The Melbourne terror plot

I'm not sure if the news was picked up overseas but we've had another foiled terrorist plot here in Melbourne. Five Muslims living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, four from Somalia and one from Lebanon, have been arrested for planning an attack on a military base near Sydney.

The reaction within the Somali community isn't promising. There have been reports in the media of Somalis claiming that the men are innocent, that the police are terrorists, that the Australian government is corrupt, that Australian authorities are bigoted, that the raids on terror suspects were unreasonable and that Somali leaders should have been consulted by the police before the raids:

Abdurahman Osman, a leader of Melbourne's 15,000 strong Somali community, said police acted unreasonably.

"What do you call waking people up at four in the morning with guns?" he said.

"It is the police themselves that are the terrorists.

... Mr Osman's outburst came as a prominent Muslim website featured a photograph of Australian soldiers in uniform with the caption: "Real Australian terrorists."

It also features a photograph of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd addressing Australian troops overseas with the caption: "Terrorist mastermind delivers sermon to impressionable followers."

"Mohammed" said on the website: "Why is it called terrorist attack when the Aussie troops have been raping, killing innocent Muslims for years?

"In this country we can't trust nobody. The Australian Government is corrupted."

... Mr Osman, until now a voice of moderation between Somalis and the wider community, said police should have consulted migrant leaders.

"The federal police could have come to us first and we could have helped them," Mr Osman said.

"We have met with them now, but we don't believe they have evidence of a terrorist plot and that is the feeling of the community."

Other Somalis accused Australian authorities of bigotry.

"As a Somali-born Australian I am outraged at these raids not only because my fellow Somalis are being targeted, but once again basic human rights are being violated," said Xamxam, a 21-year-old Sunshine woman

So there are Somalis who believe that they are the victims of a corrupt Australian society, even though it was young Somali men who were arrested for planning a violent terrorist act, and even though Somalis commit more crime here in Victoria than any other ethnic group (one in nine Victorians born in Somali committed a crime in the state last year).

The arrests have led a northern suburbs Labor Party MP, Kelvin Thomson, to call for a cut to the immigration intake to allow for a more careful vetting of immigrants who might pose a security risk. He wants a return to the immigration levels of the mid-1990s (80,000) rather than the extraordinarily high numbers of today (150,000 plus 250,000 on entry visas).

Still some blame exclusion, manipulation

So the news runs as follows. The latest terror attacks appear to have involved five doctors working in Britain (two from Saudi Arabia, an Indian, a Palestinian and an Iraqi). Another suspected member of the terror group was a doctor from India working in Australia's Gold Coast Hospital. Six doctors all up from four different countries of origin.

How did the media in Melbourne react? Perhaps the worst response was from Professor David Wright-Neville. In a column in the Herald Sun, he ran with the theme that it is "frustrated aspirations" amongst Muslim immigrants, including low levels of employment and education, which allow them to be "easily manipulated" and lured by "simplistic explanations" into terrorism. The professor even blamed "racism and other forms of social exclusion" by Europeans for terror attacks.

This is a template which doesn't fit the facts. The leader of the terror group, we are told, is a neurobiologist. The others are doctors. None of them suffer from a lack of employment or education. None of them is likely to be duped by simplistic explanations.

And, far from suffering exclusion, these doctors were catapulted into high-paid, high-status professions, arguably at the expense of the thousands of native born Britons and Australians who wish to be trained for careers in medicine.

A more realistic appraisal was penned by Ian McPhedran, the Herald Sun defence reporter. There have been suggestions that doctors were chosen for infiltration into the West because they were less likely to be placed under scrutiny by the security services. McPhedran provides information that doctors were, in fact, spared such scrutiny. He quotes Australian National University terrorism expert Clive Williams as follows (regarding those approved for the 457 temporary skilled visa scheme):

We would normally go with people whose backgrounds we can check, but when there are shortages, such as with doctors, we can't be too fussy.

McPhedran points to a further problem of scrutinising medical professionals granted visas to work in Western countries - the sheer numbers involved. He states that there are 1950 Iraqi-trained doctors working in Britain and up to 26,000 from the Middle East. (These numbers are so large that they need to be confirmed.)

To his credit, McPhedran draws what must surely be a reasonable conclusion: that the current immigration policy is flawed and must be reviewed:

The Gold Coast link will trigger an immediate review of the 457 temporary skilled visa scheme, particularly of those visas held by Muslim doctors working temporarily in Australia.

There will be howls of protest, but if the safety of the people demands that some rights are temporarily curtailed, so be it.

If not, the next car bomb might be in Kings Cross, St Kilda, or Fortitude Valley.

The one problem I have with McPhedran's comment is that I don't see that it is a right being curtailed: is it really an automatic right for foreign born doctors to come to work in Australia?

(Further evidence that the sheer size of Muslim immigrant communities makes vetting problematic is provided by Randall Parker. British security had intercepted conversations and knew an attack was coming, but were already monitoring 30 current plots, 200 suspected terror cells and close to 2,000 known suspects. They were unable in this situation to pinpoint the exact timing or location of the attacks.)

Finally, the Melbourne Age provided us with a column by Waleed Aly, a lecturer in the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University. Aly's argument runs as follows:

1) Terrorism can only be defeated by winning the hearts and minds of Muslims.
2) Muslims dislike America.
3) Muslims do want Western ideals of freedom and democracy.
4) Muslims dislike America because America isn't serious in supporting freedom and democracy, as evidenced by the failure to recognise popularly supported Hamas.
5) The West needs to be more sincere, more charitable and more self-sacrificing in its dealings with the Muslim world to overcome the impression of hypocrisy.

If we were to take Aly's analysis seriously it would mean:

a) being mired forever in the mission of winning the approval of the Muslim world. Do we really want to act in ways that the Muslim world is likely to approve of? Mightn't Muslims take advantage of the terms of engagement by continuing to find reasons to disapprove of the West, which the West would then have to make up for?

b) accepting, despite the evidence of events in Iraq, that the Middle East is serious about Western style democracy.

c) accepting the logic by which democracy in the Middle East is likely to deliver anti-Western Islamic governments, such as that in Iran.

Think of what has recently happened. Six well-educated professional men are granted a privileged status in the West and they respond by launching terrorist attacks intended to kill hundreds. Are we really supposed to conclude that we are at fault, and that we need to further prove our good intentions to such men?

I can't see us winning them over. Those recommending a disengagement are likely to be vindicated as the attacks continue.