A rebuttal to Arabist surf journalist Chas Smith

"Naivety will not protect us from the fury of our descendants."

Chas Smith’s firsthand experience of the Middle East is impressive. However, he failed to answer any of the questions I raised about the violent behaviour of radicalised Muslims.

I’ve had great experiences in Muslim countries. But some awful ones, too.

My favourite time with Muslim men was getting to know the Javanese workers in G-Land, in the mid-80s. Chilling out with these guys in the jungle was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. We became lifelong friends.

But not all Muslims are chill, as I discovered in 1988, labouring on a building site in Stepney, in the Tower Hamlets of the East End of London.

The local Cockneys were pissed off that some Muslims were not assimilating into British society. I suggested to a workmate that they stop calling them “Pakkies”, as it was disrespectful. “I’ll stop callin’ them Pakkies when they stop roaming around like packs of wolves and rapin’ our little sisters,” he defended himself.

It was the early days of the Grooming Gang Scandal. Afraid of being accused of racism, the government and police force did almost nothing over the next forty years, as tens of thousands of young women were gang raped and even murdered.

When I returned to East Java in 2004, working alone on a documentary about the 10-year anniversary of the tsunami, I got stuck for a couple of hours with some stridently militant young men in Banyuwangi.

These guys were so suspicious of me that they rifled through my bags and, finding a business card from an AAP news correspondent I’d met in Bolivia, accused me of being him. Fortunately, my translator arrived and got me out of that precarious situation.

And not a moment too soon, it seems.

After ringing his friend at the hotel later, he discovered that the young men were members of JI, Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist organisation that took responsibility for the 2002 Bali bombings.

The Bali Bombings were a series of terrorist attacks two years earlier, on 12 October 2002, in the tourist district of Kuta. The attacks killed 202 innocent people, including 88 Australians and 38 local Indonesians, and injured a further 209, making it the worst terrorist act in Indonesia’s history.

On my way home, I visited the bombing memorial to put flowers under the name of Chloe Byron, a Bondi girl whose father, Big Wave Dave, told me how he searched through the smouldering ruins of the Sari Club, climbing over dead bodies, until he found Chloe’s remains. She was in five pieces.

A year later, in 2005, leading up to the Cronulla riots, a few of my Cronulla friends told me about the gangs of young “men of Middle Eastern Appearance”, who were not only harassing their sisters and girlfriends, but were also beating up anyone who stood up for them, even if it was five against one.

To use the parlance of the Wokeraty; “What happened in Cronulla didn’t happen in a vacuum.”

Aussies think bashing an outnumbered man is almost as vile as spitting on a woman. As horrible and inexcusable as the riots were, it’s understandable. That is, if men still feel compelled to protect women.

More recently, while living in Bondi, my home beach, now the site of the second-largest pogrom since the Holocaust, my Jewish girlfriend and I, both lovers of Lebanese food, went to Lakemba to indulge in their culinary delights. That is, until a group of young men started glaring at us in the restaurant.

While my girlfriend, who was blissfully unaware of the rising temperature, was in the toilet, one of the men asked if she was Jewish.

“Mate, we’ve finished our lunch and are just about to go home.” I said, hoping to avoid further friction. On our way home, I wondered what the word home now meant.

Obviously not what it used to mean.

Nobody but a Jew can know the actual fear they experience, much to the delight of their enemies. Just like how we in the West have no idea how the Arab mind works.

How could we? To acknowledge this is not racist. It’s reality. Needless to say, we never went back to Lakemba for lunch.

You might think that living in Angourie we are safe from the horrors of Islamic terrorism. But you would be wrong. A few years ago, a close friend, the owner of a local café, lost her lovely brother, beheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood for no other reason than they could get away with it, while he was working as a contractor in the Middle East.

While Chas and I can rave about our personal encounters with Muslims, the freedom to openly disagree with each other is precisely what is at stake.

When Viktor Frankl reflected upon his experiences as a Nazi concentration camp prisoner, including time spent at Auschwitz, he concluded that humanity can basically be divided into two races:

“From all this, we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.”

While I agree with the sentiment of Frankl’s message, if “Peaceful Muslims” don’t call out the dangerous radicals among them, can they be considered decent? And if we don’t call it out, can we consider ourselves decent, no matter what our spiritual or philosophical persuasion?

What’s indecent is kicking this can down the road so our children have to deal with it.

That’s shameful.

I take the Islamist radicals at their word when they say that they want the entire world to be obeying Sharia Law by the end of this century. So far, they’re doing a very good job of it. Not least by accusing us of Islamophobia whenever we call them out for doing exactly what they boast they are doing.

Fear of being labelled Islamophobic effectively shuts down rational and reasonable conversation and debate about their most recent slaughter.

They are taking advantage of our willingness to let them practice their religion, in our countries, while simultaneously admitting to their plans of preventing us from practicing ours, anywhere, including our agnosticism and atheism.

Naivety will not protect us from the fury of our descendants, when they learn that we gave away our civilisation because we were too scared to make a stand.

Talking peacefully with our enemy may sound good to the softheaded but overlooking avoidable catastrophes and not dealing with current problems because it’s uncomfortable only lets these problems grow bigger.

It is the way of the weak. And we will be remembered for it.