The Refusal of Authorities to Identify White Supremacist Terrorism Will Only Compound It

Many have remarked on the number of stabbings in NSW of late and wondered why that might be. Of course, one reason could be that our government’s support of the Israeli-perpetrated Gaza genocide, conveys a message that violence is okay and the maiming or killing of others is no biggie.

In response to the recent knife crimes, the NSW government passed laws in early June to permit the wanding of citizens in designated areas, which amounts to running a metal detector over a person without making contact with their body, in order to ensure that they’re not in possession of a knife.

But these laws are completely ineffective in terms of preventing the type of knife crimes that these police powers have been enacted in response to, and nor did they have any deterrent or detection effect on the knife crimes that have transpired over the last fortnight.

The reason why police running metal detectors over randomly selected civilians wouldn’t have prevented these recent crimes is these incidents, which have all been considered potential acts of terror, couldn’t have been predicted much less headed off by a NSW police officer with a wand.

Yet, the four recent knife crimes, and one other terrorism offence not designated as such, have all served to expose a blind spot in the Australian criminal justice system that’s always existed, and they’ve also suggested this problem is on the uptick, and a clear reason for this is Canberra’s quiet complicity in Gaza.

But the issue that’s been exposed more succinctly than ever before is that the authorities have an extreme resistance to calling acts of politically motivated violence by white Australians as terrorism, while a similar act by a Muslim sees police instantly identify it as religiously motivated terror.

White terror central

Australian law defines terrorism as violence or the threat of violence, which has been motivated to advance a political, ideological or religious cause.

The first of the five potential terror acts is the odd one out, as it involved a white Israeli man leaving an improvised bomb on the bonnet of a white Australian man’s ute in January, with a note threatening worse if he didn’t remove a Palestinian flag from his house showing his support for Gaza.

NSW police didn’t deem this a terror act. A constable was put in charge. It took eight weeks to arrest the offender, despite being known to police. He was then charged with stalk or intimidate, even though the victim pushed for terror charges. And the bombmaker copped just 12 months inside.

A white Australian man of European descent then went on a stabbing spree in a Bondi mall on 13 April. He killed six people, five women, and in the manner he conducted himself, NSW police were confident to say he was targeting women. The killer, Joe Cauchi, was shot dead by a police officer.

But within hours, the authorities announced this was not terrorism. And this is despite a number of similar events over recent years across the Anglosphere involving incels: far-right white men who can’t get laid, so they blame women and kill them. Canada has already prosecuted this as terrorism.

Two nights later, however, a 16-year-old Muslim Arab teen nonfatally stabbed a famous Assyrian Christian priest in Wakeley. And the NSW police commissioner bizarrely decided to publicly deem it terrorism at 1.30 am that night, just hours after the incident and prior to psychological assessment.

But that was not the end of it. A week later the Joint Counter Terror Team deployed 400 police officers to 13 locations to execute search warrants at mainly the family homes of Muslim teens, with seven arrested and five charged, who were all between the ages of 14 to 17.

The teen who stabbed the priest is up on a terrorist act, contrary to section 101.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), which carries life. And some of the others were charged with planning terror, against section 101.6 of the Code.

So, these Muslim teens, who didn’t appear to have any detailed plans, are facing life for talking about violent acts, like heaps of teens do.

The next act involved an Anglo Australia teen dressed in military uniform and a helmet strolling into Labor MP Tim Crakanthorp’s office with a knife, planning to behead him. But the 19-year-old then chickened out, and all his neo-Nazi, white supremacist and incel mates ribbed him online about it.

The office was in Newcastle. NSW premier Chris Minns was in town when it happened. The teenager was then charged with planning terror. But it seemed to be suggested that it could be downgraded due to mental health. There was no media terror scare, and the matter then quietly faded away.

The last terror incident is likely the most absurd. A 14-year-old white supremacist Australian boy who threatened to do a Christchurch at school last year and was charged with terrorism back then, dressed up in army camouflage last week, and then walked up and stabbed a Chinese man in the back.

This kid has already undergone the justice department’s deradicalisation program. Yet days after the stabbing, the assistant commissioner explained that NSW police couldn’t work out a specific ideology to allow them to deem his act as terrorism, as he rather holds a “salad bar of ideologies”.

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network outlines that the international law definition of terrorism is violence to advance a political position or outcome. AMAN considers Australian law should drop religious or ideological motivations from the definition so as to avoid the fiasco of late.

And the institutionalised bias in the criminal justice system ensures that only Muslims get charged over religiously motivated terrorism.

Just some good old boys

The five potential terror incidents of late taken together tend to tell the story of a reluctance to deem politically motivated acts of terror by white people as terror, which may have something to do with the acts of violence that lead to the establishment of the Australian state.

But no worries, NSW premier Chris Minns has gifted NSW police with the power to scan people using metal detectors, on the off chance a white guy may be carrying a knife to behead a parliamentarian or a Muslim boy may be in possession of a knife obviously to commit a terrorist act.

In order to catch the terrorists carrying kitchen utensils, police can set up a 12-hour-long wanding operation in a designated area, which must be a place where a knife crime occurred in the last six months.

This ridiculous law will allow NSW police to basically hassle individuals without a reasonable suspicion based on whatever. It will certainly first and foremost target First Nations people, then other people who don’t look the same as police, as well as anyone they don’t like the look of.

Brenton Tarrant put Australian white supremacist terrorism on the global map and exposed the transnational nature of these networks, yet the authorities still don’t consider the white man from Grafton a terrorist, even though he gunned down 51 Muslims, and left a manifesto giving reasons.

So, it’s this inability of the authorities to name the white supremacist threat, because it played such a pivotal role in the securing the continent and therefore is acceptable up to a point, that’s preventing them from dealing with this front on, which is also assuming they even want to put an end to it.