Friday, September 15, 2006
MISFITS GRAVITATING
Modern policing apparently involves a disinclination to examine evidence:
Federal police commissioner Mick Keelty has urged people to back off Muslims, insisting Islamic Australia is not to blame for terrorism.
In a revealing interview with The Weekend Australian, Mr Keelty said racial profiling was self-defeating because it risked alienating mainstream Muslims while ignoring the real danger of homegrown non-Muslim terror.
“I remind people that the first person who was convicted of a terrorist offence in Australia was a person with the unlikely name of Jack Roche,” the police chief said.
Question for our police commissioner: to which faith did Jack Roche convert in the 1990s? More from Keelty:
“Some of the best examples of (terror originating beyond the Muslim community) are coming out of Canada and the UK where people have, for whatever reason, converted to Islam almost as a step towards committing a crime they probably would have committed anyway.”
If they’ve converted, surely their crimes originate from within, rather than beyond, the Muslim community.
Social misfits were gravitating towards Islam as a justification for lashing out.
“Some of these people harbour resentment of Western liberalised democracies in any event, or feel alienated or isolated within their own environment for whatever reason.”
So get to work investigating recent Islamic inductees with leftist backgrounds, chief. That’s where the trouble is, according to you.
UPDATE. James Cook University history lecturer Merv Bendle in today’s Australian:
The revelation that terrorism research in Australia tends to blame Australia and other democracies for terrorism, while absolving the terrorists, is appalling.
However, what is even more appalling is the fact that this ideological perspective is being force-fed to members of our police, intelligence and counter-terrorist agencies.
For example, the Australian Police Summit, held this week in Sydney, was addressed by Dr Colin Wastell of Macquarie University’s Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism. On ABC radio’s World Today, prior to the summit, Dr Wastell claimed that terrorists are responding to injustices and are not religious fanatics. Indeed, suicide bombers “are people of deep concern, of deep thought about the injustice that they see being done to the people they identify with”.
He had a lot more to say besides. Consider, please, the deep thoughts of Dr Colin Wastell:
In general, suicide bombers are not any more mentally deranged than members of their society. In other words, they’re not a specifically dysfunctional group of people.
We also know that in terms of the motivations that they express and that we can certainly see is consistent in the literature that they either have used, say in their video taped last wills and testaments, or other material, they are in fact people of deep concern, of deep thought about the injustice that they see being done to the people that they identify with.
One of the things that’s been unfortunate is that we have little knowledge of some of the underpinning ideological structure of the Islamic faith.
And so without that knowledge, it’s easy for us to, if you like, latch on to ideas and interpret them through our particular models of reality, or our particular viewpoints.
And so I think it’s been the essential kernel of the facts are there, but we then take them and mould them, interpret them, look at them in, shall we say, Western coloured glasses.
We do have to accept that there is a real possibility there could be people who are disaffected, who are so enraged, who are, by what they see, and I emphasise, by what they see as the injustice, and they wish to do something about it.
To dismiss it would be very unwise.
And this guy works in counter terrorism?
(Via Dan Lewis)