Authorities wanted to condemn the jihadis but didn’t want to seem “Islamophobic.” New in FrontPage:
Australia finally got around to listing the infamous jihad terror group known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, and better known as Hamas, as a terrorist group on Thursday. That’s great, even though it should have been done years ago. The way that Australian authorities chose to do it, however, once again demonstrated the moral cowardice and intellectual bankruptcy of the Left: the Australians had to find a way to condemn Hamas without appearing to be “Islamophobic.” They found a way to do that, but they didn’t find a way to avoid appearing to be woke, politically correct fools.
The Associated Press reported Thursday that Australia has “added the U.S.-based far-right extremist group National Socialist Order and planned to add the entirety of the Palestinian group Hamas to its list of outlawed terrorist organisations as concerns rise about radicalised children.”
Now, it’s easy to see why Hamas is being added to the list of outlawed terrorist organizations. Just in the past few days, its plan to target Israelis living in the Philippines was thwarted. It celebrated the murder of a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor. Before that, it sent rockets into Israel on New Year’s Eve. The leader of the Hamas Women’s Movement has claimed that all the Muslim women in Gaza are ready to blow themselves up in jihad suicide bombings.
And that’s just recently. For decades now, Hamas has called for and worked toward the total destruction of Israel, which would necessarily involve a new genocide of the Jews. For years, its website featured a “Glory Record” detailing its murders of Israeli civilians. Hamas also receives funding from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is just as genocidal and anti-Semitic as Hamas itself.
At the same time as it announced intentions to list Hamas as a terror group, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews announced that it had also added “the National Socialist Order, formerly known as Atomwaffen Division,” to its terror list. It seems that the National Socialist Order “advocates a global ‘race war’ and the collapse of democratic societies.” This is not the first “far-right” group that Australia has added to its terror list: “The Base, a neo-Nazi white supremacist group formed in the United States in 2018, was listed in December and the British-based Sonnenkrieg Division was listed in August.”
Undeniably, neo-Nazis are horrible people, and I have no doubt that the National Socialist Order thoroughly deserves to be listed as a terrorist group. But why did Australia have to add the National Socialist Order to its terror list as it added Hamas? Have you ever even heard of the National Socialist Order before reading this article? The ADL says that the Atomwaffen Division “is a small neo-Nazi group,” and that “a series of arrests in 2019-20 decimated the group’s active membership.” It adds that “in July 2020, AWD was disbanded, and the National Socialist Order emerged under the remaining AWD leadership.”
So the National Socialist Order is a rump group formed out of another that collapsed, and is likely to be an insignificant band of potbellied LARPing sociopaths, or else FBI agents trying to validate a “far-right” threat. That hardly compares to Hamas, an organization that for years has terrorized a nation with jihad rocket attacks and attacks on civilians. Hamas has international support, most notably from the Islamic Republic of Iran, while no nation has or ever will given support to the National Socialist Order.
So why has Australia only listed Hamas as a terror group in tandem with this insignificant band of Nazi idiots? The answer is clear. Australian authorities are trying to prop up the National Socialist Order as some kind of moral equivalent to Hamas, in order to try to avoid enraging its Muslim population, among whom are numerous Hamas supporters, and to avoid giving the impression that the Australian government is “Islamophobic” and is targeting only Islamic terrorists while ignoring non-Muslim terrorists.
This sort of thing isn’t limited to Australia, of course. I myself am banned from Britain in the British government’s absurd attempt to smear me as a “far right” leader on par with jihad terrorists. Then-Prime Minister Theresa May said in 2016: ““And I acted to keep those who peddle hatred and extremism out of our country. I kicked out Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. I stopped Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Pastor Terry Jones – because Islamophobia comes from the same wellspring of hatred. And I stopped people like Dieudonne coming to Britain. Because nothing excuses antisemitism – not comedy, not satire, not even irony. Antisemitism is just hatred. And it is just wrong.”Spen
So as far as May was concerned, Pamela Geller and I were the “Islamophobic” equivalents of Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada. Abu Hamza is in solitary confinement in a super-max U.S. for, among other things, conspiring to set up a training camp for jihad terrorists in Bly, Oregon. Abu Qatada was convicted of plotting the jihad massacre of Americans and Israelis in Jordan. Neither Geller nor I have ever advocated or condoned any violence at all. But May needed some “far-right extremists” to balance her actions against jihadis and appease Muslims in Britain, and so she didn’t hesitate to smear us.
