Leadership Defined as Appeasement

The enemy is within, and it is not only gun-toting, bomb-wearing sociopathic jihadists that Australians must worry about — it is their vast anti-Western ideological and institutional support system that must be confronted. This ideological support is essential to the jihadists, as it provides a ready-made justification for their murderous rampages. It also shapes the utterances of their fellow travellers and useful idiots amongst the political elite, in academia, the news media, social media, the ABC, the Human Rights Commission, and NGOs as they trot out the cliché-ridden rationalizations for mass-slaughter in the name of Allah and demand that the West accept responsibility for the attacks upon it.

The most recent glaring example of this ideological mindset is the now infamous statement made by the Muslim Grand Mufti, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, about the Paris atrocities. His Muftiness’s worldview is obviously indebted to the anti-Western post-colonial theory that dominates our universities and serves as the basic ideological paradigm of the Greens and the far left. Consequently, he indulged in a classic case of ‘blaming the victim’, declaring that the murder of the innocents in Paris had been prompted by “causative factors”, whose origins lie solely within the imperialist and oppressive West, including “racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention”. It is the policies of Western nations, allegedly directed against innocent Muslims, that are the cause of all the trouble. As Andrew Bolt recently observed, “So clearly did the Mufti’s statement read like a warning to submit [to Islam] or die that even Turnbull Government ministers attacked it.”

This insistence that the latest Paris outrage is the result of the actions of the West has been repeated by Clive Hamilton, a Greens candidate for parliament and Professor of Public Ethics (sic) at Charles Sturt University. According to Hamilton, “our political leaders must carry much of the responsibility for the dangers Australians are now exposed to.” Islamic State made it clear it would carry out terrorist attacks against anyone who opposed its attempts to establish a global Caliphate and so, apparently, we must accept that we have none to blame but ourselves. As Hamilton puts it:

After all, IS identified France’s and Russia’s roles in the Syrian conflict as the reason for the Paris outrages and the downing of the Russian airliner departing Sharm el-Sheikh that killed 224 people.

And so Australia must expect to be punished by Islamic State for our resistance to its campaign for global domination, just as Russia and France have been punished.

The leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, echoed Hamilton’s call for capitulation in the fight against Islamic State, demanding an end to the Australian bombing campaign and an easing of anti-terrorism laws designed to control jihadists: “We can’t make Australia safer by making other countries more dangerous, but that’s exactly what the citizenship laws and our air strikes do.”

It seems peace can only be achieved by refusing to fight those who seek to destroy us.

Predictably, Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs travelled the same path, revelling in the thought that the slaughter in Paris might prompt the French to capitulate in their fight against Islamic State:

I think the loss of so many people in such a cold-blooded and planned attack will heighten the concerns that they have about the role they are playing globally.

She rejoiced that the jihadist threat might prompt the French to engage in

self-reflection about the war in Syria, about France’s role, and about what are the risks worth taking … into just what can be achieved by trying to stop ISIL … or whether they should back away completely.

Triggs rejected any suggestion that open borders and illegal immigration were connected to the escalating jihadist threat. In particular, “she applauded Malcolm Turnbull for refusing to conflate terrorism with immigration.”

Indeed, it is Australia’s tragedy that this ideological mindset infects much of the political elite, with numerous senior politicians mouthing the same inane and facile drivel about terrorism, Muslims, and Islam. Typically, they talk down to the Australian people, who they regard as both cretinous Islamophobes and a greater threat to social harmony than homicidal religious maniacs living among us.

Problems, Mufti? What problems?

Our politicians act not as our representatives but as monitors and supervisors, keeping us in line in case we make trouble. Never do they give voice to the deeply-felt sense of fear and betrayal that these jihadist outrages provoke, or to the disappointment and despair that is broadly felt about a religious community which has been welcomed into our country but nevertheless breeds fanatics who feel nothing but contempt, hatred, and murderous rage towards us.

