The Sydney Siege: The act of a sociopath, not an excuse to hyperbolise islamophobia Mariko Follow Dec 15, 2014 · 4 min read

Unless you have been living away from Wifi or under a rock, you have probably heard about the gunman who is holding people hostage in a Lindt chocolate café in the middle of the Sydney CBD, and it would be basically impossible to hear anything about this incident without also hearing that hostages were forced to hold up an Islamic flag… This event has raised many diverse issues concerning the ethics of the media, how the police force reacts to major events of public security but perhaps the most important issue raised by this event is ongoing relationship that the Islamic faith (particularly extreme interpretations of it) seems to have with the commission of acts of “terrorism”… It is a matter of cultural sensitivity, and I think the best we can make of it is using it as a device to analyse the perceptions that Australians hold about Islam and terrorism.

It is an unfortunate truth to adherents of the Muslim faith that recent terrorist attacks have been linked to extreme believers in the religion. I think it is important for us to remain rational, and not using fear as an excuse for ignorance or blaming those who believe in the same God as those people using his name in aid of committing crimes against innocent civilians. I am pretty sure if you read the Quran, nowhere would you find the instructions ‘walk in to a Lindt café with gun and hold innocent people hostage to tell people that there is no god but allah’.

We should not judge the acts of a broad and varied population, by the actions of several sociopathic extremists.. In any given population there is a percentage of socio-paths, there is nothing inherent about the Islamic faith which attracts sociopathic individuals who disregard the lives of others, and anyone who believes that is quite frankly an idiot. We need to consider those who believe in Islam and live peaceful and law abiding lives, and realise that their faith has been hijacked against their will and used to commit evil, and not ostracise them from our community, but instead work out ways for cross-faith understanding and acceptance.

There is currently a diversity of viewpoints floating around the Australian vernacular on the link between terrorism and Islam. Let’s rewind a four years ago, to a Politics tutorial in my first year of studying a BA. The topic of the tutorial was how terrorism shapes the international political system and sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly some quite shocking anti-Islamic sentiments were expressed. One of my class mates decided to pipe up with the highly controversial and ill-informed comment that “if we want to end terrorism, all we need to do is burn ever copy of the Quran”. For a moment there was a dead silence, no-one quite knew how to react to this reactionary and Islamic-phobic comment.. Eventually a brave punted broke the silence with a rebuttal. “We cannot blame the problems of the world on one individual religion’s holy text, instead it is the extreme interpretation of these texts which leads to these terrible occurrence” she said, speaking my mind and judging from the nods of encouragement many others in the tutorial room. These are two comments which have always stuck with me, and I think they reflect the attitude of Australian’s today on the link between terrorism and the Islam. Either people scapegoat the Quran for an individual or groups abominable and terrorist behaviour or they instead, more rationally view the root of the terrorist act to be certain individual’s very extreme interpretation of an otherwise widely peaceful religious text.

Let’s not hyperbolise what is happening in Sydney… When it boils down to it, the link to Islam, and the fact that hostages held a Islamic flag up to the window is not actually of high significance. What is significant here is that a group of innocent people are being held against their will, subject to the whims of a man armed with a gun in the very midst of the CBD of Sydney, Australia, somewhere that is usually considered to be safe from these sort of crimes. The incident that has occurred in Sydney today should be viewed as having more in common with the Columbine school shootings — the random criminal act of someone with an extreme and misguided viewpoint — than a targeted terrorist attack orchestrated by ISIS or another group of Islamic extremists. This is not to say what has occurred is not terrible, frightening and shocking, but simply that we should not view what has occurred in Sydney as a sign that ISIS is about to declare war on the Western World, and if we are to overcome the challenges of this era that are posed by terrorism, we must realise that it is not religious texts which lead to these atrocities but counter-hegemonic socio-pathic extremist interpretations of them. Let us not hyperbolise it and lead to further perpetuation of islamophobia.