The Bondi massacre is already being exploited by the Albanese government to silence discussion of the real problems facing Australia, including Islamic immigration.

by Kurt Mahlburg

In the wake of the Bondi massacre, the Albanese government has proposed sweeping new laws to crack down on so-called “hate speech” — and I’m already picturing how these new laws will be used to make a criminal out of me and other law-abiding Australians who criticise Islam.

As reported by The Guardian:

The plan announced on Thursday includes an aggravated hate speech offence for preachers and leaders who promote violence, increased penalties for hate speech promoting violence and making hate an aggravating factor in sentencing crimes for online threats and harassment.

It would also include developing a regime for listing organisations whose leaders engage in hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred and developing a narrow federal offence for serious vilification based on race or advocating racial supremacy, he said.

Many Australians will read reports like this and feel heartened that our leaders are finally “doing something” to prevent a repeat of events like the Bondi massacre.

But further restrictions on speech are the opposite of helpful. Why? Because — mark my words — they will be used against Australians who wish to preserve our Australian way of life, and who criticise what threatens it, such as Islam.

To be clear, I love Muslims. I’ve spent years living and serving voluntarily in the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia. Generally speaking, I’ve found the Muslims I’ve met and befriended to be kind, sincere and hospitable. I genuinely want the best for Muslims, Australian or otherwise.

But here’s the rub: Wanting the best for Muslims means wanting them to reject Islam and put their faith in Jesus Christ.

Call me a bigot if you like, but my convictions about Islam aren’t based on prejudice. They’re based on first-hand experience, and more than a cursory understanding of Islamic history, theology and practice.

Islam, salvation and civilisation

Islam is a works-based religion that demands rigorous rule-keeping and offers no assurance of salvation. By contrast, the Christian gospel declares that Jesus Christ has perfectly fulfilled the requirements of God’s law on our behalf (Romans 10:4), offers us salvation as a free gift to be received by faith (Ephesians 2:8-9), and provides us with genuine assurance that we are loved by God and eternally secure in Him (John 10:28-29).

Islam and Christianity don’t just make entirely different claims about salvation; they produce entirely different civilisations.

Christian civilisation could hardly be described better than in the following words, often attributed to the 19th-century American poet James Russell Lowell:

Show me a place on the face of the earth ten miles square where a man may provide for his children in decency and comfort, where infancy is protected, where age is venerated, where womanhood is honoured, and where human life is held in due regard, and I will show you a place where the Gospel of Christ has gone and laid the foundation.

Islam, by contrast, has produced a civilisation — particularly in large swathes of the Middle East — marked by political instability, the subjugation of women, the suppression of dissent, and persistent poverty, among many other social woes.

That’s not to say Islamic civilisation has no redeeming features: we Westerners have much to learn from the cultures shaped by Islam about family loyalty, respect for tradition, hospitality, and the integration of faith into daily life.

That being said, by almost every metric, Western civilisation is vastly safer, freer, wealthier and more liveable than its Islamic counterpart. If you still don’t agree with me, consider global migration patterns: millions of Muslims migrate away from their home countries, yet there is no comparable movement of Westerners relocating en masse to Islamic societies.

Islam and violence

Christianity and Islam don’t just contrast markedly on questions of salvation and civilisation. As highlighted by last weekend’s events, they also diverge sharply on the question of violence.

Christians have committed violence in certain periods of history, but have done so in direct disobedience to the commands of Christ (e.g. Matthew 5:38-39, Matthew 26:52).

As I’ve written elsewhere, Christianity rejects violence as a means of spiritual or political conquest, and permits physical force only in extremely limited circumstances like self-defence. Over time, this ethic helped give rise to the Protestant Reformation’s firm distinction between church and state — a distinction that has profoundly shaped the Western world.

By contrast, most Islamic traditions even today fail to draw a clear line between the religious and political spheres. The life of Mohammad and the teachings of the Qur’an have historically furnished Muslims with a strong justification for the use of violence as a tool for conquest and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

Yes, there is a distinction to be made between Islam and Islamism:

• Islam is a monotheistic religion, laid out in the Qur’an and exemplified in the life of Muhammad, that calls for submission to Allah in every sphere of life.
• Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to implement Islamic law as the foundation of society and government, including by coercion or violence.

The distinction between Islam and Islamism sounds good in theory but is not always clear-cut in practice, since many Muslims themselves do not perceive a clear separation between the sacred and the secular, as do Westerners.

Thus, the clearest way to draw a line between Islam and Islamism is at the individual level — that is, by understanding what an individual Muslim believes about Islam and violence.

This is precisely the challenge Australia faces in the wake of the Bondi massacre and the growing spectre of Islamism on our shores. More than 800,000 Muslims live in Australia today and their convictions about Islam and violence differ markedly.

