When it comes to fighting nasty brown-skinned Muslim terrorists with unpronounceable names, you really don’t want to look like Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler. Hence, when introducing counter-terrorism law number 56 (or was it 57? I’ve lost count) in September 2014, then-PM Tony Abbott invoked Winston Churchill and declared: “I refuse to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”
Hitler and Churchill are long gone. But Hitler’s rhetorical and ideological legacy arguably live on in the person of the US Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee, Donald Trump. True, Trump hasn’t called for Hispanics and Muslims to be thrown into gas chambers. But then, neither had Hitler called for such treatment for Jews, disabled people, homosexuals, etc, when negotiating with Britain.
When it comes to the obvious danger arising from the election of Donald Trump, Australia’s conservative side of politics — its pollies and its media — are looking a lot like Chamberlain. Should Americans elect a President with xenophobic tendencies, it’ll just be a case of peace in our time for Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop. Meanwhile, these same conservatives are attacking Bill Shorten for sounding more like Winston Churchill in alerting voters to the dangers of a Trump presidency.
[Turnbull, Shorten and the orange, weirdly coiffed elephant in the room]
Nowhere has this been clearer than in the recent Orlando shooting. In case you’ve been asleep for the past 72 hours, here’s just a little of what we know so far about the killer Omar Mateen:
- He was born in New York, not in the mysterious nation of “Afghan” as Trump suggested;
- He dialled 911 and allegedly told the operator he was acting on behalf of the violently homophobic terrorist group Islamic State;
- Witnesses say he frequently attended the Pulse nightclub, approached men for sex, identified himself to friends as gay and used multiple gay apps such as Grindr;
- He occasionally went to the mosque with his son and performed congregational prayers. He did not attend the Friday prayer during which sermons were delivered; and
- He was violent and vicious toward his first wife.
Yet from Donald Trump to Andrew Bolt to Rita Panahi to Greg Sheridan to the editorial writer for The Australian to even Emma-Kate Symons, the message is that this is about the Islam, the whole Islam and nothing but the Islam.
And notwithstanding their almost constant linkages of terrorism to Islam, radical Islam, Islamism, Muslims, Islamists (and perhaps even those awful nasty pus-filled islamicysts), many of these same pundits allege that there is a conspiracy of political correctness stopping them from linking terrorism to Isla, radical Islam, Islamism etc etc. And when someone at the front line of fighting terrorism — say, for example, the ASIO chief — tells them that their rhetoric isn’t helpful, they go completely nuts.
[Memo to white men: Abbott’s bigotry and inflammatory language not a free speech issue]
This fixation with anything remotely Islam says more about alleged conservatives than it does about your average Yusuf Blow who buys halal/kosher certified products at the supermarket. Conservatives seem to have lost the ideological plot, more so than their most paranoid anti-communist forebears. Seriously, communism was an international threat with nuclear weapons and the ability to send men and dogs into space. Can we really compare groups like Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah and Boko Haram to the combined super power of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies?
fascism needs a hated other…
Partially true Irfan. A gay misogynist who was bipolar committed suicide by taking as many gays with him as possible because his religion and family kept telling him he was going against the laws of the great invisible sky father and he finally cracked. He could easily have been a right wing christian who prayed daily with Corey Bernadi to ungay himself and stop dreaming of donkeys.
He wasn’t however and unfortunately, his communities version of an ethical upbringing seems to supply their fair share of this sort of behaviour worldwide.
We of course, normally only provide people such as Martin Bryant, who luckily for us, did not claim to have been told to kill for religious reasons.
That said, the idea of a caliphate where we can all go back to the dark ages, listen to rampant rubbish and live under Shariah law is abhorrent to most in Western countries. From my travels it isn’t argued against even in “tolerant” muslim countries. In fact it has always been explained to me that by not following their faith, I have to die, literally or figuratively. Not much different to right wing christians and jews, but much better funded through countries like Saudi Arabia etc.
This I suspect is why it is so easy to scaremonger in this situation. Of course if the West kept out of Middle Eastern conflicts and left them to blow each other up, we wouldn’t be having this conversation and bearded misogynists could have a caliphate to die for.
Rational, expert commentators from top Republican economists like former Reserve Bank chief Alan Greenspan and the humane Dr Paul Craig Roberts on the right to humane analysts such as Professor Noam Chomsky on the left, say that the US War on Terror (in reality a US War on Muslims) is about geopolitical hegemony and oil. Zionist- and US Government-promoted, post-9-11 terror hysteria (from 3,000 killed in what many believe was a war-enabling US Government false flag atrocity; see “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ ) enabled the US War on Terror (US War on Muslims) in which Muslim avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries subject to Western military intervention in 2001-2015 now total about 27 million, with a further 5 million Muslims being killed violently by the US Alliance (see Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm ). At a more subtle level (and who knows what those running the world actually think) , science informs that fossil fuel burning must rapidly cease and the polluters must pay in full by a Carbon Tax (for ongoing GHG pollution) a Wealth Tax (for historical GHG pollution) as advocated by French economist Professor Thomas Piketty. Of course the One Percenters are fervently opposed to this although France has an annual wealth tax of 1.5%. However Muslims for 1400 years have paid an annual wealth tax of 2.5% (zakat) – an immense threat to the greedy One Percenters who own half the wealth of the world (see “1% ON 1%: one percent annual wealth tax on One Percenters”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/1-on-1 ).