Who let all these Aussie-born Jihadists into the country?

The Australian’s treatment of Numan Haider

I’ve written a piece on how no-one seems to want to come to terms with the homegrown nature of the current terrorist threat in Australia. It’s up today at New Matilda.

When Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran a front page on Numan Haider titled “Jihad Joey” it was not to agonise over what kind of country could produce this would-be terrorist, but to situate Haider as having stepped outside Australian norms.

Even in more measured analyses the question of the connection “between the global world of wickedly complicated geopolitics and the local, of suburban anomie and teenage despair” is raised but put into the too-hard basket.

The reality, according to Time magazine, is that Australia is the biggest per capita net exporter of Jihadists to Syria and Iraq of any Western country. You’d think this might raise questions about why Australia has become a successful incubator of what Tony Abbott calls a “death cult”.

Instead the threat is seen as coming from the Middle East, of “radicalization” being “imported”, and how this underpins an important justification for Australia to participate in a new military assault on Iraq, to keep us safe by degrading and destroying the terrorists “over there”.

The illogicality of this should be obvious. Australia is better at producing terrorists than importing them.

Read the full article here.