shared identity. Supremacist to its core, Islam is in the business of dominating all other identities.
But speaking to Australian broadcaster ABC on Tuesday, Prime Minister Albanese finally acknowledged, “It would appear that this [terror attack] was motivated by Islamic State ideology,” though the charisma-free Albanese still didn’t clarify what the ideology that drives the Islamic State actually is (hint: there is a clue in the name). He did add that it is an “ideology that has been around for more than a decade.”
More than a decade? That ideology has been around for more than 1400 years. Its adherents have been at war with the West – indeed, with all non-Muslims – since its origin. The Bondi Beach terror attack, the deadliest in Australian history, was only the latest manifestation of that fanatical hostility. And stricter gun control won’t prevent future attacks.
Islam is becoming the “strong horse,” as the Arab saying goes, because the West has been betrayed, and continues to be, by our feckless political elites, whose multiculturalist worldview renders them willfully blind to this existential threat. Our leaders, from Australia to Canada to Europe and to America as well, must find a backbone and take the necessary steps – even illiberal ones – to neutralize that threat, or the greatest civilization in history will end in submission to a barbaric, 7th-century totalitarian cult.
* The United States also has a National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate, released in December of 2024 under the Biden-Harris administration.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
