You know how Abbott is just too appalling for words? How every single thinking Australian – and many others besides – are all cringing in horror at the evil clown act we have as Australian Prime Minister? Which is insulting to evil clowns?

You know how all these claims are kicking around social media about Tony Abbott’s brain, some of which have – but should not have – ventured into intellectual disability and mental health diagnosis territory? Because we simply can not fully comprehend the repulsive creepiness of this which was apparently democratically elected?

Yes, it is all questions. Tony Abbott is stupendously dense and revolting. But that is not the main problem. The key question we struggle with is this: how is it that a man who is an apparently legitimately elected leader of the country incapable of speaking sense? What the hell kind of system produces a head of government so gross and so hypocritical, so deceitful and so nonsensical? Abbott makes his nasty paterfamilias – the terror-mongering racist John Howard, a conscience-free zone who sowed the seeds for this disaster – seem like a relatively benign and harmless old man. What the hell is going on in this country?

There are four key areas of explanation, and all stem from the fact that Tony Abbott is a typical privileged white male of the most destructive and greedy kind. He is typical, yet extreme. Abbott represents an extreme point on the spectrum of what goes horribly wrong when elite white men continue to hold power, as white men have, for century upon century, lording it over – and profiteering in – human lives, among other imperialist abominations, of which slavery is but one example.

The first is Abbott’s Englishness. This is not about Abbott and his failure to renounce British citizenship before standing for Commonwealth Parliament. (As an aside, if Abbott did renounce his British citizenship prior to the first time he contested the seat of Warringah in 1994, you may colour me very very surprised.)

No, this is about Abbott’s imperial attitude to women and Indigenous people. It is about his utter disregard for our rights, his inability to understand that we are not only human but better humans than those who reproduce elitist power structures based on exclusion and greed.

Tony does not get this. He appointed himself Minister for Women and for Indigenous Affairs because of the same basic character flaw. As an English-born wannabe try-hard non-aristocrat, he follows in the footsteps of the old-school English elite. Abbott thinks that by declaring something so – a misogynist declaring himself the minister for women, for example – that the rest will simply fall into place. Because he said so. A typical linear elitist thinker, if we can call him a thinker at all.

This brings me to the next two of the four key areas that explain Abbott’s unfitness for office: his Catholicism. We need not spend too much time on it. That particular type of sectarianism is a thing of the past, thank goodness. Simply take all the observations about try-hard Tony, and multiply each by at least two, because Tony is not Church of England, but Tony is a wannabe non-aristocrat of the English-born variety.

Many of us whose ancestors were relatively early occupiers of this continent, and who rarely identify as any nationality other than Australian, are descended from the feckless second sons of the minor British aristocracy. The gamblers and womanisers and drunks. Those who missed out on primogeniture (probably just as well) and were sent to the colonies to become magistrates and police chiefs and senior bureaucrats because who better to lead a new nation than such characters? Who better to benefit from – and bequeath to their descendants – the riches of the stolen land?

Such is the pseudo upper-class English mind, and its mindless faith that blue blood – even said blood diluted to within an inch of its minor aristocrat concentrate by whiskey and miscegenation and interracial marriage – somehow trumps merit-based promotion, genuine leadership, local knowledge, and belonging to the land. This wholly untrue and ultimately disgusting elitism is how the LNP collectively thinks, and this is how someone like Tony Abbott ends up in power.

So Tony Abbott embodies an imperialist Aust-Brit mentality with its aristocratic pretensions; as well as embodying a Catholic-Brit try-hard attempt to be accepted by the protestant majority. This is bad enough, but Tony has two other flaws that feed into his way of speaking – his inauthentic and meaningless mendacity, that vision-free zone that lacks any global outlook, which in fact lacks any quality that a Prime Minister should display.

Abbott is still the Australian Prime Minister, difficult as that is to withstand. The first two explanations are historically based. The next two are current. Together with his gross and apparently incurable creepiness, the history and current afflictions represent a kind of quinella of incompetence and nastiness that no polity should endure. He is destroying the country.

In his Oxford days, Abbott was a boxer. He was an average student. He would not have been eligible for the Rhodes scholarship on which he famously went to Oxford university had he not eventually applied for Australian citizenship – in order to get the scholarship – and not before – we will always be a bunch of colonials to Abbott. The scholarship is designed for a renaissance man, exceptional in sport as well as in mind. Abbott is neither. I am sure I do not have to point out to anybody that an idiotic bully like Abbott is not a renaissance man. But he was nothing if not ambitious, and boxing was his chosen ‘sport’.

This is hardly surprising: fighting is all Abbott does. He can not build consensus, or form a coherent sentence, let alone a persuasive argument. His only achievements are reliant on the fact that he is a privileged white male who attended elite educational institutions, a path forged and paid for by parental and demographic wealth rather than individual ability of any kind. This is contrary to liberal ideology of course, but liberalism – like democracy itself – has always been by the propertied white male for the propertied white male.

Abbott likes to punch, literally and metaphorically, and it has got him to where he is, but that does not make him good at anything but punching. Disastrously for us, Abbott punched his way to the top in an organisation – the Liberal National Party – which rewards thuggery.

So Abbott can punch, but not very well. He took a lot of hits to the head. This is the third explanation for his imbecilic performance at the G20 in Brisbane this weekend, his partisan, parochial bullshit, his inability to rise to the occasion. Abbott is incapable of rising to any occasion for that matter – other than an election campaign (the 2013 version of which he is apparently still waging).

I am told by a colleague of a specialist sports injury professor and a retired wrestler that Abbott shows every sign of frontal lobe damage. The ahhh and umming. The unspeakable tongue thing. The lip smacking and man-handling. Yes, he is an unreconstructed sexist racist homophobe, but he is also incapable of retaining more than one thought at a time, or processing any input without assistance. No-one in need of this much neurological rehabilitation should be in his position.

The final problem relates to the point about Abbott the man who is incapable of processing thoughts. Affairs of state, geopolitics, the measures by which a civilised society shows its values – say, treatment of the vulnerable – are all beyond Abbott.

Abbott has a Chief of Staff who assumes all roles and delegation power over what assistance he will receive. This has been a monumental failure at every level except one. The one success is that Abbott got elected to the Prime Ministership.

Other than that, his first year in office has been a nightmare of incompetence, spin, cruelty and creepiness. We can not ignore the winking, lip-licking creepiness, because it rears its ugly head so often. Abbott has been spray-tanned and hair-dyed and botoxed to within an inch of his appearance, yet still he can not articulate a policy, or take the reins of government. He can spout three word slogans and bad-mouth the opposition – but this is to not take the reins of government at all.

