The knifing of two police officers by 18-year-old Numan Haider at Endeavour Hills Police Station in Melbourne on Tuesday night is not a new threshold of Muslim violence in Australia. What is new is Haider's support for Islamic State and his desire to behead people and video the slaughtered bodies draped in the black flag of Islamic State.

Such is the new fashion among some radical young Muslims that Haider took a large knife and a black IS flag when he drove to the police station.

Five men of middle eastern appearance sit near their smashed car after being taken into custody by police when they drove into Cronulla on December 12, 2005. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

The warning signs have grown more ominous for a long time. On November 1, 1998, Lakemba police station in Sydney was peppered with gunfire in a drive-by shooting. Sixteen shots were fired from four different weapons by men in a stolen car. Those charged included several Lebanese-Australians including Michael Kanaan, Wassim El-Assaad and Saleh Mahmoud Jamal.

Kanaan, a Maronite Catholic, would later be convicted of three murders, among multiple other violent crimes. In a bizarre footnote to his bloody career, the former magistrate, Pat O'Shane, infamously discharged Kanaan from standing trial over shooting a police officer, describing the decision by two officers to pull over his car, then return gun fire, as "stupid, reckless and foolhardy". She said their conduct had "indicated police harassment of youth".