 It's very difficult for us, I think, in a country which is largely and in a world where some would say is increasingly secular, to think of sectarianism as a security threat. The first census in Australia, 0.4% of the population stated that they had no religion. In the last census, that was 22%. In New Zealand, that was 35%. So in Western established countries, secularism, in fact a belief in no God, is on the increase in proportional terms. But conversely, increasingly sectarianism is being seen as a genuine security threat for Australia. And I'll cover a few issues tonight with the caveat that an issue like this is always quite difficult for researchers to do because some of the detailed tactical level knowledge is classified. So what researchers can get hold of is normally open source material. And I'm sure there are some people here in the audience that would have greater depth of knowledge and more current knowledge and some of the stuff that will be presented here today. And if I'd welcome any comments that any of those people might have. Now it might be quite difficult to understand why I would open a lecture on this subject with a view of Waverly Cemetery in Sydney and it's not just because of its water views, but it's to give people an idea that in the not too distant history, sectarianism was a very live issue in Australia, but for a different reason. That photograph there, for those of you who don't know it, which most of you don't, I imagine, is the largest cenotaph and memorial to the Irish independence outside of Ireland and it sits in Waverly Cemetery, it was built in 1898. Sectarianism was for a large part of Australia's early history a very live security issue because Catholicism tended to be identified with Irishness and Irishness tended to be identified with nationalist tendencies. And that cenotaph there is the re-interment site of Michael Dwyer who was also known as a chief of Wicklow and in the 1798 rebellion was one of the leading Irish rebels. He was gave himself up to the British on the understanding that he would be shipped to America but Perphidius Albion sent him to Australia instead and he was a free man when he came when he finished up here and he was buried in what is now Devonshire Street next to Central Station. In 1898 on the 100th anniversary of the 1798 anti-British rebellion, Michael Dwyer and his wife were taken out of the ground in Devonshire Street and re-interred in Waverly Cemetery. There were 100,000 people lying in the streets of Sydney to see his casket go past and that was in the city of 450,000 people and just to emphasise the religious nature of this he was deliberately taken out of the ground and held in St Mary's Cathedral on Holy Thursday night of Last Supper and taken to the cemetery on Easter Sunday in 1898. So the resurrection of Irish nationalism wedded very closely with Catholicism but it's not just an 1898 cenotaph because if you go around the back the names of Irishmen who died in the 1916 Easter Rebellion is also on the back and underneath that are the names of the IRA members who died in the hunger strike in May's prison in the 1970s. So very evocative and very religious in its own way and in 1918 and 1919 some loyalty leagues were set up in Australia because there was a fear that the increasing Irish Catholic population would dilute British Protestant values. There were loyalty leagues set up in South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. They didn't last very long but they're indicative that Irishness and Catholicism were seen to be antithetical to Australian values which were British values. Now as well as sectarianism the concept of foreign fighters is not unusual to Australia and those of you in the audience who are Canberrans which I imagine all of you would instantaneously I hope know that that is in Yarra-Lamla and it's a monument to the 70 Australians who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Now it hazard a guess there's not going to be a monument to Australian fighters in Syria but it indicates it's a different nature of foreign fighter. By and large with one exception they were ideologues, socialists, communists, trade union members, some medical staff who saw in the advance of fascist forces of General Franco a force that had to be stopped because it was as an it was an expansionist ideology and history proved them right. Three thousand people greeted some of the returnees on the docks in Sydney when they came back from Spain and curiously is a kind of historical anecdote. One person a graduate from St. Joseph's College Hunters Hill fought on the side of Franco's forces because he saw the nationalists as godless communists and he fought as a Catholic believing that his Catholic identity meant he had to fight for General Franco's forces. He never returned to Australia and in fact he joined the Royal Air Force and died as an aerial gunner in 1940. Fast forward to 1972 and something a bit more serious and with a bit more resonance to today. That rather blurry photo up there shows 19 members of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood, 15 of whom were Australian, all of whom did their own form of military training in New South Wales and then went to Germany in a rather quixotic adventure believing that they could infiltrate into former Yugoslavia and instigate a rebellion and the Croatian people would rise up and create Croatia. Never actually happened, strangely enough, 15 and we think that all of the Australians were killed over the period of a couple of weeks by Yugoslav forces, three were sentenced to death in trial in Belgrade and one 20-year-old was sentenced to 20 years in prison purely because of his age. Now because of Croatian, we don't know their religion but it's probably safe to assume that they're all Catholic but their Catholicism was not the reason they went to fight in former Yugoslavia. It was a national identity, not a religious identity. And this is one of the issues that we need to really look at. So fast forward to the 21st century as we are all only two well aware. We have a new set of 