Australian PM Accuses Muslim Leaders Of Denying “Threat of Islamic Extremists”

Public needs to hear the truth on terror threat

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun November 22, 2018

Our politicians and police are now — too late! — struggling to keep us safe from the dangerous failure of our immigration policies. But the damage has been done and not just to our safety. Check out Victoria: we can’t trust our institutions to tell the truth about what immigration is now doing to us.

If Victorian Labor on Saturday loses what seemed the unlosable election only a month ago, it will be largely because of that — the crime and terrorism we’ve imported and the refusal of our political class to speak frankly about it.

Take the news of this past fortnight, which has derailed Labor’s re-election campaign and exposed our immigration program as a menace.

Worst, a Muslim terrorist killed a man in Bourke St. The killer, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, came from Somalia.

Three Muslims were arrested for an alleged terrorist plot. Their families came from Turkey.

Three more Muslims were convicted of planning a mass terrorist attack in Federation Square. Their families came from Lebanon, yet another Muslim country.

But this month, Victorians also heard of yet more pack-attacks by people whose families came here from Africa, most as refugees from Sudan.

Those pack-attacks included the bashing of a St Kilda chef and a fast-food worker; a riot at Koo Wee Rup; violent robberies in Dandenong, Pakenham and Springvale; and a mass brawl with police in St Kilda.

Apologists lie when they say this level of ethnic violence is no different from that of other migrant groups which have since settled in.

In fact, Sudanese Australians are an astonishing 57 times more likely than other Victorians to commit an aggravated burglary, says the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency, and about half the Australians jailed for terrorism are from families from just one country: Lebanon.

I’ve argued before that our immigration and refugee programs have gone from great to a menace, not least because five Australians have died in terrorist attacks by Muslim refugees.

Add the congestion, the growth of ethnic ghettos and the fact that nearly 1 million Australians have no or little English, and it’s clear we have bitten off much more than we can chew.

But Victoria shows us another problem: we can no longer trust police and politicians to tell us the truth about what we are doing to ourselves.

Sure, that is not just a Victorian failure. Last year, ASIO boss Duncan Lewis, for instance, claimed: “I have abso­lutely no evidence to suggest there is a connection between refugees and terrorism.”

But Victoria takes the cake.

In 2007, its Labor-appointed police chief commissioner, Christine Nixon, was already falsely claiming that crime statistics showed Sudanese Australians were not more likely to break the law: “They’re not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population.” Incredible.

Police command then banned the word “gangs”, often omitted the skin colour of offenders when issuing appeals for help to catch criminals and kept insisting that majority-African gangs were just multiethnic.

In 2014, police even refused to issue a media alert noting that up to 200 Africans had just staged a violent brawl in the city on New Year’s Day.

It hasn’t got better. Current Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton has attacked media reporting on African gang crime, and in February damned as “garbage” the claim by federal Home

Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s that some Melburnians were now too scared to go out to restaurants.

Yet since then, gangs of African-Australians have bashed a chef, smashed a teenage worker in the head at McDonald’s and battled police at a popular St Kilda restaurant strip.

The hoodwinking of the public has continued this past fortnight.

For six days, Premier Andrews kept to himself the fact that Shire Ali, the Bourke St terrorist, had actually been out on bail, despite being asked a direct question by a journalist.

Attorney-General Martin Pakula falsely claimed Victoria Police had not been warned by ASIO that Shire Ali had had his passport cancelled for fear he might join the Islamic State.

And now in Canberra, we’re told by Prime Minister Scott Morrison that he might cut immigration, after all, because “the roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full” and the public was saying “enough, enough, enough”.

Well, there’s yet another half-truth. Sure, we’re sick of the choked roads and trains.

But look at the violence and the terrorism in Melbourne this month and ask what truly worries Australians most about people we’ve been letting in.

1/ For six days, Premier Andrews kept to himself the fact that Shire Ali, the Bourke St terrorist, had actually been out on bail.