Frank Devine, 1.2 billion people and one word

Frank Devine is a senior columnist at The Australian. In a profile of his daughter, Miranda Devine, The Bulletin once described him as a "conservative Catholic". Devine’s views on certain issues are similar to those of his daughter.

In 2004, he praised genocide-denier and ex-Marxist Keith Windschuttle’s book praising what was (and thankfully no longer is) Australia’s racist White Australia Policy.

Devine now attempts to justify using a term championed by Islamophobes to link the acts of homicidal terrorists to Islamic theology. His column in The Australian, entitled Let's not be shy as the Islamo-fascists certainly aren’t, supports George W Bush’s description of “Islamic fascists”, though preferring the even more offensive terminology (“Islamo-fascist”) of far-right fruitcakes like Mark Steyn and Daniel Pipes.

Given his conservative Catholic leanings, one might expect Devine to have greater tolerance for a faith which suffers similar demonising in the mainstream press as his. No such luck. Devine’s attitudes toward Islam display near-chronic ignorance.

Thankfully, most Catholics don’t share Devine’s views. Devinde’s lack of sophistication can be illustrated by his lumping together a whole range of disparate interests (from the Deobandi Taliban to the Wahhabist al-Qaida to the Shia Hezbollah) as

... our Islamic foes.

Gee, that really tells us a lot, doesn’t it. The intellectual senility continues with Devine remarking:

Islamo-fascist groups or of their common purpose - to damage and, ideally,
destroy Western society - and their identical murderous tactics.

Yes, of course anyone who supports Hezbollah must be anti-Western. Try telling that to supporters of Michel Aoun with a straight face.

And who is Devine’s magical authority for his claim? First, it is widely used Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Yes, I'm sure most serious scholars of religion go straight to that source when wanting to understand the complex theological and political nuances of a faith followed by 1.2 billion people.

His next source? American historian Paul Berman. Now presuming this is the same Berman I know, I’ll admit that he isn’t exactly on the far-Right. He regularly writes for the American small-‘l’ liberal Slate magazine.

However, I’m not sure if Berman would agree with the lazy manner in which Devine applies part of one sentence from an unnamed book or article or Berman’s to conclude any Middle Eastern movement calling itself “Islamic” is necessarily linked to European fascism.

Of course, Devine is no expert in the field. Daniel Benjamin of the Centre for Strategic & International Studies is such an expert. BBC quotes him as stating:

There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was
developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term. "This is
an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but
it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.

The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists,
are a very, very different breed.

It may be hard for Devine to accept, but some phenomena cannot be summed up in a term that is

… catchier: it's only one word, is easier to say and holds promise of
developing the acronym IF (pronounced eye eff).

Devine isn’t concerned with the fact that Islam happens to be the faith of the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks. He also isn’t concerned that Islam is the surname of a British victim of the July 7 2005 attacks in London. As far as he is concerned, attributing terroristic tendencies to the faith of the majority of its victims is perfectly acceptable.

Without meaning to sound ageist, Devine isn’t exactly growing younger. Then again, who is? I've certainly increased my quota of grey hairs since the photo in the top right hand corner of this page was taken in 2001.

Still, I can confidently say that Devine's views are part of the edifice of yesterday’s Australia, an Australia which took pride in hating anyone deemed different. The White Australia Policy has been relegated to the intellectual dustbin of Australia. It’s only a matter of time before views such as those of Devine are treated in a similar fashion.

© Irfan Yusuf 2006