21st century foreign fighters and they are qualitatively and quantitatively different from foreign fighters and view of sectarian identity that has come before. Now what motivates them? There is no one reason and as we will discover there is no one solution but I think most of you at various points of time would have heard on the radio a selected spokesperson or through the newspaper that person A went to Syria to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Syria. Now there is a good reason why they use that exact phrase because of the foreign incursions and recruitment act which makes it illegal to go or provide assistance to somebody fighting in a foreign country unless you are providing humanitarian assistance. It doesn't say what form of humanitarian assistance that you are providing, you have to show no proof of it. So if you go and you don't appear as a fighter it is very difficult to get a conviction. So when people say they are going to provide humanitarian assistance I tend to take it with a grain of salt for this reason. Now the independent national legislation security monitor, national security legislation monitor has picked up on this and one of his recommendations in the last couple of months is for an amendment to the bill is to amend the nature of humanitarian assistance that you can get away from being prosecuted so long as you are providing humanitarian assistance through a recognised humanitarian body that might be one of the standing bodies we are all familiar with or it might be through a body that has tax exempt status in Australia so it has had some kind of oversight placed on it. So probably in the next few months that will pass and you will be far less likely to hear somebody saying they died providing humanitarian assistance and if they do then the owners will be on them to describe what the humanitarian organisation was that they were providing assistance through or to. So what are some of the other reasons? Religion is the obvious and significant motivating factor there is no real getting away from this and when you look at sectarian conflicts in the past it has always been religion has been part of the mix but by no means all of the mix. It is a motivating factor rarely the motivating factor. In some instances it is but it is normally mixed up with other issues of identity. National identity nationalism is a very powerful tool and your religion might be part of your national identity but it is not necessarily the only reason ethnicity is another motivating factor sometimes religion is combined with that. So religion and sectarian identity might be part of it but it is really the only part of it and you will often hear in some of the justification for some youth going that they need to fight against oppression which is always very relative and loaded term but it is religiously significant and a motivating factor and probably for those who are religiously committed the largest the most significant motivating factor. The second one there which is a religious issue about the desire to implement the Islamic state is a much less much weaker motivating factor or a motivating factor in far fewer of the people. It will be very interesting to see now with the Islamic state or ISIS's proclamation of a colour fate whatever that means whether this issue becomes more of a motivating factor in the months ahead. Some ethnic affinity to the conflict being waged now there is a strong argument that one of the reasons more Australians at least are heading to Syria is they have an affinity with the country besides the religious significance of Bilal Hasham the fact that you are next to Lebanon where the majority of the Australian Muslim population comes from gives you an affinity that you wouldn't have had in say Bosnia or Somalia or other hotspots and lastly in some cases most significantly there is that issue of identity how you identify yourself and your religious identity becomes much more powerful because you fail to identify with the country in which you live for a variety of reasons you might be poorly educated haven't been able to secure the kind of job that you want your family has never been able to give the education in the classic immigrant sense where you advance the next economic level and become more integrated in the society you become on society's periphery and religion and a calling and a belief to fight against oppression gives you exactly the kind of identity that you crave and a relevance in broader society that you never had before that can be a strong motivating factor familiar links as we'll see is also tied in with that and probably out of all of those reasons and it's a grab bag of reasons that last one is the one that is the most difficult to override or to argue against now some of the so as I said before the issue of how people are motivated and the public reasons and the real reasons the person up there I was the first Australian to die in Syria Shaikh Mustafa Majub in August 2012 if you look at the photo on the left he fits the narrative that his family and others gave that he died in a rocket attack that hit the mosque that he was in providing humanitarian assistance to the poor oppressed people of Syria so a very good narrative and the kind of narrative that could attract other people or you could believe the picture on the right which is allegedly Shaikh Mustafa Majub as a fighter in Syria where some sites said that he died during an attack leading his group of armed men that doesn't fit with the narrative of humanitarian assistance that his family and closer community would like portrayed Roger Abbas man on left again killed in crossfire in a refugee camp providing humanitarian assistance refugee camps never named humanitarian assistance he was providing never named and the Islamic Council of Victoria said that he left on his own to provide humanitarian assistance counter to that narrative is the fact that he was allegedly fighting for Jabhat al-Nusra and the man on his right under his training partners at the same gym in Melbourne who allegedly left at the same time as