THE Prime Minister warned this week about a potential “mass casualty event” from homegrown Islamist terrorists, and exhorted all Australian communities to join “team Australia”. The reaction from the sneering Left was scornful laughter.

But what is wrong with expecting all Australians to work together to prevent terrorist acts? Why downplay the threat of Islamist extremism when we see evidence of it everywhere? Medieval barbarism is on the march, and we don’t have the luxury of denial.

Instead, we should listen to people who understand the problem.

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Psychiatrist Dr Tanveer Ahmed has an insight into the psychology of the rage-filled young Muslim men he visits in NSW jails. And he sees Islamist terror and the new-found religiosity of Australian-born Muslims as two ends of the same spectrum. “The idea that the people who commit terrorist acts or commit violence have no connection with the broader Islamic community and the broader beliefs of the Islamic community is just delusional,” he says. Growing up Muslim in Sydney’s Bangladeshi community, Dr Ahmed, 39, was struck by the extreme religiosity of his Generation X counterparts.

Almost every other ethnic group which immigrates to Australia becomes less religious in successive generations. But he says second and third generation Muslims here are more religious than their parents.

Religion is an “act of protest” against mainstream Australia, but also against their parents.

“It begins at a social and psychological level (with a feeling of) ‘I don’t belong, I can’t participate in the mainstream’,’’ he says.

“That’s exacerbated by parents who are desperate not to have them be integrated … essentially they’re frightened they’ll take drugs and become sexually liberal.

“These very religious young Muslims are not that different from punks and Goths … they find a new identity and sense of belonging by being Muslim.”

media_camera Artwork: John Tiedemann

They are scathing about the way their parents and elders practise their religion: “What they’re saying is it’s stupid, it’s too culturally staid and doesn’t have this global edge to it. I’m doing it the right way, it’s culture-free, pure and almost politicised.”

He said parents often don’t realise when their children become very religious that its actually an expression of distress. It’s their way of coping with not belonging.

“It can be the young, bookish person or it can be the anti-social kind, people who are already angry, have a grievance, feel the world has screwed them over,” he says.

Dr Ahmed sees the latter kind in jail, where Islam finds new converts.

“Islam is a fantastic ideology to channel (grievances). If I feel like a victim … it’s an excuse which lets me project all these individual hurts that ‘I don’t belong, you don’t accept me, I cant participate in your life’,” he says.

“Instead of facing that I can project it out and say, ‘You’re the problem, you’re morally corrupt, you’re racist, your foreign policy is the problem’.”

For some there is the possibility that their zealotry “becomes hardened, sharpened into this politicised attack weapon. That’s the danger and that’s the process of radicalisation”, he says.

Dr Ahmed has written about the psychology of rage-filled young Muslim men in jail. Those like Khaled Sharrouf have a “rampant anti-social character … which stems in part from unsuccessful child rearing”.

Many are from the Lebanese community of south-western Sydney, the descendants of “poorer farmers and lower-class Lebanese Muslims” who fled civil war in 1975. From large families, with largely absent fathers, the way the boys are raised predisposes them to anti-social behaviour. “The horrific moves towards terror acts can be seen as an ideological extension of a propensity towards bad behaviour, combined with an unshakable victim mentality,” he says.

In cases of homegrown terrorism in Europe, a zealot flips the switch to violence when they feel victimised if they miss out on a scholarship, or lose a job: “It fits in with their narrative. They link people in Palestine getting bombed by Israel and ‘I’m getting done over in my job, I’m a Muslim, it’s part of a global conspiracy just like Iraq and Palestine’. This is the bizarre connection they make with their individual lives and this global victimhood.” Dr Ahmed warns many people are in denial about the roots of Islamist extremism: “The broad Muslim community will see acts of terrorism or violence and say that has absolutely nothing to do with us, when the reality is the beliefs of people with moderate views, what we call moderate Islam, aren’t terribly different from the people who will commit violence.”

No one wants to marginalise moderate Muslims but nor should we be intimidated into ignoring the contradictions and extreme violence at the foundation of Islam.