“No Muslims Please”



The Martin Place siege opened up a giant can of xenophobic worms all over the country. It’s impossible to visit a comments thread without someone declaring that Islam is violent and we should be cracking down on all Muslims.

It’s true that right now, the majority of terrorist organisations and terrorist attacks are Islamic. So why are they happening, and when did it become like this?

In 1948 during the Arab-Israeli war, The Muslim Brotherhood was the first Islamic group to diversify its attacks on the military to include civilian targets; police stations in British-occupied Egypt.

In the 80s there were three Islamic terrorist attacks; all in the middle east against domestic targets. Lebanon, Kuwait, and Jerusalem. Al Qaeda was founded in 1988 and operated in the Middle East.

In 1990, the Gulf War broke out, and the US invaded Iraq over their invasion of Kuwait. It ended in 1991 and the US did not withdraw afterwards.

In 1993 the first World Trade Centre bombing occurred. It was the only attack in the continental United States that decade, the others happening in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, France, and Africa. Al Qaeda’s first attack on the US assets were the bombings in Africa; US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

In 2001, the 9-11 bombings happened, and the US invaded Afghanistan to route Al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power who refused to hand them over. This effectively ended the ongoing Afghan Civil War that started 5 years earlier when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. In 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced and lasted less than a month. US troops did not leave Iraq until 8 years later in 2011. That decade there were 24 Islamic terrorist attacks, a nearly 350% increase.

The War In Afghanistan rages on, between NATO forces and the Taliban. From 2010 to 2014, there were 37 terrorist attacks, representing a 1480% increase in Islamic terrorist activity since the 80s. The vast majority of these occurred in the Middle East.

Even a cursory investigation into this timeline shows a dramatically alarming trend that terrorist attacks follow US military action on Islamic soil, and that the targets are usually in the Middle East. If the cause of this was Islam, why were there no attacks before 1983? And if Islam itself, and not the Middle Eastern countries in which they originated, why haven’t we seem a dramatic increase in terror attacks all around the world?

The answer to ‘why are there so many islamic terrorists’ is not ‘because Islam is a terrorist religion’. It is ‘the Middle Eastern socio-political and socio-economic environment creates terrorists’. And is that really so hard to imagine? The destruction of local Iraqi industry by US military defense contractors cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs and their livelihood. Iraq Body Count estimates that 150,000 Iraqi civillians have been killed as a direct result of US military action. In Afghanistan at least 18,000 civilians have died in the current conflict. And we wonder why people would want to attack us?

But no, it’s probably just Islam.