Given to bouts of masochism, I periodically torture myself with what passes for news and current affairs on our national broadcaster, the ABC. Last night I watched aghast as former NSW Liberal MP Michael Yabsley regurgitated one of the most repugnant, self righteous and utterly racist memes to emerge in the last 15 years. “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims”, is an assertion which Mr Yabsley insists “has some truth in it.”

The point was made in the context of Senator Pauline Hanson’s Islamophobic outburst in the Senate, which caused all 9 Greens Senators to stand up and walk out (seems only fitting – the Greens are used to giving speeches to an empty chamber.) Hanson’s maiden speech was awful, riddled with errors of fact, and not fit for comment. Mr Yabsley’s response however was a bald faced lie which should not go unchecked.

Fortunately a 5 minute google search produced a list of syndicated non-Islamist terror organizations of sufficient notoriety to make this a moot point: The IRA, UDA and RIRA (Ireland) The Lord’s Resistance Army (Uganda), Kahane Chai (Israel) Aum Shinrikyo (Japan), New People’s Army (NPA) (Philippines), Golden Dawn, (Spain) Shining Path, Epanastatikos Agonas (Peru), Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias De Colombia (FARC), were among the first to pop up.

Leaving aside the joint Saudi-Israeli-CIA coordinated attacks of September 11 2001, of the total number of deaths attributed to terrorism on American soil in recent years, only a small fraction (6-7%) have been blamed on Muslims. Interestingly a similar percentage of terrorist murders are attributed to Jewish extremists, while Catholic Latinos make up by far the largest ethno-religious group. Let’s not forget the murder of 100 million Native Americans, or the lynching of blacks which was still taking place in 1968. Australia’s black history is equally tragic, but I digress…

Just last year former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee correctly identified the Obama regime as the “leading state sponsor of terrorism”. Leaked emails show that Hillary Clinton’s State Department funded ISIS, just as previous administrations funded al Qaeda and the Taliban. From Bosnia and Kosovo to Indonesia and the Philippines, from Cuba and Nicaragua to just about every other country where there’s been a major civil war in the last 70 years, the US has used terrorists to wage war by proxy. Today both the CIA and State Department work hand in glove with so-called moderate opposition groups in Syria, often fighting on opposite sides. Like Star Wars Episode VII, the latest installment in the ISIS propaganda film franchise shows the same old actors with better special effects but a less convincing plot.

Britain is the world’s second biggest arms dealer and profits from selling weapons to Saudi Arabia which are paid for in US petrodollars. These weapons are then given to ‘jihadists’, some of whom are known to receive instruction in Jordanian training camps run by British SAS before being funneled into neighbouring Syria. When they are injured they are treated in Israeli field hospitals. Who was it again who told us about an axis of evil?

We are told that ISIS recruits its manpower from 100 different countries and likes to target a particular demographic: the 15-16 year old disgruntled sons of low paid immigrant workers who are easily radicalised by the internet. But just like the 19 Saudi actors of September 11 who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine and hang out with pink haired strippers, most ISIS jihadis couldn’t recite a verse from the holy Qu’ran over their own mother’s grave.

Call me cynical, but if you wanted to raise a paramilitary outfit in the Middle East, there’s no shortage of skilled labour available; from the remnants of Saddam’s republican guard and the virtual slave army of Saudi political prisoners forced to choose between military service or summary execution, to the tens of thousands of private security contractors already deployed throughout the region to protect Western assets. (These same contractors are also charged with operating Australia’s illegal offshore detention regime, and ‘protecting’ the Dakota Access pipeline from indigenous activists.)

If Mr Yabsley wants to have a conversation about terrorism (n. the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims), let’s start with Abu Ghraib, where young boys were raped in front of their mothers by US soldiers. Then maybe we can discuss what goes on in our own detention centres, where women and men are systematically and routinely tortured or driven to insanity for the dubious crime of traveling in international waters without a valid visa. When it comes to pointing the finger, both Hanson’s deplorables and Abbott’s bible thumping backbenchers would do well to take the advice of their patriarch: “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Suffice it to say that all terrorists aren’t Muslims, just as all politicians aren’t intellectually-vacant, pleasantly-grinning, xenophobic, hetero-tragic tossbuckets.

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