Victimology airbrushes oppression against own

Show of strength ... supporters of Ahmed Elomar depart Central Local Court yesterday. Photo: Wolter Peeters

The telling moment in court on Tuesday was when supporters of a young Muslim man charged with affray during a demonstration in Sydney on Saturday stayed in their seats when the magistrate entered the court. It was an act of disrespect for Australian law. These men respect sharia. They want to live under the caliphate of Islam.

Instead, they inhabit the caliphate of the mind. They are members of a strand of Muslim fundamentalists who live in the West and exploit the West while despising the West.

To justify their own hypocrisy of not living under Sharia, they exist in a permanent twilight of victimhood. Thus it was inevitable Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia, the organisation at the heart of Saturday's flash of religious hatred, issued a statement yesterday that was a classic of blame-shifting and victimology:

''We affirm that primary responsibility for what occurred [the violence] lies squarely on the powerful institutions of society, media and the political establishment in particular, which continually attack Islam and Muslims, creating the grievances that give rise to such incidents, isolating youth, and causing social tension.''

This passive-aggressive self-pity is used to justify cultural bigotry, religious intolerance and gratuitous violence.

A defender of this belligerent narcissism was published on these pages yesterday - a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, Mohamad Tabbaa, who, his biography said, ''researches issues of discrimination against Muslim minority groups in the West, particularly Australia''.

This is classic victimology. Any grudge jockey who wants to look for discrimination is going to find it. No problem. Given Tabbaa's focus on Muslims as victims, it is likely he will avert his gaze from the greatest source of intolerance involving Muslims in Australia, which is intolerance by Muslims. I could point him to hundreds of pages of examples of bastardry by Muslims living in this country.

He certainly averted his gaze from inconvenient facts in his opinion piece. In justifying the violent conduct and sympathy for jihad exhibited by scores of demonstrators, Tabbaa offers this chilling rationalisation:

''To begin with, many Muslims in Australia do not simply give up their identity as belonging to a global community merely because they happen to live in Australia. Many have not bought the liberal idea of individualism, and so see events happening on the other side of the planet as personally related to them.''

We already got that. We get that ''many Muslims'' don't identify with being Australian as their primary identity. We get the rejection of liberalism.

He offered a list of grievances which offend those who inhabit the caliphate of the mind, the oppression of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma, China, the Palestinian territories, Kashmir, Guantanamo Bay and Chechnya.

The problem with this list is that it ignores the central reality of the oppression of Muslims: the overwhelming amount of oppression of Muslims is by Muslims.

Yes, millions of Muslims have been murdered, assassinated, attacked, sexually assaulted, intimidated and otherwise silenced in the past year. And the year before that. And the year before that. That is because right now, Muslims are attacking and killing other Muslims in Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Mali, Indonesia, Yemen, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories. Muslims are also attacking or intimidating Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria. Right now, in several European countries with large Muslim immigrant populations, Muslims are well overrepresented in prisons.

All this is airbrushed out of the narrative of Muslim victimology by the nebulous accusation of ''Islamophobia'' in the West.

Nonsense. The broader context of life for Muslims in Australia is that they enjoy a verifiable and generous accommodation of their needs. They make up a significant proportion of the immigrant stream. They are significantly overrepresented among those granted refugee or asylum status, and also among those who receive welfare benefits. They enjoy religious freedom, democracy and free speech in ways most Muslims, under the governance of Muslims, do not. Very few cases of hate crimes against Muslims have been seen in the Australian courts.

That did not stop Tabbaa and others in recent days from heaping scorn on Muslim leaders who build bridges to the wider community. He ironically mocked leaders who condemned Saturday's violent stupidity as ''superheroes''. Yet his own alternative melted into vague waffle and platitudes.

The Islamophobia whine has been flogged to death. It's become self-parody.