Hard to put this genie back in the bottle

For the past decade in Sydney, which is home to the largest Muslim population in Australia, the trouble looming in Sydney's western suburbs has been ignored. The media, cowed by mostly invisible codes of political correctness, have shied away from the responsibility to inform and to tell the truth. The fact that hundreds of Lebanese Muslim youths have been running amok, running foul of the law and running unchecked by parents, imams and police alike should never have been shielded from the public.

To allow an organisation such as Hizb ut-Tahrir to spread jihadist propaganda, to recruit among Muslim youth, to import speakers from other countries who despise Western values and thumb their noses at our institutions was always folly. These organisations achieve no purpose other than to push young men into a lunatic fringe which endangers us all.

Hizb ut-Tahrir apparently has two great recruiting areas. First there is the Lakemba mosque, Australia's biggest mosque which is attended every week by tens of thousands of worshippers. The second area is the prison system and this is the area where few journalists have been game to tread. Criminality among young Lebanese men is way too high.

The riots last Saturday were not the first time many of these young men had exhibited anti-social tendencies. For too many it is how they live their lives -- how they demonstrate their contempt for all things Western.

Whenever you say anything such as, "some of my best friends are Muslims", you get into strife. In my case, however, it is true. These people are horrified at what happened last week. They are just like the rest of us, trying to earn an honest dollar and trying to live their lives in peace. They all know how much last Saturday hurt the image of Muslims in this country. This was ably demonstrated by their leaders coming out so strongly in condemnation of these idiots who resorted to such crude violence.

The tragedy is that most of those at the demonstrations last week wanted to act peaceably. You could see them pleading in vain with the idiots to back off.

The vast majority of Muslims abhor what happened but they share guilt with the rest of us for not facing up to their problems. It was wonderful to see the leaders of so many Islamic groups coming out to attack the clowns who did their collective image so much harm but they should have claimed ownership of the problem a long time ago. Ask any copper in western Sydney about these out-of-control young men and they will tell you chapter and verse about the violence and criminality they cause every day in Australia's biggest city.

I am sick and tired of hearing these young blokes described as being disenfranchised and alienated as if they are the victims. This is rubbish. No one alienated or disenfranchised them -- they chose to stand apart. Whenever they refer to the rest of us as infidels, they give the game up. If this is such a shameful country you wonder why they are so desperate to get here?

It would be easy to suggest that education would fix the problem, given that most of the violent protesters leave school early. While tempted to believe in that solution I came across an article in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday written by a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, one Mohamad Tabbaa.

The article was extraordinary only for the paucity of its arguments. Tabbaa tried to explain away the violence by suggesting that these young blokes had witnessed Muslims being killed, burned, crushed and oppressed in places around the world as diverse as China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma, Palestine, Kashmir, Guantanamo and Chechnya. The grievances gleaned from all this oppression is the reason for the anger. "When a Muslim man is crushed in Palestine, they lament the loss of their brother," he writes. He says we should "start discussing it honestly and genuinely". When I read that I realised there could be no reckoning or reasoning with these people.

If the continual sight of Muslims being killed was at the core of the hatred in the hearts of these young men, I couldn't help but wonder how they felt when they watched the goings on in Syria on the nightly news. Muslims are slaughtering Muslims every day but these loons don't seem to think that is worth demonstrating about and Tabbaa didn't consider it worth a mention.

He did mention deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan being perpetrated by Western forces but you have to wonder why we didn't see protests through the long years of civil war in that poor blighted country.

On my show on SKY News, when I challenged Tabbaa about the omission of Syria from his list, he could only respond with the ludicrous claim that western governments had supported the Assad regime. This of course had nothing to do with the price of fish and it ably shows how hopeless it is trying to reason with those who show no reason. I trust they don't hand out PhDs with lottery tickets at the University of Melbourne. Tabbaa's thesis will need to withstand analysis a hell of a lot better than his foray into social commentary in the SMH.

Senior police and Muslim community leaders have met to try to come to grips with the difficulties we now all face at the hands of a radicalised few. We all allowed this to get out of hand over the past decade and this is one genie which will prove very difficult to put back in the bottle.