The Melbourne Seven

A very scary-looking beard

Australia's biggest terror trial has just concluded, and the jury has found that 7 scary beards men of a certain non-christian religion GUILTY of conspiring to blow up a couple of Melbourne landmarks. And of course the media fall over themselves to prove what a tolerant society we are, that this does not reflect our attitude to all scary bearded non-buddhists, blah blah blah.

The Rhodes scholar Traceeeeeee Hutchinson from the Age writes an interesting opinion piece in the Age, suggesting a hypothetical equivalence between a Smith Street junkie and member of a terrorist organisation. Because you see the heroin the junkie uses could easily have come from Afghani poppy fields, and they then could be charged with being a member of terrorist organisation, because their $25 hit could be funding the Taliban.

"And, voila, shrieking from the little paper would be: Smith Street junkie in Terror Plot. "

Here, I assume Traceeee having a go at The Herald-Sun, which is mostly on the other end of ideological spectrum than The Age. The attempted snipe "little paper" is particulary funny in this context as The Herald-Sun has well over twice the circulation numbers than The Age. In fact, the "little paper" has the highest circulation of any paper in Australia. Not so much "little" as "the biggest".

"The actual plan was never, and never had to be proved, such is the wording of the Howard government's amended terror laws that refer only to proving the existence of a terror act."

You see, dear readers, it's the fault of John Howard that this bearded dole bludger was caught up in the dragnet that is the previous Government's "anti-terror" laws. It has nothing, NOTHING AT ALL to do with their particular non-buddhist beliefs. And of course, no one in the current Government ever voted for this legislation....

"Perhaps these men really were on a path of violent jihad. Or perhaps they were just disenchanted Muslim men reacting with misguided empowerment to the prevailing anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by the Coalition of the Willing at the time. "

You know, opposed to that cuddly wuddly peaceful jihad that we hear so much about. The real frightening thing about this paragraph is that it reflects current western thinking about scary beards. They (us?) desperately want to believe that it is only the current oppression of Western culture and governments that is causing this blow back. The itsy-bitsy problem with this is that there is very good evidence of over 1,400 years of conflict between Islam and the West to kind of, you know, destroy this argument. But that's OK Traceeee, once the The Obamamessiah takes the Whitehouse and redeems us all, all these problems with scary beards will just...disappear.

Unfortunately, the Herald-Sun also bends over backward to not antagonise the remainder of the scary bearded population. In an otherwise mostly balanced article there's this little gem:

"But does this make these otherwise peaceful people vulnerable to charges similar to those laid against Benbrika? "

otherwise. peaceful. people.

Well, let's just say after I picked my jaw up from the floor, the counter-argument to this wishful thinking is I believe that the onus of proof of peaceful intentions lies with the scary beards, and not with the authorities who quite rightly investigate them. And conversations like the following:

"BENBRIKA: "You shouldn't just do, kill one or two or three, you need some good ... like close to the station, the train."

MERHI: "Yeah, like what's been going on in ..."

BENBRIKA: "Do a big thing."

MERHI: "Like Spain. I've been thinking about this heaps, a lot, a lot, a lot, but the thing is, all this stuff is pleasing to Allah. It's pleasing to Allah."

...

BENBRIKA: "When you, in here, in Australia, when you do something they stop to send the troops. If you kill, we kill, here a thousand, the Government is going to think ..."

kind of suggest that their intentions are not all that peaceful.