Waleed Aly, an Australian born to Egyptian parents, is supposedly the face of “moderate Islam”. However, he has also been accused of being part of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, of being a celebrity Muslim apologist, and other support for radical Islam. He writes this piece
Focus on terror threats a convenient distraction from climate change
Something illuminating always happens when terrorism and climate change are juxtaposed. It’s just that you need to remember to see it.
Take the past week, when variously our state, territory and federal governments agreed to introduce a suite of new counter-terrorism laws, while the Turnbull government reached such a point of paralysis on climate change that it even hinted it wouldn’t proceed with the clean energy target for which it has spent months laying foundations.
The contrast could hardly be starker. Extending the limits of counter-terrorism legislation in Australia is now a frictionless process. The really attentive might notice the odd squeak of concern about civil liberties, but it carries little public weight and even less political momentum, so legislative change just happens. Climate change, meanwhile, is not just beset by friction, it’s positively jammed. Even modest suggestions – and there is good analysis suggesting the Finkel report’s clean energy target is environmentally inadequate – become politically untenable. Consequently, nothing much happens.
This continues on and on and on. What Aly really wants is for the Australian government to stop spending so much time dealing with the real threat of Islamic terrorism, and switch to the fake issue of Hotcoldwetdry. One has to wonder what the real motivation here is.
