These are not friends

MUSLIM migrants and their children are fitting in to Australian life, but there are those among them who resent this "surrender". We must watch them

Tony Abbott says he feels threatened by homosexuals. They "challenge, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things," he said, tucking in his shirt a little more tightly.

His colleague, Simon Birmingham, was born in South Australia at a time when it had probably Australia's first homosexual Premier, so he's not in fear of a few gay guys.

He's afraid of pink batts.

"The greatest threat to the safety of many Australian families over the last 12 months has been the home insulation program," he uttered to an incredulous Senate on the day the Government issued its much awaited white paper on counter-terrorism.

It's OK for us to smile at such foolishness, but Opposition Leader Abbott wants us to make him Prime Minister this year. God only knows - and surely will instruct his faithful servant Abbott - where shadow parliamentary secretary Birmingham might fit in an Abbott Cabinet: Minister for Getting On With Gays? Sounds like they'll be needing one.

Abbott and Birmingham, and you and I, know that the greatest threats to our safety are more likely to emerge from Australia's Muslim community, among which is a virulently anti-West minority determined to humiliate our democracy and do damage to us. Even kill us.

There are perhaps 300,000 Muslims here and they will rightly insist that the overwhelming majority are peace-loving and generally accepting of our democratic, Christian-inspired values.

They have migrated here and want to improve their lives and, more importantly, those of their children. Just like the British, Greek, Italian and Polish migrants that made up that great post-war tidal wave of arrivals.

Later, in the mid-70s, many thousands of Vietnamese would do the same.

Migrant communities from those countries have had teething problems, and these were hardly unexpected. With the Italians came some Mafia elements, murderous they were, too; other Europeans brought their bitter ancient enmities here and tried to settle them on suburban soccer pitches.

Sometimes still do.

Misbehaving Asians had their very own Victoria Police unit named for them. After many years, the Asian Squad has only just been disbanded and its remnants folded in to the Major Crime Squad.

We don't yet have a Muslim Squad, one that might speak its languages, work with the community and draw from that group for its members. I suspect that such a suggestion would be shouted down in deafening protest.

Muslims might make up a relatively small community - 1.5 per cent of Australia's population - but it speaks more loudly and gets more column newspaper centimetres than any other.

In these circumstances last month's Rudd Government White Paper - Securing Australia: Protecting Our Community - was a bold document, even if it did, at the last moment, shy away from specifically naming the most pressing threat to me and you. We'd had a hint that it was on the money after a speech last July to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute by Attorney-General Robert McClelland when he spoke of "domestically based threats" and quoted from a book, The Islamist, by former extremist Ed Husain, in which he argued that "it is Muslims that are able to recognise Islamist extremists most easily".

Husain should know. He was once a member of a nasty and deeply racist group known as Hizb ut Tahrir that wants Islam to rule over not just those lands in which there are many Muslims, but the rest as well. Ours is a "deceptive" culture that will soon vanish, apparently.

Let's check Sportsbook on those odds as soon as we've finished here.

But by the time the White Paper came out, there was no mention of Islam, just a reference to the "jihadist message".

That message is murder. Jihadists believe themselves to be on a glorious religious crusade, the currency of which is dead Westerners - you, me, those kids going to school across the road this morning, this Thursday's crowd at the MCG - even if, on the way through, they kill an inordinate number of fellow Muslims with their strapped-on explosives, car bombs and random attacks.

The White Paper, stating what most Australians would accept was obvious, made the point that there has been an "increase in the terrorist threat from people born or raised in Australia, who have become influenced by the violent jihadist message".

It continued: "The bombings in London on 7 July 2005, which were carried out by British nationals, brought into stark relief the real threat of globally inspired but locally generated attacks in Western democracies, including Australia.

"A number of Australians are known to subscribe to this message, some of whom might be prepared to engage in violence."

We all know who that is talking about. Well, most of us. Hizb ut Tahrir seemed oddly out of touch, notwithstanding its close relationship with - and claimed concern for - elements of the Islamic community.

It published a dodger, placed in mosques and prayer rooms, insisting we were the terrorists. Us! Now when did you and your mates last sit around planning to blow up the G?

It went on (indeed, it went on and on) to say our policies towards the Muslim world have been "brutal, vicious and inhumane" - that we were targeting Muslims.

Apparently we Westerners consider extreme anyone who "advocates a caliphate, promotes Shariah law" and "believes in jihad". Just ticked off three boxes, there. How did you go?

Some countries have banned Hizb ut Tahrir, including Bangladesh, Russia and even Egypt, once home to that Sydney troublemaker Sheik Hilaly.

Hilaly's thoughts on jihad are known. He told the Islamist murderers who kidnapped and terrorised Australian engineer Douglas Wood in 2005 that "we value your jihad". No we didn't. Real Australians agreed with Wood that they were "a---holes".

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has recently come under fire for being the leader who relaxed the rules to allow so many Lebanese Muslims into Australia while their country was paralysed by civil war, despite being warned it could lead to trouble.

Some of the would-be terrorists given long jail sentences recently after being found guilty of plotting and preparing for deadly jihad here arrived in Australia then, or were born to those who did (a court order prevents me from telling you their names).

That may be just as well, because the nine jailed men are, apparently, innocent. Sheik Hilaly says so. They had "no connection to acts of terror whatsoever", he insisted.

Predictably, he doesn't go into detail about how he knows this, just slinks off into that denial that so fails all those Muslims who just want to live happily in Australia alongside the Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews, Hindus, Baha'is, Sikhs, Buddhists and a handful of Rastafarians -all who can peacefully tolerate each other and the sometimes strange things we choose to believe.