A former senior intelligence analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Dr David Wright-Neville, has said in a radio interview that the threat of terrorism, which for a time was decreasing, is now increasing. “I really think we’re on the cusp of some very unpredictable and dangerous events in the world.” Where is the threat coming from? A variety of sources he thinks, ranging from Islamic extremists, to extremist right-wing groups, Christian fundamentalist groups, extremist environmental groups, and the like. There is a list of terrorist attacks in Australia in the extract below, and as I read it, most of the terrorists are, well, multicultural.
Anyway, point taken, and matters will get much worse as the West embraces supporting wars across the planet. Australia is not going to be spared. There is no end of threats that such groups could conduct, but most people seen blissfully unaware of the dangers.
“A foreign affairs analyst has warned that Australia is “on the cusp” of a resurgence in terrorism, describing the current global environment as the “scariest” he’s seen in the past 20 years.
Dr David Wright-Neville, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Office of National Assessments until the early 2000s, told 3AW radio host Neil Mitchell on Monday that since 9/11 the terror threat has been “receding” but there were signs it was building again.
Asked by Mitchell what he thought was the “scariest” time in the past 20 years, Dr Wright-Neville replied it was “probably now, I’d have to say”.
“I really think we’re on the cusp of some very unpredictable and dangerous events in the world,” he said.
“I don’t like the dynamics that are playing out – to me they resonate with the past, and I think we’ve lost a lot of the learnings we’ve had from the past. So that frightens me. I think what we’re dealing with we only deal with temporarily, we just push it under the carpet, we push it onto the next generation but unfortunately they invariably come back in a much more vicious way.”
Dr Wright-Neville said since the 9/11 attacks authorities had “come to terms with the risk that was posed to the world”.
“I think a lot of our responses to 9/11 were ill thought-out, they were kneejerk responses and probably worsened the situation in the short term,” he said.
“But over time I think we’ve learned from our responses and the terrorism threat has certainly been receding. Anyone who’s a student of terrorism knows you shouldn’t be complacent because it tends to go in waves. At the moment I think we’re at the bottom of a wave, but there is evidence that it’s beginning to build again and in the next few years we’re probably likely to see a resurgence of terrorist violence.”
He predicted that it would come from “different sources, not necessarily Islamist terrorism but terrorism from extremist right-wing groups, Christian fundamentalist groups, extremist environmental groups and so on”.
“It’s always been a feature of human history, unfortunately it probably always will be,” he said.
He noted the recent elections of right-wing figures including Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Georgia Meloni in Italy, saying it signified a “resurgence of populism”.
“I think that the danger here is that it symbolises a deeper process at work, and this is what worries me about the future,” he said.
“We seem to be sliding into a kind of solipsism, and what I mean by that is there is this view that the only reality is my reality, that your reality is irrelevant. We see this play out in the Middle East at the moment where supporters of Israel often ignore what the Palestinians are going through, and the Palestinians tend to ignore what the Israelis have gone through. So they tend to talk past each other, there is only my reality, and I will invent any facts that I need to only justify my reality.”
Dr Wright-Neville suggested this “slide into solipsism, and we see it evident here as well, is really dangerous”.
“It closes off empathy, it closes off the possibility of negotiation, and it leads to the polarisation of views,” he said. “There is this process underway and that worries me about the future and certainly it’s an ingredient that is ripe for the resurgence of more violent forms of terrorism whether from the right or the left.”
In October 2002, 202 people, including 88 Australians, were killed in the Bali bombings carried out by Jemaah Islamiah, a South-East Asian jihadist organisation linked to al-Qaeda.
It was single largest loss of Australian life in an act of terror.
Australia has experienced sporadic terror attacks in the years since.
In 2014, ISIS-inspired gunman Man Monis took 18 hostages in Sydney’s Lindt Cafe in a 17-hour siege that left Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson dead. Months earlier, teen terrorist Numan Haider was shot and killed after stabbing two officers outside Endeavour Hills police station in Melbourne.
In 2015, schoolboy Farhad Khalil Mohammed Jabar shot and killed police accountant Curtis Cheng outside NSW Police headquarters in Parramatta and in 2016, Ihsas Khan chased and repeatedly stabbed his neighbour Wayne Greenhalgh in Minto, southwest Sydney, while yelling “Allahu Akbar”.