I do not pretend for a moment that I think Tony Abbott was ever capable of any sort of statesmanship, or leadership, or anything other than his ugly bullying power-seeking self. He found his spiritual home in the Liberal Party, and it is by membership of the Liberal Party that he has become Prime Minister. But I do think that these four general points go some way to explaining just how low we have gone with this man in the Prime Ministerial seat. And what a crying shame it is that the Liberal Party is not motivated to be even slightly more true to its principles, simply because he is in power, despite the fact that liberalism is being trashed by Abbott and his cabinet, trashed beyond repair.

So here we are: the country run by an LNP coalition headed by a delusional misogynist, a racist homophobe; an elitist white male in thrall to an imperial past; driven by a sectarian history; a man so embarrassingly inarticulate he is both intellectually and spiritually incapable of putting together a warm or constructive sentence; who is also a bully and a liar; and who is unfit to hold public office.

Under the Migration Act 1958 (as amended) it has been confirmed that a womb is not an aircraft and ergo is an illegal maritime vessel that is to say a boat.

The Australian legal system reached a new low this week when a Federal Circuit Court judge refused to grant 11-month-old Ferouz Myuddin, born in Brisbane Mater Hospital, the right to apply for a protection visa. For the record, Brisbane Mater Hospital is in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, a large north-eastern state of the mainland of the continent of Australia.

ABC radio current affairs flagship PM provides a transcript of a dialogue between the host and a reporter outside the Federal Court in Brisbane.

According to the reporter Stephanie Smail:

“The judge accepted the Federal Government’s argument that the law states if asylum seekers enter Australia by any means other than an aircraft, they effectively arrive by boat. So even though he was born in Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, he wasn’t on the boat that his parents arrived on Christmas Island on, they were then transferred to Nauru, his mother was flown to Brisbane to give birth to Ferouz. Technically because they didn’t arrive by a plane, they’ve arrived by a boat.”

This was followed by apparent clarification of the “non-aircraft equals boat” business, which non-lawyers refer to as legal technicalities. We can assume that counsel used standard techniques of legal argument, and the judge used standard techniques of statutory interpretation. These are referred to as legal technicalities by non-lawyers. It is in fact how all common law becomes part of the common law.

The reporter then recounted some “interesting” judicial remarks. She was absolutely on the money to highlight these statements. The judgement is not yet online, but the remarks appeared to contain one of the most astonishing pieces of so-called legal reasoning that I have heard in a while. And that is from someone who works with the peculiarities of legalese – pronouncements passed off as legal reasoning – every day of the week.

“Interestingly the judge also told the court if he had granted Ferouz approval to apply for a protection visa or his lawyers, his family obviously – he’s a baby – that it might encourage other pregnant asylum seekers to enlist people smugglers and make the dangerous journey to Australia.”

This extraordinary manipulation of facts is not a new trick by the law. I fondly remember the High Court decision in Thomas v Mowbray [2007] HCA 33, where Jack Thomas (not the actor) was the first Australian to be subject to a control order under the 2004 LNP-induced terror hysteria. You might recall his nickname, Jihad Jack. It is an unwritten rule of Australian culture that brown people can not be in the headlines for too long without acquiring a casually racist and otherwise misleading nick name.

In Thomas v Mowbray, the High Court ruled that the expansion of the Commonwealth defence power under s. 51(vi) was constitutional on the basis of “notorious facts”. Notorious facts are not scientific facts, or empirical facts, or legal facts or legal fictions or, in fact, facts. Notorious facts are baseless claims. In this case, the baseless claims were accepted as notorious facts by a majority of the High Court bench – because terrorism. To not accept these baseless claims for which there was no evidence would be ‘September 10 thinking’. Gawd. The great Michael Kirby, of course, disagreed.

Some background:

The Migration Act 1958 (Cth) was drafted in the context of meeting our obligations under the Refugee Convention, which in turn was drafted in the aftermath of World War Two. Its articles reflect the collective conscious-stricken remorse of a world which had turned its back on the plight of Jews from Germany and eastern Europe.

The West had collectively refused entry to boatloads of Jews seeking refuge from persecution, including the British colonial governance in Palestine. The West then also collectively witnessed the liberation of the death camps, whether first-hand by members of the allied forces, or via newsreel. As such, there was an unprecedented impetus to assert our collective humanity and make a concerted effort to safeguard against genocide -and against blowing ourselves up.

The global response to the second world war forms the foundation of modern human rights law: the Nuremberg Trials and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration is formally codified in the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant of Economic and Cultural Rights (ICECR). Among the many other Conventions that followed the Universal Declaration, the Refugee Convention was one of the first. It facilitated the great post-war migration waves that saw the birth of modern multicultural Australia. Waves of migration to Australia are not new.

People have arrived here by boat from earliest times, now estimated at over 60,000 years ago. The next wave included British colonial invasion and occupation, Afghans with their camels allowed in to traverse the central desert, and the attractions of the gold rushes to people from all over the world, often remembered for the number of Chinese migrants.

Nevertheless, the contemporary era of migration to Australia and our modern multicultural state is traced to European migrants escaping post-war Europe. This was the beginning of the end of the White Australia policy, and political leadership makes a difference. Escape from war and persecution characterises subsequent waves of people arriving from Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is not to ignore the gradually increasing numbers of refugees escaping war and famine in Africa, particularly then-Sudan (now mainly South Sudanese refugees). African migrants typically arrive in Australia via the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Africans boarding boats are much more likely to head for Italy. This is the rub. Up until very recently, every wave of migrants to Australia, over tens of thousands of years, has arrived by boat.

There is an undeniably obvious reason for this. Australia is a very large island dotted around by lots of smaller islands. Until the invention and commercialisation and mass movement of people by aircraft, there was no other way to get here. There are no land bridges to Australia from any other country.

Our borders are clearly delineated, more so than the map markings across any other continent, even more so than islands such as the United Kingdom with its internal struggles, or archipelagos like Indonesia with its outlier cultures which retain independent identities. Even Japan has border disputes with Russia to this day. Possibly only New Zealand is comparable in terms of its borders, though its size and political decision-making (such as not to march lock-step with the USA on foreign policy and military adventurism) renders it far lower in profile in global terms.

So for millennia, by necessity, every person in Australia has reached the place by boat. Our current national political leadership has decided to reverse this reality. It is now unlawful to seek a protection visa, to seek refuge from persecution, even from countries where the Australian armed forces have participated in the destruction of your home and the killing of your family, unless your mode of arrival is by aircraft. The relevant definitions are found in section 5AA of the Migration Act 1958 (as amended).

