From Gaza to Australia: Politics of Deflection After Every Islamist Violence
This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia.
Once again, terror has struck Australia’s Jewish community. In the aftermath, a familiar argument has surfaced in the media: that only a handful of individuals, three people out of hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, carried out this act of extreme violence, and that the wider Muslim community has nothing to do with it. This assertion is repeatedly offered as a moral and religious defense and, on the surface, appears valid.
However, what is conveniently overlooked is that celebrations and open approval of this massacre are visible across sections of the Muslim world, particularly on social media and in private conversations. Alongside this, there has also been what can only be described as cosmetic condemnation and performative solidarity, expressed through slogans such as “Islam is against violence” and “Islam condemns this.”
In this process, the victims cease to be those who lost their lives. Instead, Islam, the religion itself is positioned as the primary victim, and the public energy shifts toward defending the religion rather than mourning the dead.
This raises a more uncomfortable but necessary question. Why does this phenomenon recur? Why does violence against Jewish civilians provoke not only silence but, in some quarters, open approval? Unless this question is confronted honestly, beyond politically correct language and defensive posturing, the cycle of denial, hypocrisy, and repetition will continue, costing more lives and deepening hatred across communities.
In the aftermath of this horrific attack on civilians, another familiar narrative has been foregrounded. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the fact that a Muslim saved people during the attack and that another Muslim stood up against the Islamist terrorists. The issue, however, is not whether a Muslim acted humanely in the face of inhuman violence. That is an expectation of any human being.
The more fundamental question is why the first individual was driven to carry out the attack in the first place. Until this question is addressed honestly, there is little meaning in celebrating the second act of resistance against jihadist violence. Acts of courage during terror attacks deserve recognition, but they cannot substitute for a serious examination of the ideological and religious conditioning that produces such violence. Without confronting these roots, such narratives risk becoming distractions rather than pathways to solutions.
Each time such an attack occurs, a familiar defence is invoked: that this is not true Islam, that this is not the Islam followed by the vast majority of Muslims. While this may be factually correct, it leaves a deeper and more unsettling question unanswered.
Why are these acts of terror repeatedly carried out in the name of Islam? This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia. Genuine introspection is not an attack on faith. It is a necessary condition for preventing its distortion into an instrument of violence.
Until this question is faced squarely, moral disclaimers will continue to ring hollow and fail to address the root of the problem.
Arfa Khanum Sherwani, described the Bondi Beach attack as Islamist terrorist violence targeting a peaceful gathering. In response, she was subjected to sharp criticism from sections of the Muslim intelligentsia. She was accused of liberal hypocrisy, of playing into the hands of the West, and of immaturity, among other charges.
This reaction is revealing. It shows how even naming and condemning violence carried out in the name of Islam provokes hostility rather than introspection. The focus shifts away from the crime itself and toward discrediting the individual who dares to call it out.
If thirteen or fifteen people are killed in the name of any ideology, that ideology must be subjected to scrutiny. The problem lies not with those who identify and condemn ideological violence, but with the refusal to examine the ideas that legitimize it. The instinct to silence criticism rather than engage with it reflects a deeper discomfort with accountability.
Many argue that such attacks are a consequence of the war in Gaza and Israel’s military actions. However, this particular attack targeted Jews in Australia, was carried out by a man of Pakistani origin, and occurred on Australian soil. It had no direct connection to the conflict in Gaza.
Until recently, some of our left-liberal circles argued that the attack of 7 October was justified, claiming it was inevitable because seventy-five years of history lay behind it. Even if one were to accept the relevance of historical context, a basic question remains unanswered. What had Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia done to people living far away in Pakistan to provoke such violence?
Yet the attack exposes something more troubling. The Gaza conflict is increasingly being conflated and weaponised to justify hostility toward Jewish communities across the world. Political anger over a distant war is redirected into hatred against civilians who have no role in that conflict.
This is deeply concerning. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” can easily be stripped of political context and transformed into rhetoric that legitimises indiscriminate violence. What begins as a political position risks mutating into a justification for collective punishment and terror.
This slippage between protest and violence must be recognized and confronted before it becomes normalized, and the texts that give moral justification to Muslims to carry out such attacks such as Sahih Bukhari’s Hadees in which Prophet Mohammed reported to have said that ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
What it does require is a responsible, contextual explanation of such texts—how they emerged in specific historical circumstances, how classical scholars understood their limits, and why they cannot be mechanically or morally applied to contemporary civilian life.
Islamic history itself offers clear counterpoints to extremist readings. Jewish–Muslim collaboration was not an anomaly but a lived reality: the Jewish physician who served Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi, or the Jewish neighbour of the great scholar Abdullah bin Mubarak, are reminders that coexistence, trust, and shared civic life were integral to Muslim societies. These realities stand in direct contradiction to modern attempts to universalise selective texts into timeless mandates of violence.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.