him so he didn't go alone was also killed in Syria Sami Salma Ahmed Musalli on the left and Yusuf Ali and his 22 year old wife Amira some of you may have remember that story both again had personal links both were street preachers in Sydney Yusuf a convert Ahmed of Lebanese background but again connected and allegedly set to Syria with the assistance of Hamdi al-Qudsiy who has been awaiting trial for facilitation and this last group which I mentioned before the people who sit on the periphery of society in which they are whose identity has waxed and waned until they found what they believe in as view will have seen screenshots of the man on the left Khalid Sharoof who's already done four years jail Australia for plotting terrorist attacks and the man on the right Muhammad el Omar by the firm allegedly fighting for ISIS Muhammad el Omar senior his uncle currently doing 21 years in the big house for plotting terrorist attacks and his brother Ahmed convicted for the Hyde Park riots and allegedly the 18 year old who blew himself up and killed five share in Baghdad but had familial links with Khalid Sharoof and the Sharoof family again this is probably the last of those groups that we spoke about their motivation a lack of identity in identifying with the host country and they found a cause that suited them this is just a brief slide it's incomplete just because one of the bit problems with doing this kind of open source research just to give people an idea of Australians have been killed it's an incomplete as I said and the year they were killed just to very difficult if you're talking about potentially 60 Australians who are fighting in Syria 150 Syria Iraq 150 providing assistance which are the publicly given numbers perhaps 10 to 20 who've returned we don't know all of their backgrounds in open source so all we can go off is the 12 to 13 that we know about here and the things that tend to fall out to you ethnicity this is and one of the reasons why this issue is quite different to others because it's very hard to pin down ethnicity is not necessarily a motivating factor you can see there's a majority of Lebanese but you would expect a majority of Lebanese largest population but we've got Turks fighting in an Arab country we've got Australian converts allegedly members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula killed in Yemen we've got converts in Syria so ethnically a mixed group all young and joining different groups now that might not be their choice it might be the fact that what a facilitation network they'll put into that's where you end up and you really had no choice some you might have may have gravitated to once you cross the border but it's very difficult to make definitive statements about the backgrounds of people because this current threat encompasses a different mix and to add to that the two people who are awaiting trial on Hamdi al-Qudzi is Palestinian for facilitation and one of the facilitators but who has also stopped at the airport on the way to Syria was Somali so again another ethnicity thrown into the mix cognizant of the time now what makes this a bit different to those previous issues of foreign fighters or even what makes it more attractive taking away the geographic and ethnic attraction because of the Arab population as you've seen there being Arab doesn't necessarily guarantee that you're going to end up in in Syria fighting one of the most powerful tools and this is one of the focuses for the rest of the talk is Genway jihadists the power of social media not only the power of social media but the inability of community leaders in Australia in particular to address the nature of the threat and to address the medium by which this threat is being transmitted to citizens in this country now those all of you will know the traditional kind of powers and ways to counter violent extremism that we've been undertaking increasing large number of withdrawals of passports there's prosecutions which haven't yet gone to court but people have been charged and I'll be going to court the next few months so violence all the traditional powers that are open to government and within the community countering violent extremism programs youth forums traditional interaction and make no doubt the clerical community Islamic clerical community in places like Sydney and Melbourne are very active at the local level in dissuading youth from traveling to Syria so they're not inactive my argument as you'll come on to is they don't understand modernity and how you get the messaging across it's a leadership issue it's not an activity issue because they're doing plenty of action just misdirected action hopefully this first video is one of the leading places looking at radicalization on the internet is Kings College in London and the Guardian put a very I'd recommend you look at this whole video in future in your alone time but I'll just show you first couple of minutes because it goes to that fact about why Syria and increasingly Iraq is so different to other theatres of conflict it's public it's immediate and you're really living the problems in close to real time and in the social media environment groups like Jabir al-Nusra groups like ISIS in particular produce high quality social media videos real-time tweets and really understand the target audience they use Arabic speakers to attract Arabs Turkish speakers to attract Turks and as you see in this and some of you will have seen they also use native English speakers to attract westerners okay even just the production values in that if you want to join the jihad jihad there looks pretty good there's a nice green background you're not in crappy desert all your clothes are very clean weapons are clean it all looks quite nice really this the kind of attention to detail that they put in those kind of videos it's not the harsh desert background people have been on operations for weeks it's pleasant it's serene it's kind of thing that you want to do but where the Australian clerical Muslim leadership has been failing to lead has been in responding to that kind of stuff