Australia’s ‘Islamophobia’ Top Dog: Pay No Attention to Those Screams of ‘Allahu Akbar’

Noticing motive would be ‘Islamophobic.’

Australia was fortunate amid the horrifying events of December 14, 2025, when two Islamic jihadis opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, murdering fifteen people and injuring forty others. For by then, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, had been on the job for over a year, and so was able to act swiftly and decisively to ensure that there was no really serious fallout from the attack, such as Australians beginning to get the idea that Islam wasn’t quite as wonderful as the far, far-left government of Anthony Albanese would have them believe.

More recently, Malik has recently been trying to ensure that no one Down Under ever again expresses a negative view of Islam. He hasn’t been successful so far, but just as sure as death and taxes, he will keep trying.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported Friday that ten months ago, Malik released a report on how to fight “Islamophobia” in Australia, consisting of no fewer than 54 recommendations for what the government can do in order to make sure that not even one Australian harbored, however secretly, any view other than that Islam is a marvelous addition to Australia’s diverse, multicultural landscape.

As the months have dragged on since he submitted this report, Malik has complained that the Albanese government was taking so long to formulate an official response to it, much less to implement his recommendations. He may have been particularly anxious that the government implement one of his recommendations for yet another bureaucratic boondoggle, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which involved “amending the definition of ‘terrorist act’ in federal laws, ‘to reduce a reliance on ideological, political or religious motivation as a central criterion to the offence.’”

That would have meant that the next time a jihadi decided to open fire on a crowd of Jews, the government’s official position would be that a “religious motivation” did not make the bloody deed a “terrorist act.” The very idea of “Islamic terrorism” would become an oxymoron; everyone would know, even more than they do now, that Islam is peaceful and benign, and has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, and anyone who dared to suspect that a “religious motivation” might be behind a “terrorist act” would be guilty of that sin of sins, “Islamophobia.”

Aftab Malik’s recommendation, in other words, would have required Australians not to take the evidence of their senses into account. If a jihadi screamed “Allahu akbar” while in the process of murdering people, no one would want to risk illegitimately ascribing a “religious motivation” to a terrorist act, and so the obvious motivating ideology would be ignored.

Surprisingly, the Albanese government, as clueless and compromised as it is, refused to go as far as Malik wanted to push it. Crestfallen, the far-left Australian Broadcasting Corporation framed this as a bad decision that the government had to explain: “Releasing the government’s response in Sydney on Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended his decision not to adopt all of the recommendations.”

Albanese explained that the recommendations were just that, recommendations, and not guidelines or policies that his government was bound to follow: “We’ve said it’s independent advice. What we don’t do is we don’t contract out government. Some of [the recommendations] we have adopted in full and are acting on already. Others we’ll give further consideration to.”

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation was likewise annoyed that Albanese didn’t go along with Malik in forbidding any connection between religious teaching and terrorist activity: “Mr Albanese also sought to explain why he rebuffed a push to water down the importance of religion and ideology in defining terrorism in federal laws over Mr Malik’s concerns they could lead to discrimination.”

Unfortunately, instead of noting that jihad terrorists often make their motivations abundantly clear, and pointing out that the Qur’an is unique among the revered books of the “world’s great religions” in exhorting those who believe in it to commit acts of violence, Albanese took refuge in an argument from authority: “We operate our terror laws on the basis of appropriate advice from national security agencies. But primarily, we sit in the National Security Committee of the government, and we take advice from our security agencies. I have confidence in them.”

All right. That will have to be good enough for now. Or at least Australians will have to hope that it will be enough. After all, if Aftab Malik had managed to get his recommendations adopted, the situation would have been much, much worse.