This was no more clearly seen than in the incredible courage of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Muslim shop owner who risked his life to disarm Naveed Akram — a fellow Muslim and one of the Bondi terrorists — in an act that undoubtedly saved many lives.

It is also seen in the reaction to al-Ahmed’s bravery. Across Australia, al-Ahmed’s courage was rightly celebrated, including by many Australian Muslims. And yet, as reported by The Australian, al-Ahmed has been “attacked in the Arab world as a traitor and a mercenary” — with 75 per cent of hundreds of comments on the popular Palestinian Facebook page Ramallah News branding his intervention an act of treason because it saved the lives of Jewish people.

In short, the Prime Minister’s claim that the Bondi terrorist attack represents an “extreme perversion of Islam” simply does not square with the facts. And his pet mantra that “diversity is our strength” rings hollow when that diversity includes people who want us dead.

A few bad apples or an immigration pattern?

As recently highlighted by commentator Drew Pavlou, in 2014, the Lakemba-Punchbowl-Bankstown corridor — home to about 6,800 young Muslim men — produced 60–70 ISIS fighters or attempted recruits, according to open-source Australian intelligence data. In other words, roughly 1 per cent of the local male Muslim population joined or tried to join ISIS, making it one of the most concentrated ISIS recruitment zones in the entire Western world.

Crucially, that 1 per cent only counts those who were detected attempting to join ISIS; it does not include the potentially much larger number of Muslims who privately believe that Islam justifies violence but never acted on it.

Thus, it is not a stretch to suggest that Australia now harbours thousands upon thousands of Islamists and Islamist sympathisers who have no moral qualms with the carnage unleashed on Sunday night.

As many have pointed out this week, by focussing on gun reform and “hate speech” laws — and even on antisemitism as a catch-all category — the Albanese government is avoiding the real problem.

The real problem is that the Albanese government, building on previous governments, has ramped up the inflow of people who have no interest in assimilating, who despise the Australian way of life, and who use the freedoms we afford them to tear down the very civilisation that welcomed them.

Driving home this point, in a recent, widely-shared video, commentator Konstantin Kisin illustrated the danger of ignoring radical elements within the Muslim population. “To avoid offending morons,” he began, “let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead.” His point: even if only a small minority of apples are poisonous, a government that goes on blindly importing them puts its citizens at serious risk.

Solutions: Islam, Islamism and immigration

What would it look like for the Albanese government to properly address the web of challenges posed by Islam, Islamism and immigration? Here are just a few suggestions:

1. Deport all dual nationals with proven links to jihadist violence, attendance at extremist institutions, or travel to terror-training regions.
2. Place a full moratorium on mass-migration programs from regions with elevated terror risk.
3. Significantly scale back immigration from Muslim-majority countries and implement far stricter vetting for immigrants from those countries, given that a measurable proportion of arrivals to date have gone on to endorse Islamist violence.
4. Abandon the ideology of multiculturalism and admit that Islam and Islamism often overlap in ways that hinder assimilation.
5. Defend and publicly uphold Australia’s Christian heritage and values as the foundation of national identity and a proven force for deradicalisation.

Given Mr Albanese’s track record, I expect his government to implement precisely zero of these common-sense measures. Instead, he will push his “hate speech” reforms, which will eventually be used to punish ordinary Australians — like me — for daring to honestly name uncomfortable truths about Islam.

And why wouldn’t he? After all, Albanese has previously condemned Israel Folau’s beliefs as “reprehensible” and “rubbish”, and his Foreign Minister Penny Wong claimed that even presenting children with the Christian view on marriage during the same-sex marriage debate exposed them to “hatred”.

True to the old adage, “never let a crisis go to waste”, the Albanese government is exploiting the Bondi tragedy to impose restrictions that will deepen the very dangers that Australians face.

We need the right to speak uncomfortable truths about Islam. We need to protect Australian security and sovereignty. And most of all, we need the gospel of Jesus Christ to guide our nation back to what made it so enviable in the first place.

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by Kurt Mahlburg.

Kurt Mahlburg is a husband to Angie, a father, a freelance writer, and a familiar Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He is the Senior Editor and a regular columnist at The Daily Declaration. More of his writings can be found at Mercator, Intellectual Takeout, The Spectator Australia, The American Spectator and Caldron Pool.

The Daily Declaration is Australia’s largest Christian news site. We are dedicated to providing a voice for Christian values in the public square. Our vision is to see the revitalisation of our Judeo-Christian values for the common good. We are non-profit, independent, crowdfunded, and we provide Christian news for a growing audience across Australia, Asia, and the South Pacific. 

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