in the same medium in which it's being presented in community meetings and in forums you get a few people at a certain point in time but you don't get lots of people repetitively that listen to your message and more importantly argue against it in a very unequivocal way using religiously qualified people and I just show you briefly this next video is put out the that video that you just saw before where there was the one Australian talking about used guys there was another Australian at the other end and there were three British South Asian Muslims so the UK had as more if not greater interest than Australia did but in contrast to Australia's clerical leadership this is what our group called Islam online put together in the UK very shortly after that recruitment video was was outlined so quite a slick video you'd have to agree unequivocal you'd have to agree it's very rare that in a public discourse in this country I've heard ISIS described by our clerical leadership as cowboys or terrorists but very publicly described there and more importantly three Sunni clerics two Shia clerics South Asians a mix just showing the unity it can be a very powerful message will that influence any potential jihadis who knows but you're out there in the same medium that they are so you're competing against the message which is important thing very very difficult to ever understand what influence you have but you can guarantee if you're not out there you have zero influence when I say out there I mean in the social media out there people quoted that Moses Serentino who's just returned to Australia as the third most influential ideologue for Jabot al-Nusra when you work out how they came up with that it was based on the number of hits on his sites that number of hits doesn't equate to influence and you can probably guarantee half of those are from security agency so I don't think they're necessarily going to be influenced by it and take probably a quarter is probably from academics so you're probably whittling down the numbers so very difficult just because somebody has lots of hits on their site to say they're extremely influential they're influential if they get a person from point A to fight at point B very difficult to prove that just because you've got hits on your site doesn't mean you're influential in the same way that I don't know how influential that video has been but it's pretty impressive video in the same way that the recruitment video was impressive it's cross-cultural it's cross-sectarian and it's unequivocal in contrast what's the Australian response being well it depends where you go in the social media world virtually anonymous Grand Mufti of Australia grand title that's his Facebook page if you scroll down some of the comments people are asking the Grand Mufti if you could please put on some of his comments on his Facebook in English or at least translate his Arabic ones because they'd like to read it but they can't not very influential he has been silent on the issue of Syria very difficult in some of the communities where he's Egyptian so not same nationality as the two largest Muslim communities you know in Sydney the Lebanese and the Turks so he has some issues there but so he sometimes thinks he comes from a position of weakness and he doesn't have the authority so he's got to be very careful about what he says I would argue the opposite you don't get a following until you lead you can't lead from behind the Australian Australian National Imams Council again very static website they issued a press release they get together in forums about twice a year they issued a press release 18 months after Sheikh Mustafa Majzoub died telling people not to go to Syria what happened the 18 months in between is the question why the day after reports came that Sheikh Mustafa Majzoub died wasn't the clerical community out there saying if these reports are true yeah it's haram and giving the religious reasons for why you are not to do it as opposed to hiding behind a fig leaf of humanitarian assistance a member of the Australian national from the Lebanese community 18 years old blew himself up about a week ago killed five people in Baghdad if that's not a cause for concern that's not a cause for comment I really don't know what is but if you look at the press releases on the Australian National Imams Council you'll find no reference to it but you will find references to the pernicious invasion of Israel into Gaza and a press release saying that the head of the New South Wales police counterterrorism department gave them unfair criticism by saying they weren't doing enough Lebanese Muslim Association again static website Lebanese Muslim Association any mention of the seven Lebanese have been we know of the being killed in Syria or the one Lebanese Australian who blew himself up and killed five Shia nada however there is a press release about the Israeli invasion of Gaza from the Lebanese Muslim Association it's this kind of inability to grapple with real live issues that affect the broader community in the kind of medium that those messages are going out i.e. social media that confines the clerical leadership to near irrelevance they attend forums they do community engagement at the local level they are very active as I said but you need to be public about it has to be zero tolerance and it has to be zero tolerance from the start what happens if there's another theater of operations and then the Islamic clerical leadership says no for this one it's forbidden because people obviously say yeah but what about Syria you never said it was forbidden there why is it not forbidden there but now forbidden there it's a whole notion that if you allow any light in between the arguments then in some way you're weak in your own argument somewhere further down the track and I don't think they truly understand a the gravity of the issue or b how to grapple with it the modern way that communications and the people are influenced not the old way which is the way they're still trying to do it okay so what are the consequences of all of this the terrorist