So the West asked for it?

Sadly, it seems Australian society has not yet reached this point. In November last year, Associate Professor at Griffith University, and at the time, Imam of the Kuraby Mosque, Mohamad Abdalla, was invited onto Australia’s flagship debating forum ‘QANDA’. Abdalla was asked to comment on the terror raids that the Australia Federal Police had recently launched in Brisbane to halt an Islamic State motivated attack.

Abdalla’s thoughts: the raids were “over the top”, likely to produce “anger in the [Muslim] community, especially among the young people”, this was “not the right approach”.

This was an academic, a community leader, and a seemingly otherwise moral human being, claiming on national television, that by arresting and removing terrorists from their community, other members of that community, rather than being grateful, might be angered into retributive violence. This is a counter-terrorism model whereby, ‘we must be careful when we arrest radicalised young men, lest we end up creating more radicalised young men’.

It is amazing that anyone, let alone a university professor, might feel comfortable espousing such tenuous and ill-conceived logic.

Yet worse still was the public response. After being toldthat it is the policing of terrorism that causes terrorism, the overwhelming reaction, both at the time and since, has been a passive acceptance.

Our silence at moments like these represent an abject surrender of control over the language of the debate.

We are simply too accustomed to the idea of self-hatred, and too accepting of blame for the violence of others. When someone attacks us, our first instinct is to think that we must have brought it on ourselves, that we must have done something provocative. So we accept the self-professed narratives of those who wish us harm, and we buy into their claims of grievance, rather than viewing their violence as it should be: unjustified, self-created, and mitigated by nothing.

With any luck, the behaviour of Asim Qureshi and CAGE, might just have broken this paradigm.