The appalling truth is that politicians in Australia, and the West generally, have failed in their primary responsibility to protect the civilization they were elected to lead and the problem is now far too big for them to cope with. The global Muslim insurgency is beyond their control and their greatest fear is that we will come to realize this and hold them to account. For this reason they try always to minimize the threat and steer the debate away from the actual and impending jihadist atrocities and onto questions of alleged Islamophobia and racism, portraying non-Muslims as the real problem. And on this, they know they can count on the support of the leftist mainstream media, which regards the bulk of fellow Australian as bogans and racists.

The penny has dropped however and people are waking up to just how bereft of leadership we are. As Mark Steyn declares in a recent, exasperated article entitled “Just stop talking and do something”:  “I’m Islamed out. I’m tired of Islam 24/7”. Not to mention the endless atrocities:

The West cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamisation and self-segregation [in] their own countries.

Accompanying Steyn’s article is a very telling photo of Malcolm Turnbull in earnest conversation with Barack Obama at the G20 conference. These are the two leaders of most importance for Australia and yet very few people would have any confidence that they have a grip on the problem. After all, virtually the first things Obama did upon his election to the presidency was to travel to Egypt to apologise to the Muslim world for previous American policies and then to visit Saudi Arabia where he signalled his obeisance to Islam by bowing very deeply to the Saudi king.

Since then, Obama has demonstrated only weakness in his dealings with the global Islamist insurgency. Obama is weakness personified, his nostrums bluntly contradicted by grim reality.  Typically, just before the Paris slaughter, Obama absurdly announced that his policies had contained ISIS, that it was not gaining strength. Ominously, after his meeting with Obama, Turnbull is now mouthing this same placatory drivel, as he made clear in his national security address, in which he derided any desire for a robust resistance to the Islamist insurgency as contemptible “machismo”.

This impression of a leadership vacuum is reinforced by Peter Costello:

After each atrocity, complacent political leaders trot out the same platitudes. They tell us: ‘This has nothing to do with Islam …’. It is wearing thin with the public.

Thin indeed, and after reviewing some of the more common political lies about Islam, Costello concludes:

There is no reason we should place any weight on what political leaders tell us about what Islam does or doesn’t stand for.

In particular, their comments reveal no comprehension of the power of religious ideology or of Islam’s sense of historical destiny. Costello continues:

Most of those leaders have dispensed with their own religious beliefs [if they ever had any]. They don’t understand the religious underpinnings of their own society – let alone the kind of society that a pious Muslim would aspire to.

In fact, these so-called leaders are no more informed about Islam than any ordinary citizen. Indeed, as anyone who has worked with government ministers knows, they are steered through their days by their minders and advisers and they say what they are told to say. Basically, they have no time to gain comprehensive knowledge of anything other than certain areas of their own portfolios.  Indeed, as their constant stream of platitudes and half-baked reassurances reveals, they know considerably less about Islam and its teachings and history than the many ordinary folk who have studied the subject since the 9/11 and Bali atrocities. Put simply, they are ill-equipped to contest the policies of appeasement.

Ultimately, this creates a growing tension where the public posture of our political leaders over Islam and the jihadist threat is becoming increasingly disconnected not only from reality but from the understanding of the crisis enjoyed by an ever-growing number of people. An uninformed official complacency is confronting a well-informed popular desire for resolute action. Nowhere is this disconnect better illustrated than in these posted comments that greeted Turnbull’s speech.  Of over 500 comments on that Australian thread, only a very small minority expressed any confidence in his approach and most were dismissive or contemptuous. Meanwhile, poll results indicate that 76% of respondents believe a Paris-style terrorist attack is inevitable, very likely, or likely in Australia.

Politically, this disconnection is opening up a space where a new party like the Australian Liberty Alliance could draw on support from both disaffected Coalition and ALP voters who feel their concerns are not being taken seriously and that they are either being taken for granted or treated with contempt. Crucially, neither the Liberals under Turnbull nor the ALP under Bill Shorten appears capable of comprehending or combatting this situation. Diabolically, their only hope is that the mass jihadist atrocity now judged likely does not occur before the next election. Hopefully, they’ll be lucky.