SECURITY: Are we on our way to becoming a police state?

The greatest comic cop ever to grace a Hollywood screen was Frank Drebin, lead character in the cult comedy The Naked Gun. Readers may recall a fiery exchange between Drebin and the LA mayor in which Drebin proudly declares:

Well, when I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.

The mayor wasn't impressed.

That was a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!

Thankfully our police officers are not as keen to fire at someone in a toga or similar exotic dress. Our police understand that killing or severely injuring a suspect doesn't automatically bring justice to victims. Justice is done in court before a judge (and possibly jury), with police evidence tested by counsel for the accused.

But we are now living in the age of terrorism which, as far as the Commonwealth Parliament was concerned, didn't exist before 9/11. So before 9/11, there was no separate offence or regime to cover terrorism.

Since then, the Commonwealth has been behaving as if more Australians were being killed in terrorist attacks than by sharks or in motor vehicle accidents. The result is that our police and intelligence agencies have been given extra powers.

Extra, unprecedented powers. And then more powers. And if that isn't enough, even more powers. Not only are terrorist acts (defined very broadly in the legislation) criminalised, but so is conduct ancillary to terrorist acts. Organisations that so much as praise a broadly defined terrorist act can be banned without any judicial review. People can be held incommunicado if they are suspected of having information related to a terror offence. Incommunicado. Suspected.

What we have aren't just a few amendments or a new offence. As the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department noted at a conference in September 2006, what we now have is "a whole new area of criminal law and law enforcement procedure". With all these additional powers come additional complications for officers on the ground as well as for commanders in HQ. Police officers are seasoned professionals. They are trained to deal with a wide variety of situations. Australia does not need to become a police state for police to earn the respect of communities they work to protect. 

However, in their enforcement of counter-terrorism laws, police have made serious errors. These errors were present in the case of Harun Causevic​, the accused Anzac Day terrorist, whose terrorism charges had to be dropped for want of evidence.

The unprecedented nature of our new terrorism legal system presents a major challenge to our individual liberties. Chest-beating conservative politicians tend to be keen to forget individual liberty when it comes to criminal law. The racial hysteria surrounding terrorism is such that all kinds of religious observance (even halal meat certification) is treated as a possible avenue of terrorism. If a senior religious scholar speaks of terrorism's "causative factors", he is howled down and lampooned by politicians and pundits who are happy to explain away their own cultural warrior fetishes using the most dubious "causative" explanations.

In this environment of fear and hysteria, and with so many counter-terrorism laws unused, NSW police are being given powers to shoot terror suspects engaged in hostage-style attacks without making some effort to "contain and negotiate". According to some counter-terrorism experts, negotiations don't work with terrorists whose sole aim is to cause as much damage as possible before achieving some kind of demented martyrdom. This betrays a rather simplistic understanding of terrorists and their motives.

And how will police know whether the person they're dealing with is such a terrorist? Is it their shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greater")? Is it by their name? By their holding up a flag that isn't quite the IS flag? Hopefully it won't be that simple, though details of the policy and the training remain under wraps. And in case you thought this policy and training was in response to the horrific attacks in Paris, AAP reports that

senior officers say the new policy and a training program for every officer in NSW has been in the works for several years. 

Indeed, in an interview with Radio 2UE, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas​ referred to the Mumbai attacks, in November 2008, as an instance in which

you have a mobile enemy force, which moves through places and kills people … we would be mad to continue to say we will do nothing but contain and negotiate. 

Of course, the ideal is to minimise loss of life – including the life of the terror suspect. Terrorists aren't the only people who take hostages or to hold suicidal fetishes while doing so. Our sum total of knowledge of terrorism will hardly be helped if suspects are merely identified and shot dead.

These powers need to be used sparingly, if at all. Guidelines need to be clear, and there is no reason for them to remain unpublished, for the protection of both the public and police officers themselves.

Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. First published in the Canberra Times on 20 November 2015.

CRIKEY: Who knew what (and when) about Habib's torture?

ASIO head honcho Paul O'Sullivan told a Senate Hearing that Australia expressed its opposition to Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib being sent by the US to Egypt after he was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 - The Age and The Australian report the story today.

Here's an excerpt from Natalie O'Brien's report of the story in The Oz:

The current head of ASIO, Paul O'Sullivan, revealed during a Senate estimates hearing yesterday that his predecessor, Mr Richardson, was personally involved in discussions with the US State Department and the intelligence community about the "hypothetical" possibility of Mr Habib being taken to Egypt.

"The director-general of ASIO informed the US authorities that it was not the Australian government policy position to engage in practices of rendition," Mr O'Sullivan said.

