It's War At Home

Sheikh-ing All Over

Okay, bad gag. But you know what I mean. Today's big news is that upward of 800 Federal and State police were involved in multiple busts of alleged terror cells sympathetic to the ISIS/ISIL//Caliphate. Thwarted by the AFP was a plot to randomly snatch somebody in Martin Place and behead them as a demonstration. The mind boggles, but there you have it. The imagery is almost something out of a comic book tending to gore rather than strictures from scripture. Basically some people out there were being wire-tapped and they plotted to do something savage and stupid, so the AFP got them.

This would be the moment we're supposed to praise the terror laws, including the APEC laws which had (and continue to have ) no sunset clause. I know, we forgot all about them - even I forgot about them until I started moving back here to Blogger - but these same snooping spook laws would have been the ones deployed to nab these ISIS/ISIL/Caliphate sympathisers.

Thanks to the efforts of the AFP, nobody random got beheaded in Martin Place. It's so good to be alert but not alarmed!

Multiculturalism Is Not The Problem

You're going to read it in the papers soon where people are going to take this little conspiracy of crazies as a sign that multiculturalism "failed" in Australia. They're winding up to throw their best junk ball pitch right now as I type this. You know those opportunistic xenophobes are out there.

There's really a simple explanation for this phenomenon of angry radicalisation of these muslim youths: it's cultural alienation. It's really hard growing upon anglo Australia and all the heroes of masculinity are blonde sporting gods or whatever. It's hard growing upon the west when all the movies and TV shows portray your cultural heritage as the potential enemy. A kid from a muslim family will inevitably live in a kind of cultural shadow. Not much gets done to bring them in from the cultural alienation, which explains why a distant call-to-arms may appeal so strongly to these youths.

Australian multi-culturalism is a bit of a fudge. The big demand put on immigrants is that they give up on their cultural heritage and go naked, and instead don the shallow cultural, icons of a largely artificial nation. It's a difficult call. in some ways the cultural distance and chasm is unimaginably large, and unfathomably deep. I don't condone people who run to radicalism as a desperate ploy to shore up self esteem but it's not like I'm without empathy for their plight. They don't need our sympathy - yet they do need us to understand them a lot more.

It's tough to navigate this stuff in Australia and establish a sense of identity. It's hard to feel like you belong in a place that denies you your history or metaphysics. People may say they need to get over it, but it's not easy getting over your family heritage.

Worse still are the people who go around pointing to this sort of thing as a reason way multiculturalism "fails". They say the failure to assimilate is the ultimate failure - but it is often spoken by people who have never experienced any alienation in their lives. Rich white people who went to distinguished private schools, selling down the prospect of people finding a place in Australia because they don't abandon everything that came with them in their cultural suitcase, are not helping.

At best, multi-culturalism in Australia sets up a halfway house safe zone where people can feel a certain amount of legitimacy in holding on to the things that are important from their origins. If the rich white people didn't bleat so loudly about the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Australia, maybe the children of these immigrants wouldn't feel the need to radicalise in the shadows.