threat in Australia from returning jihadis the only kind of academic study on this is thomas head hummers a Norwegian defense researcher who said you know one in nine people who fought overseas have plotted or have an intent to attack in the country which they come from but even he said it was very difficult to research he could only go off known attacks that happen in countries so that part of the equation was solid but he could only use the data of foreign fighters overseas that he knew about and obviously there are a lot more than he knew about so one in nine is based on the figures that he knew so the figures are actually smaller than that more like one in 15 one in 20 so the number of people there is a an academic view that you can intellectually disassociate yourself from your home your home country from the theater in which you're operating in you fight in Syria you come back to Australia you don't fight but if you're the government that's the most serious threat you have to legislate for the most serious threat not necessarily the most likely threat but obviously you will pick up military training but there's degradation of skills not everybody coming back some expert bomb maker many will not have ever seen an explosive device that will have fired a rifle or fired a few rockets getting from that level to be able to do detonate explosive device in Australia takes a significantly larger degree of training so not everybody is a potential bomb maker when they come back the longer term issues are probably the more important issues for two reasons one if you're somebody who's returned from Syria amongst some elements of the community unless you have been by the community leadership roundly criticised from the start for some people you'll be a role model you're a person of action you just didn't talk about things from during your hutbat on Fridays you went out and did something so for some people you are potentially an anti-roll model but more importantly I think in the long term the linkages that these people are going to make no Australians being killed by Islamist terrorists in Australia but over a hundred have been killed overseas by Somalis in Kenya by Indonesians in Bali and Indonesia by Saudis in America by South Asian British nationals in the UK those kind of plots take planning they also take planning that involves perhaps financial assistance from people perhaps travel assistance perhaps documentary assistance all these kind of facilitation networks they don't necessarily happen naturally but we are potentially creating 150 to 200 people who may have links established links in Syria and Iraq that might lie dormant for five 10 15 years until out of the blue somebody wants some financial assistance that you knew from your days back in Aleppo of course I'll provide it to you where that goes nobody knows and I think it's those linkages not the people running down George Street and Sydney shooting Naked 47 because that's not likely to happen but an Australian being killed overseas as a result of a plot that involved somebody at some stage who had connections with other people as a result of their service in Syria that's why they need to be identified it's needed why they need to be stopped from going in the first instance and again I don't think the Islamic clerical leadership understands this they think the threat is somebody running down George Street with a gun so they can calm that situation that's not the threat the threats are the linkages not necessarily the actions that these people are going to do okay so lastly have we failed you would have to ask yourself we have never had more foreign fighters overseas we have never had more people assisting foreign fighters overseas since 2011 we spent five million dollars or more than five million dollars on countering violent extremism programs they can take two views of that if we hadn't done those that's the subjective view if we hadn't done those the problem would be even greater but either way or the objective view that zero foreign fighters is what you're aiming for so 60 foreign fighters is unacceptable and 150 people assisting them is even more unacceptable so whether you take the subjective or the objective view it's a problem you can only do so so much more in countering violent extremism only legislate for so much and I come back to that central argument which I kind of leave on is that the one missing element of this is community clerical leadership and a clerical leadership that is very public clerical leadership that is cross-cultural because one of the issues is a disaggregated community leadership you need to have videos like that imams online video that speaks to the population in a medium that they understand in a language that is inclusive that is unequivocal and the unequivocal nature is probably the most important there has to be zero tolerance because the future challenge is that over the last 10 to 15 years the information revolution has meant that what's happening in Syria is beamed in either through the news or you can go on websites where you can see a uploaded vision of fighting an hour or two after it occurred it's visceral it's real it's very influential that's not what's happened in the last decade where are we going to be in the next five years how much more immediate is it going to be and how much easier is it for you to be a geographic it is geographic Australian and I mean by that stay in a one particular part of one particular city get your news feeds in your mother tongue with all its subjectivity from single sources and live on social media that just feeds the narrative that you've already implicitly have in yourself and it just confirms it for you if you don't have competing narratives coming at you from people that you respect law enforcement agencies and the Commonwealth if you're going to go and fight overseas you've already disregarded their direction so you're not going to listen to them you need religious guidance in an unequivocal way in the medium that reaches you no matter where you are and I'll probably leave it to that