Documents tabled in federal parliament last week revealed the rendition was discussed at a meeting in Canberra on October 23, 2001, between senior officials from the Prime Minister's office, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Attorney-General's Department, and they agreed "that the Australian government could not agree to the transfer of Mr Habib to Egypt".

Mr O'Sullivan said yesterday it was Mr Richardson, who is now the Australian ambassador in Washington, who conveyed that message to the US Government.

Habib is of Egyptian origin. He speaks fluent Arabic. Why would Australia object to a short holiday in the home country? Because the Howard government knew that Habib was going to be tortured.

They also knew about the Bush administration' s practice of extraordinary rendition - the outsourcing of torture to another country which lacks the strict laws against torture that would (at least in theory) enable a detainee to bring action under US law.

Habib's torture is mentioned by former British Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg in his memoir Enemy Combatant. He tells of a detainee who had been kidnapped by Indonesian security services and sent to Egypt where he was ...

... held in a tiny room and interrogated brutally for three months before being handed over to the Americans.

That detainee told Begg of ...

... the screams of another man [Habib] from a room nearby.

Begg himself recalls Habib as ...

... a man who was often made to stand but kept fainting and dropping to the floor.

Back in November 2005, hardly 10 months after Habib was finally released from Guantanamo, the Washington Post reported at great length of ...

... a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe.

The report is lengthy and well worth reading in full. Here's more from the report.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

Even the Washington Post admits it engaged in self-censorship over the issue.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

But it isn't just foreign governments helping the CIA by providing venues for its gulags. In their 2006 book Torture Taxi: On The Trail Of The CIA's Rendition Flights, AC Thompson and Trevor Paglen mention that even commercial airliners are contracted to transport suspects to and between CIA prisons.

The Oz reports:

The Prime Minister's Department told estimates last night it had no record of whether then prime minister John Howard was advised of the situation.

If ASIO knew but Howard didn't, on what basis would ASIO communicate Canberra's displeasure to the United States over Habib being the subject of extraordinary rendition?

At the very least, one can say that the Howard government's insistence on blindly supporting the Bush administration' s foreign policy agenda was often at the expense of Australian citizens.

Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, spent years being abused and tortured in Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and then Guantanamo. After all that, he was released without charge. Whether the Australian government was complicit in all this remains to be seen. But the fact remains that someone in Canberra knew in advance what would happen to Habib.

An edited version of this story was first published in the Crikey daily alert for 27 May 2008.


Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Muslim apathy makes passing terror laws that much easier ...

If you believe what you read in many newspapers, Australian Muslims are up in arms about the new anti-terror laws. Yet solid evidence on the ground is thin. Further, the leaders of most peak Muslim bodies have been silent on the laws in recent weeks.

Around a week ago, I received an e-mail from a non-Muslim Australian of libertarian tendencies. He was complaining about the complete apathy of Muslim leaders and the general Muslim community on the proposed terror laws.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. On the evening of 4 November 2005, SBS World News reported the views of 2 young Australian Muslims.

Kurandar Seyit, Executive Director of the Forum of Australia’s Islamic Relations (FAIR), told the SBS reporter that he has received calls from numerous individuals expressing fears of participation in protest marches.

Dr Waleed Kadous of the Australian Muslim Civil Rights & Advocacy Network (AMCRAN) also spoke of fears amongst people he had spoke to.

Both Messrs Seyit and Kadous have been active in the debate on the proposed terror laws. They have been joined by Waleed Aly and other executive members of the Islamic Council of Victoria.

However, apart from these voices, there have been few articulate noises made by prominent Muslim leaders on the terror laws.

Dr Ameer Ali, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) and Chair of the Government’s Muslim Community Reference Group, has been unable to provide any real leadership on the issue. After initially agreeing to “sell” the proposed laws to his community (before even a sentence of the Bill had been drafted), Dr Ali was pressured to back peddle.

New South Wales has three organisations claiming status as peak representative bodies. The original Islamic Council of New South Wales has been unable to even set up a proper media response unit. Its website is proof of the Prime Minister’s criticism that Muslim leaders were not quick enough to condemn the London terror attacks.

The Supreme Islamic Council of New South Wales (often jokingly referred to by Muslim New South Welshmen as “the Pizza Council”) has also been virtually silent on the matter. As for the AFIC-endorsed Muslim Council of NSW, their e-mail address is invalid and their telephone number rings out without anyone answering.

AFIC recently published an edition of its “Australian Muslim News” after some 3 years hiatus. The entire edition was devoted to the devotional aspects of Ramadan. It was as if the pangs of hunger were more important than the loss of civil liberties.

