Things haven't been easy for Andrew Bolt since John Howard left the Lodge. Terrorists haven't cease to exist, but anti-terror raids are no longer occasions for politicians and respectable media to say and write remarks attributing responsibility to entire sections of the Australian community based on their ethnic or ethno-religious heritage.
During his press conference following the recent terror raids in Melbourne, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd refused to even identify a particular ethnic or ethno-religious group. As The Age reported:
He warned against any backlash against any ethnic groups in the wake of the latest arrests.
Mr Rudd said that the terrorist threat came from a small number of individuals "who should in no way be taken as a wider reflection of any group in Australian society".
Instead of demonising minorities and fighting cultural wars, the Rudd government prefers to focus on practical measures such as continued surveillance and increasing security at military installations.
Even The Australian editorialised as follows:
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland acted responsibly yesterday in pointing out that the broader Islamic community should not be seen as terrorists. The majority of Muslims do not support terrorism and have integrated successfully into Australian life where they are valuable members of the community. If anything, such people have an even stronger interest than other Australians in seeing terror stamped out.
With so much sanity now surrounding popular debate about national security, it seems Andrew Bolt may have lost the plot just a tad ...
The alleged terrorists arrested in Melbourne yesterday were all Muslims, from either Somalia or Lebanon. They weren’t Baptists or Greenlanders, Buddhists or Swedes. In fact, if you wanted to confirm a stereotypical profile of a modern terrorist, this pretty much fitted the bill.
So what would be the stereotypical profile of the victims of modern terrorism? Would they be Baptists, Greenlanders, Buddhists or Swedes?
And so, for some reason, Andrew Bolt now founds himself to be in a headspace where to be a terrorist it it's no longer enough for you to be a Muslim. You have to be a Lebanese or a Somali Muslim. I guess that lets Usama bin Ladin off the hook.
Which leads me to ask Andrew Bolt the obvious question ...
Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf
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