Capital letter(s) after a section are usually a signifier of multiple amendments, which in turn signifies that the section governs a policy area that is contested and amended by successive governments. A political hot potato of the highest order, in other words, is what we find in these sections with capital letter amendments. This signifier puts paid to any notion that the law is objective or neutral, because it has been re-written and voted into law by politicians who can not agree on which ways to mobilise and exercise executive power over other people’s lives – nor cease to meddle therein.

This is what produced the absurd injustice that saw a federal circuit court judge deem a baby born in Brisbane to have arrived in Australia by sea:

MIGRATION ACT 1958 – SECT 5AA
Meaning of unauthorised maritime arrival
(1) For the purposes of this Act, a person is an unauthorised maritime arrival if:
(a) the person entered Australia by sea:
(i) at an excised offshore place at any time after the excision time for that place; or
(ii) at any other place at any time on or after the commencement of this section; and
(b) the person became an unlawful non-citizen because of that entry; and
(c) the person is not an excluded maritime arrival.
Entered Australia by sea
(2) A person entered Australia by sea if:
(a) the person entered the migration zone except on an aircraft that landed in the migration zone
[s. 245A]: “aircraft” includes aeroplanes, seaplanes, airships, balloons or any other means of aerial locomotion.

This particular piece of weirdness means that a baby born in a major maternity hospital in a state capital is deemed at law to have arrived by boat. Had Farouz Myuddin thought to arrive in Australia by air balloon rather than by the traditional method of exiting his mother’s womb, his legal status would be altogether different.

There are common law rules around these kinds of case law interpretations, because otherwise the justice system produces injustices. The problem with the rules is that they are only as good as those who make common law decisions. Those people are called “judges”. The judge presiding over the case of Farouz Myuddin felt bound by law to produce an unjust absurdity, which is what the common law rules exist to prevent.

Such decisions are made by members of the judiciary all the time, of course. Many are accepted as necessary application of the legal reasoning process. When the rules produce historic justice or corrections of injustice, such as in the Mabo case, the right-wing commentariat call this ‘judicial activism’. The implication is that judges are usually neutral and impartial, but when manifest injustices such as terra nullius are recognised, a rogue judge has randomly lost their neutrality hat.

These assumptions and implications are not true. Judges are not objective, no-one is. The law is not impartial, it is partisan. We know this, because legislation is introduced and voted on by politicians who belong to political parties. Particularly when we see a law with multiple capital letters after the section number, we can absolutely certain that the piece of law at which we are looking has been subject to multiple partisan meddling. And so it is with section 5AA of the Commonwealth Migration Act 1958.

It is the judicial remarks that throw most light on the political sensibility of the judge presiding over this case. As reported by ABC radio, the judge expressed concern that a finding in favour of baby Farouz “might encourage other pregnant asylum seekers to enlist people smugglers and make the dangerous journey to Australia”.

There are roughly seventeen separate ways wrong with this statement. Even if it is not a verbatim or accurate account of what the judge in fact said, it is what a trained journalist heard and thus what the audience heard. So if the judge has been misinterpreted, the statement should have been expressed more carefully in the first place. On the face of it, this sentiment is absolutely abhorrent.

First, the phrase ‘other pregnant asylum seekers’: this obscurantist nonsense is steeped in sexism. The most obvious point is that Farouz has been denied the right to exercise the rights of asylum seekers under the United Nations regime, the Universal Declaration and the Refugee Convention. So to call anyone in this context an “other pregnant asylum seeker” is grossly inaccurate and internally inconsistent. Farouz was in the same breath legally defined out of asylum seeker status. There is no other because there is no-one in the case at hand being granted the rights of asylum seekers under international law.

This is probably sloppy and inadvertent – it is always sloppy and inadvertent. White man elites do not get called out or have any imperative to recognise their own obscurantism and the inherent denialism that the English legal language generously provides – to them. Happily, critical discourse analysis of the English language also provides us with the tools to see this kind of phraseology as a misrepresentation of fact and of law.

The phrase ‘other pregnant asylum seekers’ is busy obscuring another truth, the simple truth that all peoples, all cultures, all of the history of the human species knows to be a very special status: that of women carrying a member of the next generation of humans. To say “other pregnant asylum seekers” is to ignore a basic biological fact. Men do not get pregnant. Men do not do the hard labour of producing the next generation of humans. There is no such category of human as ‘pregnant people’. There are only pregnant women.

This ugly usage obscures the ugly inhumanity of denying human rights to women fleeing persecution, women who may be pregnant, women who are doing everything in their power to escape the atrocities and destruction and abuses that are exacerbated during wars, and wars are waged by men. To obscure these basic facts of humanity by implying that women are sneakily getting pregnant to reach Australia and simultaneously denying the most basic of human rights to a baby is a hideous thing to do.

And it gets worse.

The suggestion is that a finding in favour of baby Farouz “might encourage other pregnant asylum seekers to enlist people smugglers and make the dangerous journey to Australia”.
By drawing a very long bow, and looking at this remark in isolation, we can concede that it might contain a small degree of possibility. It may be that unknown women in unknown locations might become pregnant at some unknown time in the future and subsequently seek to reach Australia while fleeing persecution in her home country. Certainly the expansion of military aggression by US and Australian governments increases the likelihood that women in Iraq and Syria will seek to escape the death and destruction wrought by our decisions.

This kind of judicial reasoning contains a policy component. That is, the judge looks beyond the facts at hand, and also takes into account wider public policy considerations. It is not especially unusual, and Justice Deane and Justice Kirby, compassionate and passionate advocates for justice both, were well recognised for their agile policy-based reasoning. Such reasoning requires careful connecting of legal dots from an international human rights law instrument (for example) to the case before the court. Again, if this type of reasoning displeases particular people with particular agendas, it is labelled ‘judicial activism’.

Policy-based judicial decision-making is not some kind of free-for-all for rogue judges, however the overturning of terra nullius or acceptance of cruel Migration Act amendments may be perceived by the audience or portrayed to the public. The actual concern around policy-based judicial reasoning is to do with temporality. Here is the basic legal thinking around such approaches. The “introduction to law” version. Note to lawyers: I am talking to non-lawyers.

Legislation is prospective law-making. The political party in power, or parties in the case of our current federal government, drafts legislation which will operationalise its political objectives, such as changes to the Migration Act. Once the law is drafted and passed by both Houses and signed off by the Governor-General, it swings into action. Now people who breach that law can be legally dealt with by authorities whose job it is to detain them or charge them or bring them before a judge or whatever. The crucial thing here is the direction in which law-time is travelling.

In our system, a law is passed, and unless it is retrospective, it can not govern over people until it meets each of the relevant criteria for coming into force. Yes, force. That is the language used at law, and for good reason. Once the law is in force, the state can forcibly detain people, or do all sorts of other things to interfere in the lives of the people under its jurisdiction.

