CAUSE IN PLAIN VIEW

The battle against globalised trade never really caught on. Today, former anti-globos would scream if you took away their third-world constructed mobile phones. Climate change was and remains of little interest to anyone not stupid. Asylum seekers? That issue largely vanished when the Howard government stopped people smugglers.

This cause shortage must have been especially frustrating for left-wing journalists, who’d grown up dreaming of one day confronting, let’s say, some kind of women-hating, gay-loathing anti-democracy fundamentalist religious movement. Ideally, such a movement would be led by a shadowy millionaire who despised freedom, education and art.

Well, just such a movement did finally present itself late in 2001. One crusading left winger, the British writer Christopher Hitchens, immediately recognised it for what it was. Writing just a few weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Hitchens had this to say:

“I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration.

“Here was the most frightful enemy – theocratic barbarism – in plain view. All my other foes, from the Christian Coalition to the Milosevic Left, were busy getting it wrong or giving it cover. Other and better people were gloomy at the prospect of confrontation. But I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

True to his word, Hitchens did indeed continue to fight “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate”, right up until his death in late 2011. But a funny thing happened to his friends on the broader left. Faced with the perfect enemy, the left utterly bottled it.

Even worse, many leftists – presumably confused by this enemy’s non-Anglo appearance, and desperately wishing not to be seen as racist – have since wilfully conceded territory to what Hitchens accurately described as “theocratic barbarism”. We can witness such concessions in the soft, compliant coverage in Australia of the Sydney-based Hizb ut-Tahrir extremist group.

It’s been going on for some time. Back in 2007, when I was the Daily Telegraph‘s opinion editor, a press release arrived from Hizb ut-Tahrir’s Wassim Doureihi. These were not infrequent and were usually binned. On this occasion, however, I ran the piece under the headline “Hizb ut-Tahrir wants a Caliph”.

After all, I thought, if this mob wants to announce its rejection of Australian democracy, the least I can do is alert our readers. Remarkably, the left-wing website Crikey subsequently ran an item expressing outrage not at Hizb ut-Tahrir but at the Telegraph for running a piece entirely written by and credited to Hizb ut-Tahrir.

“What on earth was Tim Blair thinking when he decided to reprint (and almost plagiarise) a press release as an article without seeking the author’s permission?” Crikey fumed, described the piece as “supposedly written” by the Hizbies and “seemingly submitted” to the Telegraph. “Doureihi confirmed to Crikey yesterday afternoon that neither he nor anyone else from his organisation submitted anything to the Tele.”

All nonsense, of course. This was a telling indication of the feral left’s attitude, which prevails to the current day. Given the option of criticising a News Corp publication or an extremist Islamic movement, they’ll go News Corp every time.

Left-leaning mainstream publications also give friendly cover to the Hizbuttheads. Last September the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Anne Davies went to Lakemba to report on a Hizbie rally in the wake of terrorism raids. One of the attendees was Man Monis, who within just a few months would hold a deadly siege at Martin Place.

“My impression was he was a little unstable. He also seemed a little creepy. Ominously, he also told me he did not think giving speeches would be enough,” Davies later wrote, following Monis’s murderous siege. But she never quoted him back in September: “I decided to drop his quotes from my story because I concluded he was a man on a campaign, who didn’t represent the broader sentiments of the Muslim community.”

One month after that September gathering, the SMH sent another reporter on a Hizbie assignment. “There were no riots and no police, not so much as a burning effigy,” the paper’s “investigations journalist” Tim Elliott revealed. “The Hizb ut-Tahrir meeting called on Friday night in Lakemba proved to be as threatening as a primary school cake stall.”

Some investigator. Elliott missed the big story: at a public meeting in Sydney in 2014, women were ordered to sit at the back of the hall. You’d think this might be worth reporting, especially given the SMH’s commitment to equality.

Luckily, freelancer Alison Bevege also turned up. To her enormous credit, she is now taking Hizb ut-Tahrir to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal over their obvious sexism. Reaction from the left? Almost complete silence, although the Daily Telegraph did report last week: “Sociologist and feminist Eva Cox described the incident as ‘trivial’ …”

Inequality and religious bigotry are in plain view. As it has done since 2001, the broader left continues to look away.