Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the member for McMahon for this motion. I certainly support the government's moves in the support of the RAAF flying military supplies to the Kurdish region and also the humanitarian intake, making 4,400 positions available for Iraqi Christians and Yazidis. The main point I would like to make this morning is the fact that we cannot see ISIS as some sort of organisation that can just be destroyed and that that will be the end of it. We have to understand the history. Before the 1920s, the Wahhabism of the Saudi and Sunni Muslim religion was all about unifying Islam under one voice. Everybody else was considered to be a heretic.

In the 1920s, in order to exploit the oil, the Saudi king changed Wahhabism to more of a cultural revolution rather than violent repressions. But what we see now is ISIS being the successor of the Ikhwan movement, which was a militant and puritan moralistic movement which disagreed with the cultural revolution the Saudi king wanted and, instead of the Saudi king being the head of the Sunni Islam, a caliph was to be head of that religion. The Ikhwan and the IS are a violent organisation. Their view of the world is— (Time expired)

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