The imams have also displayed little leadership. Imam Hilali, appointed by AFIC as the Mufti of Australia without being provided resources or a job description, made some incoherent noises. First he offered to go to gaol if he was proven wrong about there being no home-grown terror threat. This routine was followed up with his call for a fringe sect known as “al-Ahbash” to be investigated for links to the assassination of the former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri.

As for the other imams, one cannot expect much from them. Most imams cannot speak English, and have little knowledge or even interest in public affairs.

Recently a group of Muslim lawyers called a meeting to discuss the new laws and prepare a campaign. Some four persons turned up.

Compare this to the hundreds that filled the Sydney Town Hall some weeks back for the launch of the New Matilda campaign for a Human Rights Bill. Compare this also to the articulate voices being heard from former Prime Ministers, Civil Rights activists and writers of letters to the editor.

In the ACT, Chief Minister Jon Stanhope released the first Draft Anti-Terrorism Bill after discussions with the articulate and well-connected Canberra Muslim community. In NSW, the Premier is also the Member for Lakemba, a veritable Muslim heartland. Yet one wonders whether any of the dozen or so Muslim groups in Lakemba pressured Mr Iemma concerning his stance on the proposed Bill.

Sydney has more mosques and Muslims than any city in Australia. Yet Sydney Muslims have shown an amazing degree of apathy concerning the passing of laws that, according to the President of the Police Federation of Australia, can only be enforced using ethno-religious profiling.

Some will suggest that it has only been Muslim leaders who have been silent. Yet I have seen little evidence of ordinary Muslims assisting those few Muslim groups like AMCRAN and FAIR whose resources are already over-stretched.

The apathy of Muslim leaders reflects the apathy of ordinary Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad said: “You get the leaders you deserve from amongst yourselves”. It appears his prophecy has come true yet again. Unless concerned Muslims take control of their peak bodies, apathy will prevail. But where are the concerned Muslims?

OPINION: Just Shoot Me?

I’m an Australian. I grew up in the heart of the Prime Minister’s electorate. I attended an Anglican school. I practice law and do some freelance writing. I speak with a broad Australian accent. English is my first language. The only passport I ever held was an Australian one. My favourite item of clothing is my Wallabies jersey.

I also happen to have a Muslim background. I have a Turkish and Arabic name. And after reading the provisions of the draft Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005, I am terrified.

It took over 100 years to develop industrial relations into its current form in Australia. Now, the Commonwealth is spending millions educating us about our Work Choices. Most ALP premiers are up in arms at the loss of State jurisdictions in sensitive areas such as unfair dismissal.

Industrial reform interests me because it is the area in which I practice the most. The rights and freedoms of Australian employers and employees is an important issue. We need to have public debate on workplace reform.

Our civil liberties date back to ancient Greece. It took centuries of civilisation and philosophical effort to develop our liberal democracy. It took hundreds of wars costing millions of lives to protect liberties we all take for granted.

But for some reason, the Prime Minister and most State and Territory leaders are resisting debate on laws which represent perhaps the biggest assault of basic Australian civil liberties since Federation.

To make matters worse, few governments were happy to have the draft laws released to those whose liberties will be most affected – ordinary Australians. Were it not for the brave actions of ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, Australians would have had no hope of having some idea of the extent to which liberties were endangered.

Mr Howard says the laws are based on agreement reached between Commonwealth, State and Territory leaders. He says there is little point having a discussion.

Effectively he is expecting Australians to accept the idea that police should have power to kill anyone they suspect of being a terrorist. The “shoot to kill” power was nowhere mentioned in the PM’s proposals released on 8 September 2005. Nor was there any mention at the Council of Australian Governments meeting on 27 September 2005 of police being allowed to kill terror suspects.

So who will be shot? What sort of persons could be killed as potential terrorists?

Under United States law, there is a list of organisations deemed to be terrorist organisations. Membership of and support for such organisations is an offence. The organisations include the usual suspects such as the Abu Nidal Organisation. They also include the Israeli Kahane Chai movement, certain Northern Ireland militias and the Tamil Tigers.

In Australia, only groups linked to Islam or Muslims are deemed terrorist groups. Already, the president of a national union representing police officers across the country has stated that the proposed laws can only be implemented using ethno-religious and racial profiling.

Now let’s be honest with ourselves. If a terrorist act occurred in Sydney or Melbourne, which ethno-religious group would be the first suspected of involvement? Vietnamese Buddhists? South African Jews? Kiwi back packers?

