Hatred, intolerance, malevolence and misguided Islamic piety

I am left with the impression that the material tendered on your behalf, including your letters to the Court, is unconvincing, contrived and self-serving… If you continue to maintain the extreme beliefs and thinking which were at the heart of your crimes, your prospects of rehabilitation will be exceedingly dim. The state of your beliefs will be a matter for the assessment of [the Parole Board] many years down the track…

There is no single reason for the very successful de facto censorship of public debate on the unique set of ideas, beliefs and practices embodied in The Koran. It is chiefly the outcome of the combined effect of authoritarian ideology (both religious and political), the mischievous conflation of religion and race, the widespread clever use of the invented abstraction "Islamophobia", the justified fear nowadays of fair-minded people of being labelled/smeared as racists, the inherent contradictions of tribal/"identity" politics, and interfaith antagonism to secularism. And then there is wilful blindness to the truth and abysmal ignorance.

As Justice Kagan emphasised, a person who engages in terrorist conduct with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause and seeks to shelter behind a scriptural incitement to violence directs attention to the need for rejection of the scripture.

It cannot be emphasised too much that, as with all religious texts, critical analysis of the contents of The Koran as a clear source of violent jihadism, as is demonstrated in the steady, lamentable flow of terrorist prosecutions in Australia, does not amount to making any statement about believers in that book. It is no different from any religion. Australians are free to disavow any scriptural instruction. And, as one Australian appellate judge noted in 2006, "… there are any number of persons who may despise each other's faiths and yet bear each other no ill will."

Alas, the cases continue: see the sentencing decision of Justice Peter Johnson of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 2 August last in R v Hraichie (No 3).