A 12-year-old has now been connected to the shooting along with 17 other terror suspects.The revelations include a virtual shopping list of terrorist propaganda favorites, including:
“…perceived anger on war on Islam in Australia”. One suspect said the war was “…because we grow our beards” in a part of his statement.
A senior police officer said IS had been grooming Australian teens.
A gun was allegedly given to the shooter, who was killed at the scene, by someone in a local mosque. The gun was allegedly sourced from a local crime gang. The mosque has a record of statements regarding anti-radicalization policies.
Two men have been charged with complicity in the shooting. An 18-year-old man has been charged under national terrorism laws and may face life in prison.
Radicalization in Australia
The shooter went to a local school 100 metres down the road from the shooting scene. According to some reports, “radical preaching” by schoolkids was also part of the social scene. The 15-year-old was reportedly a “quiet kid”, and some students were evidently quite shocked by his actions.
The subject of anti-radicalization has been very much to the fore in Australia’s rather iffy, semi-literate, debate regarding Islam and terror. National anti-terror raids have now been going on for years. Middle Eastern gangs now have their own special crime squad in New South Wales.
Australian anti-terror agencies have been monitoring a large number of people regarding IS-related communications. Australia’s 300,000 Muslims, in fact, have been under heavy scrutiny since 911 as Australia, like everyone else, beefed up its security.
The cultural situation, however, is very different. To say that white middle class Australia is a long way away from the culture of terrorism is putting it mildly. There’s no point of contact and understanding is marginal at best. The fact is that Aussies aren’t that fascinated with the insanity.
That includes the Australian Muslim community. I have had quite a few Muslim and Middle Eastern friends over the years. In my experience, traditional Muslims and non-observant Muslims, particularly the highly educated, are as super-skeptical of “conspicuously Islamic” radicals as anyone else in the community. They think we’re incredibly soft regarding basic crime, let alone terrorism. They’re hardly “sympathizers” to a movement which would literally put them back in the Stone Age.
The cultural divide between middle class Islam and radical Islam is an interesting study in itself. In Australia, we have a lot of Muslim women driving, in professional jobs, and doing university degrees in their hijabs. Their lifestyle is the antithesis of hardline Taliban/IS dogma, where they wouldn’t be allowed to drive or get an education. In all, about 0.001 percent of Australian Muslims have been directly connected to actual terrorism activities. Radical Islam, in practice, obviously isn’t the Next Big Thing in the Australian Muslim community.
That range of obvious facts hasn’t stopped a lot of local nationalists and right wingers getting on the anti-Muslim bandwagon. The Australian United Patriots Front has been quick enough to make a public face for itself, protesting against a mosque, in the face of community anti-racist demonstrations.
The fact that these groups basically provide propaganda for IS and other groups in promoting their bogus “war on Islam” agenda is apparently lost on them. Australia’s redneck population, called Bogans, are as obnoxious as any redneck group, anywhere in the world.
The problem is that the constant threats from IS do seriously annoy a lot of Australians. “Terrorism” could easily be described as “Angerism,” getting people who would otherwise be indifferent to be actively angry and hostile to those threatening. That the actual acts of terror in Australia have been confined to random acts of idiocy and insanity by a rather mixed bag of individuals hasn’t helped.
The Lindt café siege, by a fake sheik with a complex alleged past of fraudulent immigration, complicity in murder, and sexual assault, for example, and other incidents suggests that these acts aren’t by mainstream people.
A kid shot dead in Melbourne while trying to stab police was also connected by social media information to IS terrorism. This kid was on the police radar for other reasons, but the situation got out of control when he came to a police station.
Various plots, including “random beheadings,” an attack on an Australian military base, and an alleged plot to attack ANZAC Day services have been foiled. The common factor is a high public profile, in keeping with the Al Qaeda publicity model. These attacks are designed to recruit new members and get publicity, a sort of ideological Ponzi scheme. They’re about as Islamic as a new fast food commercial, but in this case, they’re recruiting the cannon fodder.
Most people know that, even the Bogan rednecks. The problem is that if a serious incident takes place, the currently very each way mood of the public will harden and become actively hostile, not just passively hostile.
Ironically, the old traditional culture of the past does have a solution, and it’s a type of logic, pretty rough and hardly PC, but it makes a point:
“You’re a punk kid, barely out of the womb. What the hell do you know about anything? What gives you the right to start a war in our living room because you’re having a hissy fit about what some other moron told you? Who’s trying to kill you? Are you being persecuted? You want to go back to minding the camels in a 50 degree desert? What have these deadbeat gun-happy terrorists ever done for anyone but themselves? Are people in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan any better off or happier for having every moment of their lives run by them and their guns? The people over there are still poor as dogs, with their kids being taken away from them and living in ratholes at gunpoint, and will be forever unless people like you wise up and grow a brain.”
That, as a matter of fact, is a sort of synopsis of the bottom line. Some of the Australian escapees from IS have been saying in so many words that “it’s hell over there”. Ironically, given the threat of “radicalized returnees,” they’re not coming back radicalized, but anti-radicalized, quite disillusioned. The contrast makes its own points. In Australia, people live so much better, even if the vast majority of Australia’s Middle Easterners aren’t exactly living like kings. If someone causes problems, you can do something about it. Maybe the message is getting through, maybe not. The question remains whether Australia, and by implication the West, will get the message too — to beat terror, let the facts speak for themselves.