Would police officers be scouting yoga classes at Byron Bay for terror suspects? Will shock jocks be calling upon the governments to crack down on Steiner Schools? Will Liberal backbenchers be complaining about Hindus not abiding by Australian values? Will there be talk of detaining Callithumpians in special camps for their own protection?

The reality is that people with strange names and/or slightly darker skin colour will be the first suspected. That means men with beards and women with veils. And that means many Muslim Australians will be targeted. But not just them.

Some months back, I employed a clerk to work in my law firm. She has an Anglo-Australian father and a South Indian mother. She considers herself a Catholic and was born in Australia. Yet following the London bombing, she could feel people were watching her more closely on trains and buses.

I have another friend who never met her Muslim father. I met her some 18 months ago when she was working behind a bar serving beer and wine. She has a typical Arabic name.

Within days of the September 11 attacks in New York, FBI agents arrested their first suspect. He had dark brown skin and wore a turban. Some days later, another man sporting a beard and turban was shot dead by a crazed killer seeking revenge. Both men were Sikhs.

Mr Ruddock insists that racial profiling will not be used in the implementation and enforcement of the new laws. But Mr Ruddock has not addressed the compelling argument made by the president of the national police union. State and Federal police will be implementing the laws on the ground.

If a terror suspect decides to run, police officers don’t have time to go before a magistrate or wait for specific orders. They just shoot. Just as they did in London. And when they realise the person they just killed was an Indigenous Australian or a French Jew or a Brazilian backpacker, it will be too late.

COMMENT: Vandalising Muslim Civil Liberties

Australians were shocked to read of 4 mosques across New Zealand being vandalised in the wake of the London bombings. But the way the debate on anti-terror laws is heading in Australia, it seems civil rights are the target of state-sponsored terrorism.

Leader of the Labor Opposition Kim Beazley announced a plan to enable police to cordon off entire suburbs before exercising extensive and expanded powers. These include existing powers to search and confiscate. They also include powers to round up and detain people on the basis of which suburb they reside or find themselves in.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard has introduced a raft of security laws designed to make Australians feel safer and avert a terrorist attack. His proposals will be detailed at a terrorism summit this week when he addresses State Premiers.

The new laws contain sensible measures including beefing up security at airports. They also include providing Federal Police power to fine and even imprison suspects refusing to hand over documents.

Effectively the new measures enable police to deem certain people terror suspects. Once so deemed, persons are required to hand over just about any document which may provide clues to a terrorist attack.

So are these laws targeting persons of a particular ethno-religious background? The answer can be found in the list or organisations which the government has proscribed as terrorist organisations. Without exception, the organisations are somehow related to Muslims or Islam.

Compare this to a similar list of proscribed organisations under United States law. In his excellent terrorism primer entitled Terrorism Explained – The Facts About Terrorism and Terrorist Groups, Australian National University academic Clive Williams has provided a full list of 36 groups proscribed under US law.

The list is current as at 30 January 2003, and includes the Israeli Kahane Chai (Kach) movement, Basque group ETA and secular groups such as the Abu Nidal organisation, the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The Government insists that Federal Police and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officers will exercise their powers with restraint and sensitivity. But Muslim Australian groups and civil libertarians are concerned about the implications of the laws for deemed terror suspects.

On August 28 2005, I had occasion to appear on the Channel Nine Sunday program’s Hypothetical moderated by Geoffrey Robertson QC. The scenario painted by Mr Robertson involved a possible terrorist attack coinciding with the Pope’s Visit for World Youth Day in 2007. A terror suspect is arrested and tortured.

The suspect provides interrogators with a tip-off that a terrorist will be attacking the pope using a machine gun and will appear from a certain government building. Police marksmen focus on the building and see someone who looks like a terrorist emerging from the building carrying what appears to be a gun. The suspect is shot dead.

On what basis was the person deemed a terrorist? In what way did he fit the terrorist profile? What makes the police think that the man looks like a terrorist?

Apart from Mr Robertson and myself, none of the panel saw any problem with the notion of a person having a certain appearance before being deemed a terrorist and treated accordingly. The panel included a judge, 3 senior politicians, police and intelligence officials, senior editors of mainstream media and a former State Governor.

As it turned out, the terror suspect was a contract cleaner from a local Australian family of Turkish background. His alleged weapon was in fact a vacuum cleaner. Yet the fact that a Turkish Australian whose family had probably been living in Australia since the 1960’s could be deemed a terrorist makes the new laws all the more frightening for local Muslims.

In an environment where no non-Muslim terrorist group has been proscribed, where Federal Government backbenchers are calling for headscarves to be banned and where police, politicians and the media make presumptions on a terrorist’s appearance, it seems Muslims and civil libertarians have every reason to be worried.

