Brendan O'Neill: Islamic extremism is a threat. Islamophobia is a racket |
There really is a pathological fear of saying 'Islamist'
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Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke a total of 5,022 words in the day after the slaughter of Jews at Bondi Beach. And not one of those words was “Islam.” Or “Muslim.” Or even “Islamic extremism.”
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He did talk about the “far right” though. Twice. We need to tackle “the rise of right-wing extremist groups,” he said.
What an odd thing to focus on the day after a father-and-son Islamofascist outfit had mown down 15 innocents, all while proudly displaying the black flag of ISIS.
To fret about the far right hours after suspected Islamic militants had carried out the worst slaughter of Jews in Australian history is cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.
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It would be like turning up to the bloody aftermath of a KKK massacre and flat-out refusing to say the words “Klansmen,” “racist” or “white supremacist.” Well, we wouldn’t want to offend the pointed-hood community.
Some Australians were dumbfounded by the PM’s bullish refusal to name the ideology that fuelled this act of antisemitic savagery.
After all, at the time he was holding forth on the various threats to the Aussie way of life, officialdom had found the killers’ ISIS flag and other paraphernalia suggesting they had taken the knee to the death cult of radical Islam.
“What happened at Bondi was an act of radical Islamic terrorism,” thundered Sean Bell of the populist party One Nation. If the PM “cannot be honest” about the “radical Islamic ideology,” he said, “then he has no place leading the country.”
It’s hard to disagree. The........