I am utterly serious.

What we really don’t need is this kind of salivating; I shudder to think what front pages from tomorrow on will be like.

Look, I am quite convinced that our police and security people have done an excellent job today. I have read balderdash such as emanates from the self-styled “Islamic State” before – the whole Caliphate dream or nightmare, though back when I encountered it in 2004 it was slightly more rational and unaccompanied by a desire to behead any who didn’t conform to their demented take on Islam. Sure, I can be clever too and do all the usual tropes on how the stupid Yanks stirred up this whole hornets’ nest, and even further back how WWI and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the internal combustion engine and the need for oil etc. etc, Palestine etc. etc. But I really can’t be bothered at this point. Just read their shit, and weep. Judging from what I saw and read back in 2004, that’s authentic and also utterly insane.  So many on the “left” go out of their way in exercising their own grand narratives about Amerika and evil Capitalism that they take no notice of what these people ACTUALLY say and believe – stuff that no sane denizen of the 21st century, even on the hardest Left, can possibly ever want to come to pass.

OK, but these murderous dingbats are NOT typical of the 26% of the population of this planet who happen, in most cases through accident of birth, to be Muslim, or of the 3% or less of Australians who are Muslim. Sadly, it is again necessary to commend my 2008 post Irfan Yusuf’s book review and his response to a response.

So I agree wholeheartedly with NSW Police Commissioner Scipione:

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said the raids reflected “the reality of the threat we actually face”.

“You know it is of serious concern that right at the heart of our communities we have people that are planning to conduct random attacks,” he said.

“Today we work together to make sure that didn’t happen. We have disrupted that particular attack.

“Our police will continue to work tirelessly to prevent any such attacks but certainly can I stress that right now is a time for calm.

“We don’t need to whip this up.”

I even agree with Tony Abbott, as opposed to that fool Bernadi from South Australia who had his go earlier today; Tony Abbott quite pointedly said there was no need to “fret about people’s faith” or “fret about what people wear”.

See also Live blog: Senior Australian in Islamic State ‘ordered kidnappings and beheadings in Sydney and Brisbane’ and Anti-terror operation in Sydney and Brisbane ‘thwarted’ beheading plot.

But there is also something to be said for this, posted on Facebook the other day:

The next day

I posted the above in the heat of the moment. Just to balance a little: I commend Jim Belshaw’s post written last Sunday — Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Rationality, proportionality and the latest war on terror.

ISIL is a disease like Ebola, just less dangerous outside the epicentre. I am only guessing, but I imagine that the most that ISIL could kill in Australia in any one year with maximum effort and effect is significantly less than the number of road deaths in the same period. I wonder, then, why we are treating ISIL as though it were a case of bubonic plague in the days when we didn’t know what that plague was? 

We have to be careful about our cures. When the Australian Government raised the threat level to high, Australians did not know how too respond. What did it mean? What could we do?  The answer, of course, was nothing. And yet, at the same time, ASIO wanted more powers. So a heightened threat level added to the apparent case for those powers.

Also do read Waleed Aly:

… And it’s that thought that perhaps has the most to teach us in Australia. ISIL is not simply a group to be vanquished. It is not a fixed, finite, collection of people we can somehow control or eradicate. For us in Australia, it’s most dangerously a symbol: a brand a young man from Sydney can claim for himself; a flag in which he can wrap himself, and his proposed victim. For all its pretensions to statehood, the key thing is that it’s anything but. It exists in the mind as much as on land.

So it’s not the kind of thing we can simply destroy with military force. Modern terrorism doesn’t work that way. We keep killing “senior figures” in terrorist groups – indeed, it’s more than three years since we killed the most senior of them all – and nothing substantive changes. We tried to smash al-Qaeda. It fragmented, then morphed into a mass movement not truly under anyone’s direct control, with Osama bin Laden mostly a symbolic figurehead. Then it begat ISIL.

This yields a devilish problem: namely, that we are trying to confront a threat that exists nowhere in particular, and anywhere in theory…

Finally, there is no doubt that there has been much in Tony Abbott’s style too that has been more than necessarily inflammatory and impulsive. So I do worry about his personality and leadership. He seems to hanker after “war leadership” rather too much, but Churchill he ain’t! Julie Bishop has shown more wisdom at times lately.