Coalition frontbencher says commentators should stop pressuring Muslim leaders to condemn terrorist attacks as if they have to explain their horror

Commentators should stop issuing “pejorative demands” to Muslim leaders to condemn terrorism each time it occurs, the government frontbencher Christopher Pyne said during a Q&A program dominated by discussion of the Paris attacks.

Pyne was responding to a question from a young Australian Muslim and former Iraqi refugee, Mohammad Al-Khafaji, who said that every time there was an attack he and his community were called upon to condemn it and explain themselves.

The industry minister and leader of the house told the ABC program that Muslim communities condemned such acts but “they shouldn’t be called on to do so because it suggests that they didn’t want to do it”.

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“I’ve never known one of these things to happen where Muslim leaders in Australia didn’t come out and condemn them, but by the very act of demanding they come out you suggest that they didn’t want to, and that is something that we must stop happening in Australia,” Pyne said on Monday evening.

“Whoever is doing that must stop it, because it is pejorative demand. I don’t know any Muslims in my community who would think that the acts in Paris or in Lebanon or anywhere else were reasonable, and their leadership should react exactly the same way as everyone else’s leadership, which is to be horrified and aghast by it.”

Pyne declined to comment on the appropriateness of the comment in February by the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, that more Muslim leaders should describe Islam as a religion of peace “more often, and mean it”.

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“I’m not going to be partisan and political,” Pyne said.



The Q&A program focused on the challenge of clamping down on terrorism after Islamic State (Isis) claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks in the French capital that killed more than 130 people on Friday.

The French ambassador to Australia, Christophe Lecourtier, joined the Q&A panel and said his country would not be intimidated by the attacks.

“We share the same values,” he said of France and Australia.

“It means that we want to be able to go out with anybody, to dress as we want, to be in love with any people we want, we love. So that’s the kind of things these people do not accept, and until the very last moment you can be sure that France will resist that, and we shall never retreat one millimetre from our values.”

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Andrew MacLeod, a former United Nations official, said it was not a time for slogans and he believed the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was displaying “thoughtful leadership”.

“But what we need from our national leadership now is to determine who is the ‘them’ and who is the ‘us’,” MacLeod said.

“There are two broad choices. Is it us westerners, against them, all of Islam, or is it us, moderates of all religions, against them, radicals of all religions?



“We have organisations in this country, like Reclaim Australia, who really are falling into the trap of Islamic State, who are trying to create the us westerners against them, all of Islam. If we fall into that trap, we are saying we want to fight with 1.6 billion people, whereas if we define the us as all moderates of all religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – against radicals of all religions, it’s a much smaller number to fight, and a much more effective number to fight.”

Pyne agreed that Isis must not succeed in “turning Australian against Australian or European against European”.

“We mustn’t allow extremist militant Islamists to represent the Islamic faith,” the minister said. “Moderate Muslims need to be embraced in Australia or elsewhere, moderate Muslim governments need to be embraced wherever they might be, because they have as much at stake as we do in defeating the extremists.”

The Labor frontbencher Kate Ellis said moderate Muslims were “our closest ally in this fight” and it was a time for cool and calm heads.

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“That means that our leaders need to all step up and be putting forward messages of unity and the importance of it,” she said. “I don’t just talk about political leaders. I think all leaders across our community. I, for one, cannot for a moment comprehend why Pauline Hanson was on our television over the weekend speaking about these events and about Muslim Australians.”

The independent senator Nick Xenophon said the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was “a bloody mess” and spawned sectarian violence. “We must acknowledge that we cannot bomb our way out of this,” he said.

The entrepreneur Holly Ransom called for community leadership, saying “each and every single one of us” can play a role in supporting social cohesion.