Case law is different. When a case comes before a court, it looks back in time. It is not prospective, as legislation is supposed to be, in most circumstances. Someone does something, their actions come to the attention of the authorities, and if the authorities act, the person is brought before a court of law and their past actions (and intentions and evidence and so on) are scrutinised in an open court. These are basic tenets of our system of law.

When the government departs from its usual model of enacting legislation which operates prospectively, there is usually some concern about those who will be caught by retrospective legislation. Lawyers tend not to like retrospective legislation (except administrative formalities that streamline inconsistencies and errors as they are discovered) because it is extremely difficult to build a defence for a client who has been charged with an offence which was not an offence at the time your client was allegedly involved.

Similarly, judicial decisions that put the facts to hand to one side and instead are based on what an unknown number of women in an unknown place at an unknown future point in time may or may not do whether or not they are pregnant, is highly problematic. This kind of reasoning is unlikely to be sound reasoning. It is even more troubling when such judicial reasoning is closely streamlined with the political rhetoric of the government of the day. We have the doctrine of the separation of powers in this country, at least in theory. For a judge to base a decision on prospective policy grounds is to see the ancient power-sharing arrangements of democracy crumbling before our eyes. And that’s not even skimming the surface of the sheer inhumanity of the treatment of this baby, at least one hundred other babies in the same position, their families, and all the people seeking to escape persecution by reaching our wealthy wealthy island in the sun.

On Thursday 25 September 2014, the Sydney Morning Herald plastered its front page with jihadi imagery and an oddly dissonant picture of a young man in a suit. The Fairfax mast heads in Melbourne and Canberra published the same images and the same misinformation. It turned out the young man in the picture was alive but not so well, having been frightened by Fairfax out of leaving the house.

Picture a beautifully restored heritage landscape of sandstone and brick buildings, manicured gardens and green, green lawns rolling down to a sadly despoiled but still picturesque river. The odd Rivercat, a special catamaran-style ferry built for the shallows of Duck Creek, swooshes by with a faint honk carried on the wind.

This landscape is alive with young people and their families, everyone beautifully and respectfully dressed for the solemnity and respect demanded by the occasion. There are photos being taken on every corner. Young women tower over their parents in heels, bursting with health and pride. Young men hold their heads high and their chests sturdy. Nearly every ethnicity, nationality and religion on earth is represented. Scholars in full academic dress sweep by in pairs, their floppy hats and glowing brocade glittering in the sun.

This is graduation day at the University of Western Sydney, Parramatta campus. Our wonderful, dedicated, ambitious, hard-working against-the-odds students are attending their commencement, the day they start their adult lives as qualified bachelors, to go forth and work and teach and learn. To tend the sick, represent the accused, run the computer systems and teach the children of Western Sydney, Australia, and the world.

They are a wonder to behold. Huge numbers of our students would never have had access to tertiary education without this university, the brain child of Gough Whitlam, 25 years old this year. My heart swells with the tiny contribution I have made to some of their lives. I wish them every success, and eagerly anticipate seeing some of them on the news programs of tomorrow, working for peace, entering Parliament, making a difference.

Graduation is during the semester break. Just before the break, two of my students asked if I could give a lecture at Bankstown on the strong and rational responses we can deploy to mitigate against stereotypes of Muslim people, especially the young men. “They will listen to you miss” said one young man, an exceptional and committed student, employee, and family man, an Arabic-speaking Muslim who appears to know every other young man “of Middle Eastern appearance” on campus. Following up this request has become more urgent in recent days.

A few weeks ago I wrote about these young men. It was the story of an incident in my classroom where one Muslim student had objected to my using Islam in an example of an illogical argument. Three other Muslim students leapt to my defence, and one of the three later explained the concept in more detail to his formerly confused classmate, who is no longer confused on the point. It is good story, with a happy ending. It reinforced my conviction that education is the answer, irrespective of the question. As mother used to say, to a man with a hammer every problem looks like a nail. To that I would add that to a man with a seat in Parliament, every problem looks like more legislation. And to an educator in richly vibrant, hugely diverse multicultural western Sydney, every problem looks like sensible, ongoing and consistent investment in universal education. I like to think of myself as consistent in my commitments and values, and in line with my views of the value of education, I busy myself each day with the tasks of living, working and educating in Western Sydney.

Imagine then my disgust, my visceral anger, my absolute contempt for everyone involved in the sordid and careless mistake that was what Fairfax did that morning. I responded to the SMH front page with fury. I also did what any other engaged digital citizen would do with their seething, roiling, relentless heartburn at this despicable carelessness, and posted my intention to boycott Fairfax, after 25 years of faithful readership, on my Twitter feed.

The response was overwhelming. No tweet of mine has ever gone so far (not even retweets from the mighty Van Badham, whose reach is legendary). My notification folder filled with hundreds of retweets, favourites and mentions. More experienced tweeps contacted me by private message to offer support, advice and caution. I thanked everybody, responded to almost everybody, and continued to tweet out my reasons for 24 hours. Over and over again, I said this is the last straw. This is it. Too much.

Then I got a reply from a sub-editor at BRW, a Fairfax publication. This put me on the alert. Like my reply would not be sent through the ranks, if my tweets had caught her attention? SMH was tagged in every single tweet.

‘I’m not defending the front page’ she began. Well, obviously, given that it is indefensible.

‘But after 25 years there must be more to your decision than one front page?’

I took this question in good faith. I answered with two tweets, in the accepted two-tweet way. The first said

‘Yeah, fair call. It’s been a slow burn since the Abbott endorsement and Carlton, but this was personal 1/2′.

This tweet referenced the fact that Fairfax endorsed Tony Abbott at the 2013 election, even though it was obvious to the most casual of observers the man is a power-seeking wrecker, with no policies of any value, no vision, and tendencies to be violent, misogynist, homophobic, and racist. Nevertheless, Fairfax is a company in decline with a dinosaur of a business model, and it was equally obvious that Abbott would be the next Prime Minister. For this and other claimed reasons, Fairfax endorsed this decision of the Australian electorate. The tweet also referenced their shameful treatment of long-time columnist Mike Carlton. When the editor who arranged for an apology for an article critical of Israel was over-ruled, and sought to impose a suspension of the columnist instead, Carlton walked.

