It is inevitable that Australia is a target for a Muslim terrorist attack, like that which has occurred in France and before that in Mumbai. There are occasional hints that such plans have already been foiled.
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The bombing in the Bali nightclub, which cost 200 lives, could also be construed as an attack on Australia.
Our governments will be reviewing our security, which is already on alert. We could do with a review of our response arrangements, in the wake of the Martin Place siege, when a police swat squad did not enter the Lindt café until a day after an escapee had shown there was a way in. Two hostages died.
It was reminiscent of the police caution years ago in the Berlin Games, when terrorists killed Israeli athletes and flew off under safe passage. The Israelis vice identified them and over the assassinated them, one by one. That is hardly a judicial process.
Terrorists are not criminals, entitled to the protection of civil law. They are soldiers serving a cause in which they have fanatical belief.
They have to be apprehended on suspicion, based on intelligence, before they commit murder not after. That is counter to all that we believe in, and not easily done in a society so well equipped with left-wing ambulance chasers seeking to apply civil law to war.
Then the suspects must be confined until it is safe to release them. That is not easy, either. The Americans, who have lost a lot of people, have such a camp at Guantanamo Bay. So in effect do we, on Christmas Island.
In Cyprus, where I spent a couple years during the emergency, I was taken with other journalists to a round-up. The suspects were paraded, one by one, past a hooded informant, and on his word, were released or went into detention. Imagine the uproar here as the usual lawyers parade their stout defence of the human rights of terrorists.
The Brits bungled the trial of a man who murdered an airman carrying his two-year-old son in a Cyprus shopping centre, and had to acquit him.
He was rearrested and detained as he left the court room. Imagine the uproar from the usual lawyers if that were to happen here.
Our political leaders tell us that Islam is peaceful. It is not. Muslim terrorists believe they will go to paradise to frolic with 48 dark-eyed houris, that democracy and capitalism are blasphemy and that the penalty for conversion is death.
The colonial power lost their stomach for repression, and pulled out. We do not have that option. Australia is our homeland, as France, India and America are homelands.
