ANDREW Bolt’s chief accusation against my ABC colleague Waleed Aly is that he is “the model moderate Muslim, used by the media to persuade us we have little to fear from Islam but our own bigotry”. And then comes the crucial sentence: “His rewards have been great.”

It is offensive to attack someone’s credentials, suggest they are either unfairly profiting from or misrepresenting the group they are a part of, or both. Bolt sneered at an academic for being “a blonde and pale science PhD who calls herself Aboriginal” when talking about what he calls the Left’s group thinking mentality.

That was called out as “foul racial abuse” by Marcia Langton. Her further comments led her to apologise and the ABC to issue a statement as well.

But if Bolt is horrified by the way he says he was misconstrued, how is Waleed Aly to respond when Bolt denigrates his expertise?

Why does Bolt question Aly’s credentials to work at Monash University’s Global Terrorism Research Centre, “despite having no doctorate and having qualified in engineering and law”? Strange that Bolt doesn’t note that Aly is completing a PhD in the area and has a published record on the topic. A lack of qualifications doesn’t inhibit Bolt’s expertise on climate science, “despite” having no training in science. Nor does it stop him speaking well of Ian Plimer’s books denying the facts of climate change, “despite” the fact Plimer is a geologist and not a climate scientist.

ANDREW BOLT: Wondering about a blind Aly

Bolt misrepresents not only Waleed Aly’s published work, but also his comments on Boko Haram on Channel 10. Aly said the terrorists are a complex product of ethnic tension and internal division. The movement has morphed and splintered, and vigilantes have acted under its banner. That’s a mainstream analysis, echoed by a former US ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, who said that “poverty and corruption-driven alienation ... contribute to Boko Haram’s popular support”. The basic thrust: there may be something more than a radical stream of Islam at work.

Bolt fails to mention that the elite school the girls were kidnapped from educates both Christian and Muslim girls. The issue is that their secular school was closed down by threats from Boko Haram. Perhaps that doesn’t fit what Bolt wanted to say about Aly’s analysis. It doesn’t fit the thunderous query that ends his column: “Is Islam a threat?”

Bolt says he is “determined to find what unites us and not to invent racist excuses to divide”. But when he asks, “What have we imported and what danger would we run by importing more?”, I believe he does the opposite.

The online comments from his readers show that Bolt’s words give permission for prejudice to flow. One reader worries about a culture “that endangers our own”. Another says “fortunately I can’t stand looking at Aly long enough to know what he has to say”. Another slights a major religion, writing “I cannot for a moment trust believers, followers and supporters of Islam”. Yet another gets the facts wrong, “protecting the terrorists and their murder and rape of Christian schoolgirls is disgusting”. Audience feedback is not dictated by content, but Aly’s views were misrepresented and the commentary follows.

Slamming an entire community is easy. Did you know there’s a “worrying” group living among us in Australia annually celebrating the massacre of 75,000 of their opponents? Thousands of their opponents have been killed this century, yet only hundreds of this group have died. So clearly this group are the aggressors. I am talking about Jews, the festival of Purim and the nation of Israel. As a member of this religion, perhaps I’m too Machiavellian to reveal the true intent of my religion? Or perhaps I’ve left out some crucial clarification, context, and the inexplicably messy state of human affairs. The facile and ridiculous can be made to sound reasonable. Just like Andrew Bolt’s ridicule of Waleed Aly and Islam.

Perhaps we should heed Bolt’s warning and worry about what “we are importing”. But who are the imports? Andrew Bolt’s parents came to Australia from the Netherlands in 1958, but Muslims from Afghanistan are thought to have come here almost one hundred years earlier. Should the descendants of those Afghans immigrants be worried about “importing” immigrants from the Netherlands? Or would that be silly and simplistic?

Rafael Epstein is the Drive host on 774 ABC Melbourne