Pathway to terror? Immigration versus the raised terror alerts

Rebecca Weisser I 10 August 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Last weekend, anonymous senior government sources told the Sydney Morning Herald that the government was looking at creating a new special visa pathway for Palestinians so they did not have to return to Gaza. The new Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke has since confirmed that the federal government is examining how it can allow Palestinians on temporary visitor visas to stay in Australia longer.

Following hot on the heels of Burke’s announcement, on Monday, Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), flanked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, advised that ASIO has raised Australia’s national terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’ due to the ‘degrading security environment’. The reason that Dreyfus attended was because in the recent reshuffle he has taken over responsibility for ASIO, which had previously been under the purview of the Minister of Home Affairs.

The new ASIO assessment means that ‘there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of an attack or attack planning in the next year’ because of a rise in extremism. Burgess said that just in the last four months there were ‘eight attacks or disruptions in Australia that involved alleged terrorism or were being investigated as potential terror acts’.

Burgess warns that Hamas’s invasion of Israel and the ensuing conflict ‘has fuelled grievances, prompted protest, exacerbated division, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance’. Moreover, the escalation of Hezbollah’s war on Israel has the potential to ‘fuel radicalisation’. He says, ‘More Australians are being radicalised, and radicalised more quickly. More Australians are embracing a more diverse range of extreme ideologies, and more Australians are willing to use violence to advance their cause.’ In particular, ASIO is seeing ‘spikes in political polarisation and intolerance, uncivil debate and unpeaceful protest’.

Mr Burke claimed on Sky News that the Australian government would not compromise on security checks and that the safety of the Australian community was paramount.

If that is true, Mr Burke needs to explain how Australia has performed security checks on people living in Gaza when we don’t have a consular service in the territory, virtually no civilian access to it, and all government institutions are run by Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation?

As if to underline the problem, this week, a United Nations investigation into the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East? (UNRWA) – still refuses to say with certainty whether or not its own employees were engaged in terrorist atrocities on 7 October. Israel alleged that 13 UNRWA staff took part in the attacks, ten of whom directly participated in the atrocities including nine who worked as teachers. Israel also alleges that UNRWA has employed 190 operatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

On August 6, the UN investigation team found that nine UNRWA staff ‘may’ have been involved in the atrocities. Underlining its sympathies with Palestinian terrorism, it merely terminated their employment rather than demand their arrest and prosecution for war crimes. This is no trivial oversight by a marginal player in Palestine – UNRWA employs 13,000 people just in Gaza running the territory’s schools, primary healthcare clinics, other social services, and distributing humanitarian aid. It employs another 17,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and in camps in neighbouring Arab countries providing similar services.

Meanwhile Australia has gone back to our longstanding practice of funding UNRWA to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars despite the fact that the agency incites hatred of Jews and Israelis and educates Palestinians to be violent and intolerant rather than to seek peaceful coexistence with Israel.

It is therefore hardly surprising that a recent opinion poll conducted in Gaza, published on 12 June, showed that two-thirds of respondents continued to support the Hamas-led 7 October attack on Israel in which terrorists killed 1,200 people, almost all civilians, and took at least 240 hostages of whom 110 are still being held in Gaza – whether alive or dead no one knows.

This was despite the fact that 60 per cent of respondents reported losing family members. About half said they expected Hamas to win the war (whatever that means) and continue to rule Gaza. In addition, twice as many Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank (40 per cent) said they preferred to be ruled by Hamas (terrorists) and only 20 per cent preferred to be ruled by Fatah (which theoretically renounced terrorism but funds the families of dead terrorists as ‘martyrs’). Indeed, support for Hamas had increased by 6 per cent over the previous three months.

Yet since the 7 October attack, the Australian government has granted temporary visas to 2,823 people declaring Palestinian citizenship including 2,499 visitor visas by 30 June. By May 31, some 1,120 Palestinians had arrived in Australia of whom 422 had applied for a protection visa.

We have only to look to the UK to see how the failure to control unauthorised migrant arrivals and the creation of Muslim enclaves has eroded social cohesion to the point where police are bracing for 30 riots in one day this week around the country.

Why has this happened? As Konstantin Kisin said in a speech last weekend at the MCC Festival in Esztergom, Hungary, ‘We had more people come into Britain under the last conservative government or the last Labour government than we had come into Britain since the Battle of Hastings to 1950’.

The problem is not just the force of numbers it is the ability to choose migrants. As Kisin pointed out, ‘When Hungary built its border fence, it really got hammered by everyone for doing that. Why? Because it’s become an ideological issue. People think that having the choice of who comes to your country and who doesn’t somehow makes you immoral. And it’s a moronic argument, and one that we have to defeat.’ Kisin cited Australia as a shining example of how to address this problem telling the audience that Australia had had the same problem as Britain. ‘In 2013, they elected a government led by Tony Abbott which decided to stop it. And they did. So they went from having 13,000 people a year come by small boat, to having 70 people a year come by small boat. It’s absolutely possible. …in fact, the vast majority of countries… have absolutely no problem policing their own borders.’

Burke is one of two ministers – the other being Education Minister Jason Clare – who are being targeted by the Muslim lobby. Both ministers have significant Muslim minorities – 25 per cent in Burke’s seat of Watson and 32 per cent in Clare’s seat of Blaxland. Burke’s former portfolio was Employment Minister.

In pushing for a pathway to Palestinian citizenship is he more interested in shoring up votes in his electorate and securing his ministerial employment than taking into account the risk of an increased threat of terror?

Rebecca Weisser is a research fellow at the Danube Institute