George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The speaker before me likened the terrorist incidents that have recently occurred as 'a scar on the world'. I have to say that I concur with the view put forward by the honourable member. The incidents that we saw in Paris were shocking to say the least. It is horrific to think of all those young people trapped in the concert hall, who were basically popped off one by one, and the people who had to cower under bodies for fear that they too would be gunned down. They could not have known what was about to unfold that night. You can only imagine the horror in the cafes and the sporting ground while the soccer game was going on. In all of those places across Paris, at roughly the same time, the forces of hell were unleashed. Those forces of hell, as we know now, were Islamic State.

We have seen many such atrocities across the Western world in recent times, going back over the past decade or so. We have certainly seen—and it has become almost commonplace, sadly—those sorts of atrocities happening in the Middle East, but, when they breach into a Western democracy and places where we, otherwise, have a peaceful existence and like to think we can all coexist with each other, it really is scarring. I could refer to 7/7 in London, where buses were torn apart by fanatical madmen, or the Bali bombings where, again, a bunch of young people, including lots of Australians, were torn to shreds because a jihadist put a bomb in a place knowing that it would kill as many Westerners—or infidels—as possible. I could go right back to 2001, when we saw those planes fly into the twin towers, a plane fly into the Pentagon and another plane, which might, perhaps, have been heading to the White House, fly into a field in Pennsylvania.

We see these images again and again and again around the world. They have even touched Australian soil. We saw Man Monis, a self-styled imam. He might have been self-styled, but so are many imams across this country, because there is no prerequisite for setting up your own Islamic centre and acting in a religious leadership role. He had thousands of followers on Facebook—tens of thousands of followers, I am led to believe—a lot of whom were in Australia. That is concerning. He walked into the Lindt cafe in Martin Place in Sydney and took that place hostage. As a result, two Australians ended up dead. We recently saw the slaughter of Curtis Cheng, where the guy ran out and started screaming, 'God is great'—'Allahu Akbar'—repeatedly, only to be gunned down by police, who were probably wondering what that hell was going on and why this madness had descended upon the police station.

We are starting to see the incursion into this country of the violent extremism that is coming out of radical Islam. It concerns me, and it concerns me greatly. What concerns me even more than that is the refusal of people in positions of leadership to call it out. It might be politically incorrect to do so; it might be jarring; it might be confronting and offensive to some people here. But it is also reality. In the wake of a terrorist atrocity that was committed by a group calling itself Islamic State, or when someone yelled out 'Allahu Akbar' before they detonated a bomb or shot someone, I get so distraught seeing someone in leadership saying that this had nothing to do with Islam. They are wrong. They are dead wrong. It has everything to do with Islam.

I am not saying that all Muslims—not even the majority of Muslims—would be capable of, or would even think of, committing such an atrocity, but the people who do do so in the belief that they are acting completely in accord with the tenets of Islam, under the guidance of the Koran and the Hadiths and in accordance with the supreme will of their god. They fundamentally believe that.

Islamic State has been behind many of the latest atrocities, even here in Australia. If we look to the Man Monis case, he wanted an Islamic State flag brought to him by the police. He might have been what they call a lone wolf, but Islamic State is encouraging lone wolves to act in its name. That is part of this new battle that we face in this world. If we look at the 18-year-old who stabbed a number of police officers at the police station in Endeavour Hills, he posed on Facebook with a photograph of the Islamic State flag. Islamic State has a lot to do with what is going on at the moment. It is just the latest in radical Islamic organisations that have come to the fore. We had al-Qaeda at one stage. Elements of that have left and now morphed into Islamic State. In this region, we had Jemaah Islamiah at one stage, which was acting in accordance with al-Qaeda. All of them have the common philosophy of Islamism, of the world view that there are two houses on planet Earth: the house of Islam and the house of war. The house of Islam is where countries and the people are subjugated to the will of Islam, under sharia. The house of war is those countries which have not yet accepted sharia and have not had Islam imposed upon them. It is called the house of war because the belief is that they will continue waging war, or jihad, until those places that are called the house of war become the house of Islam as well.

That is the world view that Islamic State holds, and it is no use to say that it has nothing to do with Islam. Actually, it is very Islamic; it is fundamental Islam, in fact. They take the texts of the Koran and the Hadith literally. They look at the later texts of the Koran and say that, because they were written later, they supersede the earlier, more peaceful sections of the Koran, which is why they can justify what they do. We should not be afraid to call that out and to say that there is a problem there—that there is a problem that obviously exists within a religion, which needs to be sorted out. I believe that it can only be sorted out, ultimately, by those within that religious faith.

The problem is even deeper than that. I could walk out of this place to the front of parliament, have all the cameras in front of me and burn a Bible, and I would probably get a press release from the Australian Christian Lobby condemning me. But if I were to walk out the front of parliament and burn a Koran, I think that everyone in this place would know that there would be a very, very different reaction. We have to ask ourselves, in this day and age, why would there be such a different reaction? What is it that is inherent there amongst a certain particular strand of the Islamic faith that causes that reaction? Those are the questions that need to be asked.

We do not need statements put out by the Grand Mufti the day after the attacks on Paris saying that the reasons behind this were the actions of the West and that the reasons behind it were, 'You are bringing in national security legislation that we don't like,' or something like that. It is justification for the actions of madmen. These actions have been going on long before any of the stuff that Grand Mufti complained about were enacted and were in place. We have had celebrity television presenters telling us that, in the face of this, all we need is to hold hands and have love for our fellow man. There is some truth in that; yes, we do. But it also is a bit cute, and it keeps us from dealing with the real issues and asking the hard questions that do need to be answered.

I, for one, think that as a government we should be doing more to empower those people within Islam to actually speak out and to tell people within their faith why those sections of the Koran and those sections of the Hadith that are twisted around by the murderous fanatics we see in Islamic State are not to be interpreted the way those people interpret them. I could point to someone who is very well-versed in Islamic scholarship—Professor Abdullah Saeed, at the University of Melbourne. I do not know Dr Saeed, but I certainly read a very thought-provoking article from him on the Islamic case for religious liberty. He is a Muslim and a scholar of Islam who believes that there can be a true Islamic separation of the religious from the political. That is something that would be an affront to Islamic State. Unfortunately, a lot, perhaps, of moderate Muslims believe that there is an intertwining of the religious and the political as well. I say that because I have seen data put out by the Pew study on religious views, which suggested that a lot of Muslims—right around the world and not purely in Australia; they burrowed it down to the United States, another western nation—did believe that sharia law to them was of higher value than the law of the land and that they would adhere to it more, even if it were in conflict. That is concerning. So we need people out there within Islam that are willing to say, with authority, that there can be a separation between the political and the religious.

When I hear other people in this place talking about a reformation, I suppose that that is what I think should happen too. There is one very brave woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a former Muslim that has been calling for this for a long time. She has been calling for it for a long time and, as a result, has been subjected to repeated death threats. She now has to have security 24/7 wherever she goes. That is sad. So when those leaders in the Muslim community come out and advocate for this—something that we want to see happen so that we do not have more atrocities in this country or around the world—we need to ensure not only that their voice is amplified and heard in the Muslim community and in the wider community but that they are afforded our protection for being brave enough and bold enough to get out there and say that.

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