The second tweet said:
‘It was graduation day at UWS. I teach 100s of students ‘of Middle East appearance’. Fairfax endangered them all. More’

Interestingly, the Fairfax employee retweeted the first but not the second reply. If this was strategic, and I assume it was – she is a professional – the thinking would go something like this: I had a made a claim that Fairfax lawyers could argue is unsubstantiated yet damaging to the brand. Defamation, loss of earnings, damages. Thus a Fairfax employee could not spread my claim further across the twitterverse, as that would further damage the brand (and assist my hypothetical defence in this hypothetical libel case).

Here is what it would look like.

This woman has made an unfounded claim, Fairfax lawyers could tell the judge, which has resulted in loss of earnings. Where is the proof that students at UWS are endangered by the Fairfax front page? Show us the endangered student. Prove the danger has increased. Demonstrate the chain of causation back to Fairfax. How did the Fairfax front page endanger anyone any more than a Murdoch front page?

It doesn’t, of course. The front pages are all as awful as each other. But lawyers like causation. For this hypothetical suit, Fairfax would imply that I have to prove a link between their front page (rather than any other front page) and the reckless endangerment of one of my students (rather than the student community “of Middle Eastern appearance”). I would not have to, because the onus of proof lies with the complainant in these matters. The correct legal argument would therefore be around whether I caused loss of earnings through an unsubstantiated claim. But that would not necessarily stop libel lawyers from trying to imply that the case is about something else. I adore many of my colleagues who are in legal practice, and send many exceptional future lawyers their way. But I am not particularly fond of those who ‘defend’ corporate interests against people with little or no resources, wealth, income or power.

Here, in more than 140 characters, is why that headline was the last straw, and why I took to Twitter to express my disgust, and why I am boycotting Fairfax.

I have read the Sydney Morning Herald all my life. It was delivered to my parents’ home (still is), and when I left home I kept buying it daily.

In our student household in the late 80s and early 90s, someone would go get the paper and we would all sit around and pool our wits to do the crosswords. A day when we got the cryptic done before lectures (usually a Thursday, never a Friday) was a good day. A completed cryptic is still a beautiful thing. I taught my mum to tackle them, and later when we got mobile phones, we would exchange texts and tips on 7-down or 8-across. My dad developed a sort of ritualised whinge about the time mum spent with the crossword.

When I moved to Alice Springs in 1994, my mum would send a fax of the cryptic to herself, tear off that shiny paper and send me a bundle of four or five by post. Once a week I would head into town and buy the one SMH available in the Northern Territory: the Saturday Herald. My then-partner and I would do the crosswords together, a happy reminder of our pre-parenting, carefree student life.

The cryptic crossword alone was part of my circle of friends and family.

I also submitted letters. The editor printed many of them. I would get a flurry of texts from friends and family – ‘saw your letter today, well said, well done’. Once a letter I wrote attracted replies for over a week. The paper had gone digital relatively recently, and gentility was already evaporating. The digital splash fanned a controversy over Nicole Kidman pretending to play the didgeridoo. Colleagues stopped me in the corridor, friends questioned me at BBQs, and disagreed with me by email. All this was triggered by my letter. Ironically, it was on a similar topic: I criticised Kidman for potentially disrespecting Aboriginal people for the purpose of selling movie tickets (I try to be consistent). I also felt like I was contributing to public debate, and I was, as I am now. But it was somewhat intimidating and confronting (so is this) and I stopped submitting letters to the editor after that (I do not plan to stop blogging or tweeting. Yet).

On returning to my home town of Sydney after 14 years in remote and regional Australia, I booked a Saturday SMH delivery. I leave too early during the week, and more than one day a week delivery would feel indulgent anyway. By now a single mother escaping domestic violence, this Saturday delivery was a tiny luxury, one that made me feel I had re-entered polite society after a traumatic ride in the gutter. Reading the SMH felt like hanging out with kindred spirit adults, and like home. The letters page remained a delight. I had graduated from the simple Sudoku to the samurai, egged along by my other ‘adult company’ in that little house, Adam Spencer. I bought an SMH each week day morning on the way to the station and geared my brain up for the day at work with news and comment and puzzles.

I have come a long way since then. I graduated at law, have publications in academic journals, and a co-edited collection on citizenship to my name. I went to Greece last year and gave a paper on the parlous state of Australian democracy in the home of democracy. My eldest son has reached adulthood, a young man who has a clear understanding of the risks of being a young man in this world. My daughter and younger son are in high school. I work hard in my home town and am more connected than ever before. My reliance on the SMH for like-minded adults to read and ponder and sometimes interact with via the letters page diminished. And now it is gone.

This is what I think happened. It is not conjecture but hypothesis, produced using the available evidence and accepted rules of case theory. The news that police had shot a teenager dead broke late on the night of Tuesday 23 September. By the time I signed off just after midnight, all we had heard was of a stabbing and a shooting. This is too late for a print publication to get a full story out for the first Wednesday morning edition.
Next, the workers at the paper probably went into overdrive to catch up on Thursday. This is highly likely for the simple reason that print is dying but the business model demands it remain relevant. This is because much of the news cycle is actually the news recycled. Breakfast radio and television do ‘what the papers say’ and the papers return the favour by cross-quoting broadcast media. All the major dailies now have social media monitors and presences. Maintaining a print presence is about feeding the larger machine.

As they all do these days, the people on the Numaid story would have trawled facebook pages for uncopyrighted images. Of course, just because everyone does it does not make it right. Trawling the facebook pages of a dead teenager in order to increase newspaper sales is a repulsive thing to do, but people do it. There are papers to sell, and catch-up imperative to satisfy.

My considered view is that someone had too many screens open at once and in a race to deadline – the media environment has been more frenzied than usual and they are all on it to keep themselves relevant and afloat – the wrong picture was put on the front pages.

Human error is common and predictable. No-one is suggesting malicious intent by whoever made this monumental mistake. Just a profit-seeking relevance-desperation deadline-driven rush job. But it has nevertheless wreaked enormous harm on the teenager concerned, and has flow-on effects to all Australians of “Middle Eastern appearance”. And that includes many of my students, and that is why I am so angry.

And here is a predictable fact: attacks on Muslim women have increased according to AFP Commissioner Ken Lay. That is on top of the attacks on a Muslim school. To state the absolute obvious, schools have children inside. That is who schools are built to serve. So the ramping up of a terror threat, in which all the media are playing a shameful part, women and children in Australia are suffering. It is a man’s world alright.

It has been a slow burn, and it is personal, as I said in my first tweet to the Fairfax employee. And I will not be backing away from that second tweet. I have my arguments mustered. They are rational arguments. I have even generously disclosed some of those arguments to Fairfax lawyers right here in this post. And full disclosure, as they know, or ought to know, is how ethical lawyering is done.

