You and I have no idea what kind of Muslim he would have turned out to be. Abdullah Kurdi, whose three-year-old son, Alan, drowned and washed up on a beach in Turkey. Credit:AP Maybe he would have prayed five times a day and kept his political views to himself. Maybe he would have said "in the name of Allah, the compassionate and the merciful" before tucking into a bacon sandwich and never darkened the door of a mosque. Or maybe he would have beaten his wife or gone into organised crime or blamed the West for his and his people's misfortune and blown up a bus. It doesn't matter. What matters, it seems, is that we can now decide that Muslims are trouble and that if we walk into a burning house, we'll save the others first. What do we know about the others? We know they're not Muslims. In mid-August, when little Slovakia said it would take some refugees - 200 in all - but that they had to be Christians because Slovakia "doesn't have mosques", we all knew what was going on: the rise of the far-right in Europe's post-Communist east, part of a wider wave of anti-immigrant feeling across the continent.

The last time I checked, Australia had a few mosques. Indeed, there is one of them at the end of the street where I live. And that means there are Muslims here. Indeed, some of them would be generous enough to say that I am one of them. I have always said that I am not a Muslim, but that Islam is a part of me. Illustration: Cathy Wilcox The question is now whether this country can truly say - for all the mosque visits by pollies, for all the iftar dinners at Ramadan, for all the talk of "Team Australia" - that Islam is a part of it. After watching the Reclaim rallies recently, after hearing some of what passes for commentary and debate, the question seems almost foolish, naive. Of course "we" don't want them! Muslims are just trouble. Let them go somewhere where they can get their sharia and their halal and their fatwas and their burqas and all the rest and leave us alone. Perhaps this country has decided that Muslims are too big a cultural problem. In the same way that in 1938, when Thomas Walter White, the minister for customs in the Lyons government, attended the conference at the French resort town of Evian on the plight of Jewish refugees, he told those gathered there that Australians would rather not import a "racial problem". I am not the only Arab of Muslim parentage who regards what has happened to the Christian populations of the Arab world in recent decades as a shame and a disgrace and a crime, one that shows little sign of ending. It is true that Arab Christians are confronted with an existential threat. But it is also true that the bulk of those being butchered by the Assad regime and by the so-called Islamic State are Muslim Arabs and Muslim Kurds.

Australian Muslims were alive to the plight of these people long before the death of little Alan. On YouTube and on Arabic-language satellite channels they saw far worse horrors involving men, women and children. And they became convinced that what was happening in Syria was a genocide. But when they turned over to mainstream Australian TV and to political debate in this country they saw no urgency in the discussion. The Prime Minister was happy to label Bashar al-Assad "the worst of the worst" and to accuse him of "serial atrocities", but as for doing something . . . well, it was all too hard. Now we are told that Canberra is considering bombing the areas held by Islamic State - areas where the population is largely Muslim - and rescuing Christians and Yazidis and Druze - but not Muslims. If this is so, then there is no point in talking about relations with the Australian Muslim community. Perhaps that will win the Coalition some votes in some important seats. I don't know. But I do know that the Arab communities of this country are already bitterly divided by this conflict and the government's response to it. If Muslims here feel that the blood of their brothers and sisters in Syria does not cry out as loudly as that of other communities, I worry about the long-term consequences. And I wonder what the hue and cry about a little boy on a beach was really all about.

Maher Mughrabi is Fairfax Media's foreign editor. Follow us on Twitter