In fact, calling the National Socialist Order “far-right,” the same term that is used for people (including me) who aren’t remotely Nazi and are simply enunciating unwelcome truths, shows how the term is employed as a weapon to stigmatize, demonize, and marginalize all those whom the elites hate. Lump us in with some Nazi idiots, and the job is done.
It’s good that Australia will list Hamas as a terror group. But the way Australian officials have done it shows them to be Leftist cowards and self-deluded fools.
Wellington says
One of the few pathetic and mendacious weapons the Left (and wishy-washy moderates and RINO types) has when it finally comes around to condemning some Islamic terrorist group is to do exactly what was done here as Robert Spencer noted in this article, i.e., engage in a moronic moral equivalency argument whereby an EXTREMELLY small group of the Far Right are aligned as some kind of equal menace with either a Far Left group (e.g., Antifa and BLM) or with some kind of Muslim atrocity like Hamas.
It’s not only pathetic and foolish; it’s also stupid and deceitful. The Far-Right, what’s left of it in the West, is almost no threat to freedom and other good things. The Far-Left and Islam are, by comparison, gigantic menaces to the continuation of liberty and other good things. One knows the difference between the two by now or should know it.
No excuse or bogus argument will make up for the massive discrepancy between a still powerful Islamic and Leftist lobby versus a pathetically weak and very minor Far-Right lobby—though the castigation by Islam and the Left of mainstream conservatives as Far-Right would have you believe otherwise. But only fools or worse believe this enormous deception. Unfortunately, there are tons of “fools or worse” in in the West today. I would start with Biden as an example, Trudeau coming in a very close second if not in a tie with the dummy from Delaware.
gravenimage says
+1
mortimer says
I agree with Wellington. Only someone lacking a moral compass and who is ideologically blinkered would be unable to discern that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas’s constitution clearly advocates terrorism and genocide.
Many Arab countries are also able to discern that Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood are terrorist organizations.
abu taleb says
Now, anti vaxxers, anti CRT parents and anti vaccine mandate truck drivers are all terrorists.
But killer jihadists are mentally ill people or ignorant people who do not understand western culture, not terrorists.
Western civilization is collapsing fast.
gravenimage says
Grimly true, abu taleb. Utter insanity.
mortimer says
If you are NOT WOKE, the wokist mob will find ways to FIX YOU.
somehistory says
The memo from the dhs lists those who post “mis,” “dis,” and “mal” information as terrorists and people are supposed to report. Anything about the list you provided…that does not agree with what the government has said, repeated by the media, etc. is what the “memo” is all about.
Aussie Infidel says
As Robert suggests, I for one had never heard of the National Socialist Order before reading this article – and I pay close attention to the news reports. But over the last 20 years I have watched the number of Islamic jihad attacks against infidels around the world, continually climb day by day to now almost 41,000 – with over 100,000 people killed and more than half a million injured.
https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.aspx
It really does seem like a politically correct attempt to include the mice with the elephant in the room. But it beggars belief why it has taken so long to proscribe organisations like HAMAS. I have spoken to many of our politicians on this issue over the years, but to no avail. Did they wait until there was an opportunity to proscribe a ‘far-right’ group as well, to avoid ‘offending’ the Muslims and being labelled ‘Islamophobes’? But at least, it’s a start. Now all the other Muslim Brotherhood front groups operating in Western countries as ‘Islamic Charities’, should also be proscribed. All such groups support the Islamic Doctrine of Jihad or – as it is defined in the Sharia – “war to establish the religion”. (Reliance of the Traveller, o9.1).
Mrs Andrews is a very talented woman, and on the conservative side of the fence; but like many of our politicians, she probably has little understanding of Islam and its covert mission to ‘conquer the world for Allah’.
Alfredo says
“It’s good that Australia will list Hamas as a terror group. But the way Australian officials have done it shows them to be Leftist cowards and self-deluded fools.”
Well said Mr. Spencer! It reveals once again the incredible delusion of the elites afflicted by the Woke Idiocy Syndrome. This is a condition that reduces the ability to think clearly of those infected by the mind pathogen.
The symptoms include twisted logic, moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. It seems too many members of the Western elites have become infected by the common sense destroying pathogen.
Which is the reason common sense is becoming increasingly uncommon.