But it isn’t just observant or practising Muslims who may be targeted. Two examples will illustrate this. In both cases, names and details have been changed to protect anonymity.

Jane never met her Indonesian Muslim father. Despite growing up in Brisbane with her Dutch mother, she retained her distinctly Indonesian Muslim surname, an abbreviation of a common Arabic surname. Jane has brown skin and black hair.

Sita has dark brown skin and European features. Her mother is Indian Hindu and her father is Anglo-Australian. Sita has often been confused for being Pakistani, Lebanese or Iranian.

If either Jane or Sita had been the person walking out of the building carrying a vacuum cleaner, they would have equal chance of being profiled by police marksmen and shot dead.

Arab and Muslim names and culture have permeated almost every aspect of Australian life. The Governor of New South Wales Professor Marie Bashir shares a surname with an Indonesian imam believed to be responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings. Yet popularly held ignorance about ethno-religious differences and similarities and the lack of safeguards for civil liberties in proposed laws does give Muslim Australians reason to be alert and alarmed.

The author is a Sydney lawyer whose practises in employment and human rights law.

Words © 2005 Irfan Yusuf

TERRORISM/COMMENT: Profiling the unprofilable ...

Former ASIO Assistant Director Michael Roach suggests that police should adopt the unorthodox practice of racial profiling. He told the ABC television program Lateline on 2 August 2005 that Muslims should expect to be approached ...

... because of their beliefs, their dress and their colour.

So there you have it. An intelligence expert providing an idea of what kind of approaches police should use to gather intelligence. And with al due respect to Mr Roach, the suggested approaches are not all that intelligent.

Firstly, as Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Waleed Aly rightly notes, any terrorist planner will no longer use persons of Middle Eastern appearance to carry out their attacks.

But more importantly, when persons are targeted because they “look” Muslim, the social collateral damage could be enormous. A few examples will illustrate this.

In 1991, while still at university, I commenced teaching scripture classes to Muslim children at Hampden Park Public School in Lakemba. The school principal took me around to all classes and asked Muslim children to identify themselves. I remember seeing in one class a young girl with blonde hair stand up when the principal made her request. The Principal remared:

Jasmina, why are you standing up? You don’t look Muslim.

Poor Jasmina started to cry. She later told me that her mum was Muslim and her late father was Serbian Orthodox Christian.

I have a friend whose father is Irish Catholic and mother is Indian Hindu. She walks half an hour each day from Potts Point to Town Hall, from where she catches a train to her university. Typically, she carries a backpack.

My friend rang me on the evening of 2 August at almost midnight. She had just finished watching Lateline. She was absolutely terrified.

I think they are going to arrest me one day. I’d better stop carrying a backpack.

My friend’s problem is that she fits the racial profiling criteria set by Mr Roach. She has olive skin, dark brown hair and is of Middle Eastern appearance. Yet she was born in Canberra Hospital and attended an Anglican college throughout high school. Her father was about to join the priesthood until he met her mother.

Another friend of mine never met her Muslim father. She works behind a bar, and enjoys drinking a mixture of champagne and orange juice. Apart from her name, there is little to suggest her Muslim background. Yet her appearance and her name make her a suspect.

One young Imam in Lakemba looks about as much a terrorist as any other Australian with red hair and green eyes. Although he is Palestinian, his ancestry is most probably Greek.

After September 11, Strathfield Council organised an inter-faith memorial service. One young imam said a small prayer in Arabic and English. He was wearing a suit and tie. After he finished, one Muslim asked him:

Imam, why are you wearing European dress?

The imam’s response?

Because I am European.

This imam was from Sarajevo.

The Melbourne Age recently reported that young Bosnians form the backbone of some extremist groups linked to the notorious Mohammed Omran in Melbourne. Should any of these young men take part in a terrorist attack, and should racial profiling be the order of the day, they will probably go unnoticed.

Racial profiling will result in innocent Australians being profiled and presumed terrorists (or at best terror suspects). Further, the fact is that many Muslims simply do not fit the profile. And to suggest that mainstream Muslim beliefs support suicide bombing and other terrorist acts is ludicrous.

Australians should be concerned about fighting terror. And the Muslim community is perhaps Australia’s best weapon in this war. Muslim Australians have in the past provided useful evidence which has averted numerous attacks on Australian targets. Racial profiling will do little to carry forward this good work. Instead, it will further marginalise anyone fitting the ethnic profile, this creating social tensions and divisions. The only benefactor will be terrorists themselves.

Words © 2005 Irfan Yusuf