Andrew Bolt
Why did the Abbott Government bring out Abdul-Rehman Malik and Daisy Khan? Why did the ABC give them an easy ride? If this is the moderate voice, repeatedly turning the criticism on the West, what hope of integrating the radicals?
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: My two guests tonight were both invited by the Australian Government to speak at the Sydney summit on countering violent extremism. Abdul-Rehman Malik is a London-based journalist and educator. He’s programs manager for Radical Middle Way, a group trying to encourage young Muslims to embrace social inclusion and reject violence… Now, Abdul-Rehman first to you, the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop today said the first question she’s always asked on this topic is what motivates young Australians to leave our safer and tolerant society as she put it to join a violent and unforgiving organisation thousands of miles away?…
ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK: … For some it’s exercising a sense of adventure. For others it’s a sense of returning back to an imagined homeland or an imagined utopia which they can’t find here. But for many, it’s alienation from the societies that they live in; it’s economic, social and cultural marginalisation…
Well I think first we have to question whether this is a cult or not. I think to call it a death cult, as the Australian Prime Minister does, is a complete misnomer and actually feeds in to IS propaganda…. The fact is that IS- Daesh absolutely a brutal force but it’s not an irrational force. It has a political agenda. It has an agenda which emerges from an existing political context which is absolutely chaotic, linked right back to the invasion of Iraq, to the sectarian division, to political divisions that are- that have been in Syria and Iraq and in the Levant for decades, maybe even longer…
You know you talk about the barbarity of the beheadings and the brutality of the images that they’re shown. They will come back and you and say look at Abu Ghraib, look at Guantanamo, look at drone attacks that have destroyed families and destroyed villages. Look at the invasion of Iraq that killed anywhere between half a million to a million innocent people… You’re talking about morals and ethics to kids who think there’s no morals and ethics in the world to begin with. Now, that as much our problem as is as it is their problem.
This is too much like the victimology on which the radicals feed. The West’s invasion of Iraq did not kill anywhee near that number of “innocent people”. The dead were in fact mostly the victims of jihadists and Sunni extremists. Nor is the slaughter of Shiites by Sunnis “linked right back to the invasion of Iraq”. It has been going on for centuries, and some of the worst occurred under Saddam Hussein. Nor is “marginalisation” the main driver of Islamist extremism in the West, when the recruits include university students, doctors and the children of doctors. “Marginalisation” is in many cases actually “rejectionism” – of, not by, the West.
Rejectionism is the problem, and its origins are in Islam and in the cultures from which so many jihadists or the families come. Why are we importing speakers who are only too keen to blame the West?
Fearful and defeatist, Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze (Druse) in Lebanon, counsels the Druze in Syria to give up on the Alawites and the regime that protects non-Muslim minorities, and throw in their lot with the Sunni Arabs, some of whom, as members of the Al-Nusra Front, have just massacred two dozen Druze in northwestern Syria and forcibly converted others (as has happened to non-Muslims in the Middle East over the centuries — what is happening today is just Islamic history speeded up, and there for all to see). Jumblatt has given up, and he can’t say what some Druze must be thinking — there is, after all, a country next door, where 125,000 Druze live peacefully and are protected by, and in turn help protect, the government and people of Israel. —Walid Jumblatt Advises The Druse To Surrender To The Sunnis, by Hugh Fitzgerald