So I feel like I lost a friend, but we were drifting apart anyway. I was probably holding on, unnecessarily, tenuously, for old times’ sake, the way you do, not wanting to be the one to do the breaking up. Not wanting to face the fact that I was deluded all along, thinking we were friends. The SMH brought many joys. But Fairfax is a corporation and I am a human being. And when I opened that newspaper yesterday and saw that sordid headline, and got home to hear a young man is afraid to leave the house, I pictured those proud students and their proud families against the backdrop of the university grounds. Then I looked at my newspaper and thought ‘I stand with my students. And I no longer read you.’

I started this blog to vent my anger at the Abbott government. To keep myself sane. To mitigate against the real likelihood of alienating myself from polite company. And to share my thoughts with like-minded Australians in online communities, many of whom are speechless with horror at what we are becoming, and grateful for support in putting that horror into words.

There are many brain-dumps on here. Some are mocking, some are furious, or disgusted. I won’t be deleting anything – we still have implied freedom of political communication in our liberal democracy – but I am changing my style. Sane people change their behaviour when circumstances around them change. As Einstein observed, to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different outcome amounts to insanity.

What has changed?

I no longer trust my own government. I do not feel that it is safe for me to furiously and hastily say what I think of government actions (in the hasty immoral way that the press does to the Muslim community). I am afraid that the brain-dump approach risks attracting the attention of a band of heavily armed men with the legal power to use force against me. If I wrote in haste what I really think of the Abbott government and its oppressive nonsense, I would be afraid for my children. As many Australians know only too well, particularly the Aboriginal community and now the Muslim community, children are deeply traumatised by heavily armed men breaking down your front door and using legal force against innocent civilians. And yes, they are civilians. They are not members of the armed forces of a nation state. And yes, they are innocent. We have the presumption of innocence in this country. You are innocent until proven guilty in a properly constituted court of law. And so am I.

So.

I have decided to try and make sense of events in Australia on 23-24 September 2014 using evidence-based arguments instead. I would rather scribble off an angry rant about the ugly rhetoric and extreme violence being deployed around Australia on the flimsiest – or absence – of evidence. But that is dangerous now. Here is my thinking on the danger: armed agents of the Australian government are convinced or deluded about the level of terror threat to Australians; and impervious to their role in increasing that threat. And because they are probably convinced and likely deluded and definitely impervious, they might accidently mistake a middle-aged mother of three sitting at her computer for a threat to national security.

I have written before on the clash of civilisations thesis, I have drawn on theology and history and law and peace studies and international relations and political economy to make sense of the rhetoric about what is happening in Iraq and here. Today, I think the news stories are best addressed using intersectionality, a recent development in our understanding across social categorisers such as class, race and sex. In particular, intersectionality brings together critical race theory with feminism, where race theory also illuminates (religious) sectarianism.

In the current climate, adherents of the Muslim faith are conflated with any person ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ (whatever that means). Muslims are conflated with all Arabs, who frequently bear a striking physical resemblance to Jews, both being of Semitic ethnic origin (whatever that means). The facts do not get in the way of government and media enthusiastically reproducing ethno-religious stereotypes to foment fear in the Australian population, so we need to make sense of both.

What we have been told

This comes from the joint press release issued by the Victorian and Australian Federal Police. An 18 year old man was wanted for questioning. He agreed to meet police at 8.00pm on Tuesday 23 September at Endeavour Hills in Victoria. He carried a knife. He used the knife to stab two officers. He was shot dead. His name is reported to be Numan Haider.

There are conflicting statements about what kind of threat the teenager posed before agreeing to meet police to answer questions. It is said he was under surveillance for at least two months, and had been seen by authorities to be acting ‘strangely’. Some say it was suicide by cop. This is as plausible as any other hypothesis. Such events typically involve a young man with a mental illness (depression can be fatal: its worst outcome is suicide). A young man who had been acting strangely and voluntarily attended a police station for questioning is as likely a candidate as any other to seek suicide by cop.

The other explanations are various versions of this: the young man was a terrorist, an extremist who hates our way of life. He was simultaneously a lone wolf even though the entire Australian community is under threat from an organisation of terrorist Muslim extremists on another continent. So he is depicted as a representative of an organised group but acted alone and independently of them. He was a terrorist but this is not about Islam. But the group he represents calls itself Islamic State. There is no specific intelligence that the man made threats against the Prime Minister. But the loosely labelled ‘press’ has ‘reported’ that police killed a man who made threats against the Prime Minister. Imagine US security forces allowing a man to stab two officers while making threats against the President before shooting him. Plausible? No. This narrative is incoherent at best. Most of it is probably propaganda. As the old saying goes, the most effective lies contain a kernel of truth.

The context and the analysis

The police in Victoria, as elsewhere in Australia, have a long history of shooting young men dead. The young man may be unarmed or, more commonly, armed with a knife. One memorable incident at Bondi Beach involved multiple officers shooting and killing a mentally ill man who was wielding a knife. One of the officers who fatally shot Roni Levi was later convicted on drug charges.

You will search high and low, however, for news of a policeman shooting a woman, or a policewoman shooting anyone. Police have a deep and abiding interest in young men, particularly brown young men, or bearded young men, and especially black young men. Do not be any of those people, and the chances of being stopped, searched, detained, arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned go through the floor. Add poor. Poor young men. Our jails are full of young men with very little formal education, who are from low income areas. They are survivors of child sexual assault, bullying, physical abuse, neglect. Many have a mental illness, an intellectual disability, substance addictions, and histories of being victimized by, and then perpetrating, violence. This is the lot of many poor young men in contemporary Australia. It is a disgrace, but it is the case.

Across human history, these people were traditionally sent to war. They needed a role in society, and the role chosen for them by patriarchs is, typically, to be frontline guards of whatever territory the society regards as its own. This was seen as a good job for young men, and for the society. When young men are killed in the line of this duty, it is a tragic terrible loss for the young man’s family and friends, but for everyone else – namely, the patriarchs – it seems like an excellent idea to send young men to kill other young men at the ‘front’. The front is any border of the territory the society calls its own.

And so it is today, with two key exceptions.

The first exception is that we now send young women as well. This is stupid. Young women have the most crucial role in the survival of any society. No-one else can fulfil the function that young women can do. They do not have to fulfill this role in Australia if they do not want to, thank goddess. Or more specifically, thank feminism. Nevertheless, all patriarchies treat young women with contempt, as human incubators, and ignore their rights. Patriarchies are violent and careless towards women; and lie about the singular, crucial role young women play in the survival of humanity. Using threats of force and actual force to ensure its own survival is a classic behaviour of any patriarchy. It is ugly and cruel, but it is the case.

