A quick run down of relevant points:
Monis was already charged with being an accessory to the murder of his wife, and was somehow out on bail.
He was facing 40, yes forty, charges of indecent and sexual assault.
He had previously been convicted in 2009 of sending offensive letters to the families of deceased Australian soldiers.
It doesn’t say what his current immigration status was in Australia but he claimed asylum in 1996, and given the above didn’t seem to be making great efforts to integrate. I would expect and hope he never gained citizenship, but nothing would surprise me.
Yet despite all the above, he was still able to wonder around freely, procure gun and walk into the heart of Sydney’s business and financial district unchallenged. In Australia, a country where you can be fined for taking an apple across the desolate border between the states of South Australia and Western Australia.
The threat from terrorism is as nothing compared to the threat from our own stupid governments who have wasted billions and now seem eager to waste more running around Iraq and Afghanistan “fighting terrorism” and generally involving ourselves in the affairs of middle eastern countries we have nothing to do with, and yet at the same time take absolutely no meaningful steps to prevent an obviously dangerous lunatic from causing major problems.
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I’ve saved it off just in case. It appears, cursorily, to be letting him off lightly on account of his mental condition, whatever that was, rather than flagging him up as an evil effing bastard.
Yes, especially the “spiritual healing” guru con that Monis ran over a decade ago seems designed to paint him as mainly crazy. More emphasis should be placed, it seems to me, on the much more recent charge that he was complicit with his girl friend in the murder of his ex-wife.
But, the money quote comes from his former attorney – “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” Conditsis told the paper. The key word here being “ideology.”
What ideology might his lawyer have in mind? Certainly not radical Islam. Most coverage goes to great lengths to quote Muslim community leaders saying he wasn’t one of them. So what? Islam has little of the formal hierarchy and ordination standards that we are familiar with in various Christian denominations.
Even if we grant that Monis was mentally unbalanced, shouldn’t that have led to heightened scrutiny? The ranks of mass murderers are full of serious head cases (in polite society, one does not speak of evil, just mental illness). And, isn’t much of the propaganda from Al Qaeda, Taliban, IS, etc. aimed precisely at such vulnerable minds?
It seems from a lengthy Daily Mail story – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2874295/Police-investigate-Sydney-siege-gunman-calling-Brother-lone-wolf-fanatic-wider-terror-network.html – that Manteghi Bourjerdi (the name by which he was known in Iran) ran afoul of Iran’s Shia religious authorities for being too liberal a Muslim. This seems to have precipitated some difficulties for his wife and two daughters and led to his emigration to Australia where he received asylum in the mid-1990s.
In his early years in Australia, he styled himself Ayatollah Manteghi Bourjerdi and it seems to have taken until 2009 for the Shia clerical council in Australia to point out that no Shia clerics recognized him as such. Somewhere along the way he changed his name, ran the con game which may have been no more than a way to recruit sexual assault victims, acquired a new wife and two sons.
At least as late as 2001 he was still making statements consistent with his story of being driven out of Iran as a liberal, although he also intimated a connection to Iranian intelligence. Five or six years later he started sending those hate letters that ran afoul of Australian postal authorities.
If this guy was on the radar of the Australian counter-terror forces, they should have caught his recent announcement on his website of his conversion to Sunni Islam and pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and its caliph. This is the type of action that those in threat assessment refer to as preclusion. That is, it is a step which the subject under study takes which leaves him with no reasonable course but violence.
I trust it will be accepted that the people who just murdered more than a 130 people (including 80 children) in Pakistan were terrorists.
Although, doubtless, conspiracy theorists are already at work blaming the CIA, the Koch Brothers and (of course) “the Jews”. Is that going to be in “Taki’s” Spectator article on Friday Sean Gabb? After all – you would know. Not that I am saying that Mr Rantwell is Dr Gabb – they are, most likely, quite different people.
As for Afghanistan and Iraq – the attacks on the World Trade Centre (and so on) came before (not after) these events.
In reality Islam has been attacking the West since the 7th century AD – no century has passed without Islamic attack. Our governments are indeed stupid (I agree). and “nation building” in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.; as if most people there were nice and all one had to do was get rid of a few nasty “extremists”, is wrong headed (I agree again).
But to blame the victim (the West) for repeated attacks upon us, is Rothbardianism – and Rothbardianism was (and is) even more stupid than the governments of the West.
Hopefully no one is going to jump up saying (like Rothbard) that the victory of the Communists in Indochina in 1975 was a good thing – or (again like Rothbard) that the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 was justified.
Or (yet again like Rothbard) that the Nazis should not have been opposed by the West in World War II. Is that going to be in “Takis” next “Golden Dawn” inspired article Sean Gabb?
For government, failure is the reward – government gets to double down on the failed policies. There’s a symbiosis between governments and police and genuine criminals, one couldn’t exist without the other. By genuine criminals I mean those who aren’t bound by humane code of ethics in their dealings with other people. This “asylum seeker” could conveniently be left at large due to treaty obligations of International Law, all the while waiting to to go off like a unstable bomb. When he does, the SWAT swoop in and save the day and the press clamours for more laws to disarm to the general public.
War is the health of the state indeed.
Paul.
I wasn’t blaming anyone but the attackers for the attack, but to say that the victim, in this case Australia, could have prevented it without encroaching further on the liberties of ordinary Australians is a matter of recorded fact, from that hardly right wing nut job organisation the BBC. This man was a convicted criminal and known nut case who was on bail for the murder of his wife. No conspiracy, no blaming of Jews, just the simple bald fact that if the Australian legal system was serious about protecting people from “crime” then this act of “terrorism” would never have happened.
And I am neither Sean Gabb nor Murray Rothbard, but I can confirm that they are separate people, as am I.