In 2017, two teens aged 15 and 16 stabbed Caltex service station worker Zeeshan Akbar to death in Queanbeyan, just outside Canberra, before scrawling “IS” on the window in the man’s blood.
The same year, Yacqub Khayre took an escort hostage and killed receptionist Kai Hao at a serviced apartment complex in Brighton, Melbourne, before dying in a shootout with police.
In 2018, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali went on an ISIS-inspired stabbing rampage in Melbourne’s CBD, killing beloved restaurateur Sisto Malaspina and seriously wounding two others before being shot dead by police.
And last December, Christian extremists Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train ambushed four police officers at a property in Wieambilla, Queensland, killing Constable Matthew Arnold and Constable Rachel McCrow, and their neighbour Alan Dare.
Australian police and intelligence agencies have foiled many more planned attacks, including public beheadings, bombings and mass shootings.
Terrorism expert Dr Ran Porat from Monash University said Australia faced the persistent threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, fuelled by “several organisations and individuals … working to spread around anti-western, anti-Jewish, Iranian-produced propaganda”.
“The infrastructure exists in Australia – preachers, imams – they encourage people to go and do something, they play around with not being too obvious but everyone understands the message,” he told news.com.au.
Dr Porat said there were “several reasons why it had not exploded”.
“One is good monitoring and good co-operation between Australian authorities and external ones like America and Israel,” he said, noting the Israelis foiled at least one attack in 2017.
“Another element is some organisations are trying to create moderate programs [clarifying that] these people are distorting Islam. Third, it’s a numbers game. We have a big cluster of people from Islamist backgrounds in Sydney and Melbourne, but not as big as in say America.”
But Dr Porat said there had been a “quite substantial and frightening jump in anti-Semitic events” since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas conflict.
“I myself witnessed violence and slogans against Jews in the streets,” he said.
Earlier this month, the federal government announced it had approved 860 temporary visas for people in Gaza seeking to flee the war between Hamas and Israel, sparking security fears.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought to downplay concerns raised by the Coalition that corners “were cut”, saying visas being offered to Palestinians with close links to Australia had been subject to appropriate security checks.
Dr Porat said he trusted the “rigorous” Australian vetting process and was “not against giving people refuge when they’re in trouble”.
“I’m not worried about these 800 people, I’m worried about the undercurrents going on for years in Australia, on social media and institutional media, that incite violence,” he said.
“Those undercurrents are what we see now unleashed in very scary events.”
The Australian government currently lists the National Terrorism Threat Level as “possible”.
“This is because there are a small number of people in Australia and overseas who want to cause Australia harm,” it says.
In March, Australia’s top spy confirmed neo-Nazis were becoming “more emboldened” but said religiously motivated extremism remained the principal threat.
ASIO boss Mike Burgess was reacting to comments by the Prime Minister that “for some time” right-wing extremism had posed the strongest identified threat to Australia’s security.
Appearing before a Senate estimates hearing, Mr Burgess said neo-Nazis were staging public displays with more frequency but monitoring these groups still didn’t form the bulk of his organisation’s caseload.
“It’s a sign that those groups are more emboldened and able to come out publicly in their recruitment to push their what they believe in and recruit to their cause,” he said. “Does that mean there’s been an increase in the numbers of them? I don’t necessarily see that correlation.”
He revealed ASIO’s counter-terrorism investigation caseload dedicated to ideologically-motivated extremism, including the neo-Nazi movement, had grown over the past seven years from 5 per cent to about 30 per cent.
But the principal threat remained religiously-motivated extremism, taking up 70 per cent of the organisation’s workload, Mr Burgess said.
Dr Porat agreed Islamist terrorism was still “much bigger” purely by the numbers.
“It’s a numbers game, and it’s also a question of accessibility,” he said.
“Extreme right-wing terrorists are horrible and their number is too high, but they are still marginal compared to the many active terrorists in the Middle East and their outreach around the world – Iran and Iraq are full of all sorts of militias, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Africa there are all sorts of armed extremist groups that commit terror out of the news cycle.”
He was also sceptical that radical environmental groups might commit terror attacks.
“They are not violent people by nature, they don’t sanctify death as an ISIS-like organisation like Hamas,” he said. “It if happens it’s going to be possibly isolated – a black swan event.””