To reiterate: It is a social fact that we fail to honour the humanity of young women. It is a scientific fact that no-one else, no-one but young women, can do what young women do for the survival of humanity. To hold any other position is to remain deaf to the lies told by the patriarchs.

And the patriarchs tell many lies. These are dangerous lies. Lies which cause massive, tangible harm to humanity and to the planet. Patriarchs dishonour young women for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs send young men to war for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs plunder and poison the planet for power-seeking purposes. Patriarchs tell more lies to cover up the true power-seeking purposes of their dishonourable and bloodthirsty actions. This is so whether they are white patriarchs or black patriarchs or Muslim patriarchs or Christian or Zionist patriarchs. Yes we get the odd Golda Meir or Maggie Thatcher. They are women, but they operate a patriarchal paradigm It is not that a woman can not imitate a patriarch. Some choose to, and some are really quite good at that. It is that we can not imagine an alternative reality where young women are honoured for their crucial capability and young men are found something more constructive and less abhorrent to do than kill other young men.

Which brings us to the chief patriarch in 2014 Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Here are some grabs from his statement in response to the shooting of an 18 year old man.

“It is clear that there are people in our community who are capable of very extreme acts”.

Yes it is. Are any of these people young women? Are any of them matriarchs? Are some of them young men and some of them patriarchs?

“I have spoken to the wives of both the officers concerned”.

The Prime Minister did not discuss the international meeting he is attending and the global response to terrorist acts. He did not outline our foreign policy objectives in the face of terrorist threats. He did not even have to imply that the dead young man was planning a terrorist act, regarding which no evidence has been released.

The AFP has categorically stated that there is no specific evidence of a threat to the Prime Minister. And the Prime Minister has categorically stated that he has “spoken to the wives of the officers concerned.” Remember what our alliance in Iraq is called this time? It is called the Coalition of the Concerned. Abbott is our chief patriarch, keeping Australian women and children safe from the barbarians at the gate. Sending young men (and now women) to do it.

Many will not be convinced by this analysis. Some will complain that I have left out a detail here, or omitted context there. Well, yes. Yes I have. That is what writers do. We choose to tell this story, and by choosing this story, we discard every other story there is to be told. We choose this particular story for a reason, and we often provide those reasons. My reason for choosing to present the particular analysis I have presented here is because the cognitive dissonance is so great. The only framework for understanding the events of 23-24 September 2014 in Australia available to me and my experiences is the frame of the violence and deceptions reproduced by patriarchs. It will not work for everyone.

A final word on when the penny dropped that the violence and deception of patriarchs would clarify my understanding of this uglier Australia the Prime Minister is determined we should be, regardless of facts on the ground.

Each morning I wake to an ABC radio news bulletin. I set my clock radio to 6.00am and the theme rings out and I listen to the news and weather as I begin preparing for the day. For the last few days the lead story has been the Australian Prime Minister’s decision to send the country to war again. Each piece of rhetoric I hear, every piece of propaganda dressed up as rational argument, from the so-called experts and leaders and commentators, describes the disregard our enemy has for humanity. Each description also communicates exactly what “we” are doing to “them”. Over and over I heard a head of security, or intelligence, or government, or police, using language that would not be out of place at a fiery sermon from the middle ages. Or at a radical mosque, temple, synagogue, or tent of the roller variety. It all sounds the same. I heard someone saying of the enemy that ‘some people are attracted to the thought of the end of days’. Well Christians certainly are. It is all there in the Book of Revelations.

The sad thing , the cause for despair, is this. The task of demonising the “other” is an easy one, because there the patriarchs have been doing it for centuries. It is embedded in the languages and cultures that have sprung from across the ancient world, in the collective memory of humanity.

This leaves me in no doubt that there are patriarchs of communities across Australia preaching hate. Here’s the main difference between these various patriarchs of various cultures, languages and faiths, from my perspective.

Our chief patriarch is waxing lyrical about the barbarians at the gate, with very little evidence. (By waxing lyrical I mean Abbott is awkwardly stumbling over his words which contain either religious imagery or vacuous rhetoric or both). I do not doubt the blood thirsty intent and actions of Islamic patriarchs in Iraq and Syria. I do doubt that Islamic extremists represent as serious a threat to Australians as we are told.

I also do not doubt the blood thirsty intent and actions of patriarchs in the USA and Australia. We are going to other peoples’ countries to blow up human beings and their ancestral homes, from a massive (and probably previously safe) distance.

I most certainly do not doubt that our current actions will ensure that the rate of slaughter of women and children in Iraq and Syria, by us and by them, will become much much worse. And it is women and children who ensure the survival of humanity.

The Australian government has decided that Australian taxpayers should spend half a billion dollars per year fighting a war against someone.

Not so long ago we had a budget emergency. We were drowning in a debt and deficit disaster. The problem was so dire that it justified starving people under 30 to death. It justified gouging pensioners to see a doctor. It justified disinvesting in people with disabilities, disinvesting in universal education, hindering access to university for all but the wealthy. This talking down of the economy as though there is no relationship between confidence and economic growth justified gutting the most important 21st century infrastructure and productivity boost the country ever attempted, a national high speed broadband network. These appallingly brutal policies, which are terrible for business and consumer confidence and will have a negative multiplier effect, had to be installed because the government’s political opponents. That is the argument. Plus something about poor people and car ownership. Really. Leaving aside foreign minister Julie Bishop, who has stood loftily above mundane domestic issues like whether young people can eat, we have a room full of white men and one wannabe white man, a group whose combined education cost millions. Here is what they decided: hey we can kick the poor people yay because the Labor Party.

So we are dealing with a bunch of heartless economic illiterates for whom power is its own end. They do not want political power to run the country for all Australians, to invest in our future, or to make sensible fiscal decisions based on a coherent ideology and our shared, national future. They do not even have a coherent ideology. They did once, but it has been jettisoned. Cogency? Principles? Values? Nah, no need. This is the age of neoliberalism gone mad, a ramshackle outfit of nasty incompetent brutes who have their greedy hands on the levers of power and are determined to bring the rest of Australia across to their grim and destructive outlook. That way they are returned to power, and that is all they seek. Nothing more.

When domestic politics go wrong, as with the spectacular failure of this first Coalition budget since 2007, men in power look for a distraction and a common enemy. I would call this an old trick except it is something more serious than a trick. It is a tired unimaginative political ploy, but it is also stupidly expensive and globally destructive. The current Australian government has chosen ISIS. Or ISIL. Or is it Islamic State. Hard to know.

We could be spending half a billion dollars a year on foreign aid. Or combatting Ebola. Or re-building Gaza, a recurring, urgent need that will never go away, or not for as long as Israel refuses to get over itself. We could invest that money in education, or health, or infrastructure. We could just distribute it evenly across the Australian population and save millions in welfare compliance costs. It would pay for itself in the year, easily. But instead, the government is pouring massive amounts of our own money into scaring the shit out of us. For the same old shitty reason: to stay in power. That is it, that is all. Nothing more.

Putting to one side all the constructive efforts in foreign affairs we could be doing instead, here is the problem with naming the enemy. The enemy calls itself Islamic State. This is clever. It is brief and pithy and to the point. Islamic, and a state. No need to use the word caliphate, but a caliphate is clearly implied. It is the same with the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad. Apart from colonial imperatives, which were numerous and powerful, Pakistan was created as the territory neighbouring India for people of the Muslim faith, and as such named its capital Islamabad. It is nigh on a teetering failed state, of course. No people can be at the whims and tides of colonial imperatives for centuries and then be expected to function democratically when the coloniser cuts and runs. It never works, and it will never work again in Iraq and Syria.

For a while, the news media went along with most Western leaders and called Islamic State Islamic State. There was an exception, however, and an important one. President Obama resolutely and consistently referred to ISIL. This is an acronym for Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. Obama conspicuously did not refer to ISIS, the alternative acronym which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This week, the Australian Prime Minister finally got the memo and switched his language too. He had already committed the death and destruction machines, the money, and the human beings, to fighting this super terrible threatening horrific terrorist terrorist terrorist threat. Remember, it is a threat. No Australian has been harmed in any way. Then yesterday the Prime Minister also worked out what he was supposed to call the enemy. Well done, Tony.

Words matter. Words are powerful and influential and important. Using words in war is always as important as the killing machines. This is why we quote the ancient and modern iterations of that famous phrase ‘the first casualty of war is truth’. It goes to such truisms as ‘we have to win the battle for hearts and minds’. So naming the enemy is a pretty basic starting point for committing our country’s resources – human and capital resources – to an obviously poorly considered, expensive, unwinnable war.

Here’s the thinking behind the words, or the best explaination I can figure, which is not easy, because I don’t think the way these war-mongering idiots think.

Naming the enemy by its own preferred moniker is giving succour to the enemy. We can not call Islamic State Islamic State because we want to demonise its Islamicness but not credit it with statehood. It is a powerful armed group seizing territory by force, just like England and France and Spain and Portugal and all the other imperial powers have done in the past. But we must not allow this now because Islam. Or democracy. Or subjugation of women. Take your pick.

Or barbarian hoards at the gate. Aha. Here it is. Invoking barbarism is a typical appropriation by imperial powers, in this case of the Berber identity, dehumanising and demonising a whole group of people. The Greeks saw the Berber as ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’ as they came from across the Mediterranean, the sea at the middle of the territory. The Berber of the ancient world, from North Africa, or the Mughrabe, provide the linguistic origin of the imagery invoked by barbarism. Much the same was done to the Philistines by those who wanted their country and identity. The Philistines are the Palestinians, and thus it is a cinch to invoke notions that Palestinians are uncivilised in the western/Christian mind. Bethlehem and Nazareth are of course in Palestine, hence the desire of the Christian west to appropriate Palestinian identity and cast a whole people as deserving of subjugation, dehumanisation and, in the case of Western support for Israel, mass murder.

Whatever, just keep arming this side or that and profiteering from the sale of weapons and the deaths of human beings. This is obviously the work of violent and inept men in thrall to the military-industrial complex, but it is unfashionable to say so.

That little journey through geo-political history and nomenclature brings us to why Obama and now Abbott call the enemy ISIL and not ISIS today. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria presents a problem: it names Syria. The western intervention wants to stop at the imaginary line, drawn by colonial powers in the first place, between Iraq and Syria. As the enemy has so neatly captured in its name, the actual human beings who live there did not consent to this border, and it has been used ever since by powerful leaders for their own ends rather than for the good of local populations. Iraqis and Syrians have always had cross-border family and friendships and tribal connections and enmities and all the other relationships that humans create. But it suited Assad and other Syrian and Iraqi leaders before him to go along with the borders of a nation state. As Palestinians know only too well, it is nigh on impossible to function in the contemporary world without the rights and interests that are conferred with the existence of a nation state with borders. This is so for individuals and for groups, for societies and religions and polities. It is a relatively recent development, and it feeds all sorts of violence and problems and vested interests of rich and violent men. But there it is.

Australians tend to overlook the significance of borders and the colonial powers that created them at huge cost and heartbreak for local populations because our borders are so clearly delineated. As a great big island continent, we know where we are and who we are more clearly than possibly any other country. It is only when some minor short-lived clamour is raised, like that around our navy entering Indonesian waters to tow back asylum seekers – more human costs and misery – that we are reminded that we even have borders with other countries.

The point of writing Syria out of the story is that its regime has killed almost 200,000 of its own citizens in just three years. This mass slaughter, this crime against humanity, this revolting atrocity, is not apparently worthy of Western intervention. So if we name the enemy Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, we risk awkward questions about our failure to give two hoots about the lives of the Syrian people. And as the meme goes, awkward questions are awkward. So to spare the sensibilities of a gung-ho war mongering buffoon like Abbott, we don’t mention the war. Or not the Syrian civil war.

That leaves the final label, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This one is tricky. The ancient world was understood and labelled as Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the Mughrabe. Mesopotamia centred on modern day Iraq. Think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The starting point of Abraham’s journey. The Levant is further west. Think the twelve tribes of Israel. Hold that thought. And finally, the Mughrabe, the northern swathe of the African-Arab world. It stretches across much of the area where the Arab Spring, that moment of hope, originated.

Why on earth would we in the west choose this invocation of the Levant, with its anachronistic imagery and biblical overtones, to refer to our present-day enemy?

Easy. It triggers all the associated geo-political and religious imaginations, the clash of civilisations thesis. It implies that Israel is in danger, again. Israel is always in danger in its collective Israeli mind despite being the most heavily armed territory in the region, with the fourth biggest army in the world, on a permanent war footing and undisclosed numbers of nuclear warheads. Saying ISIL feeds this and other useful imagery. It implies the backwardness of those violent sectarian Arabs, always at war with each other. It erases the massive damage wreaked upon the region by the imperialist west, from colonial times to the 2003-09 carpet bombing of Iraq. It shifts responsibility from us, us who clearly have the most fire-power, global power, and capacity to harm. It simultaneously evokes biblical overtones while managing to imply that Muslims are sword-wielding primitives who nevertheless pose a grave terrible horrific terrorist terrorist terrorist threat to our way of life over here in wealthy, distant, peaceful Australia.

And remember, it is still a threat and a threat alone. No single Australian has been harmed by the enemy. Not one.