Finding My Place Page 21

  It was the murder of 28-year-old Private Eva Martin, the first female soldier of the Ulster Defence Regiment to be killed by the IRA that planted the seed of doubt. He became disillusioned by the behaviour of some leaders, who seemed consumed by their own sense of self-importance and were far less than the selfless soldiers he had imagined them to be. When news broke that a policewoman had been killed in a bomb explosion, O’Callaghan watched in horror as one of his seniors – a man he had admired and looked up to – remarked, ‘Maybe she was pregnant and we got two for the price of one.’

  I was allowed around half an hour with O’Callaghan in a busy cafe in Soho. Since his outing as an informer, he had evaded retribution from the IRA. (Until his death in August 2017, an IRA death threat still loomed over his head). I knew that Dave, who could sometimes be a little overzealous about my security, would not approve of a meeting with someone who needed round-the-clock protection and pretty much lived in exile. I walked over to O’Callaghan and immediately recognised the look on his face. It was the same look I get when I’m not trying hard to hide what I’m really thinking. He looked like he was in his sixties – a slight man whose face mapped a life lived uncomfortably. His two stints of hunger strikes while in jail no doubt had had a long-lasting effect on his health.

  ‘So,’ he began, ‘you’re some kind of academic, are you? I suppose you want to know why I joined the IRA and why I left?’ he asked in a thick Irish accent and a wry tone.

  ‘No, actually I don’t.’ He looked at me like I had just told him his fly was undone. ‘I’m interested in what you do now. And why you do it.’ For the previous two decades or so, O’Callaghan had devoted his life to getting young men off the streets and out of violent gangs.

  As we started talking we found much more in common – a love of the arts, poetry, literature and a shared passion for peace. I ended up spending five hours with him drinking coffee, smoking and talking about life. We shared many profound insights on that warm evening in the middle of busy Soho – the academic and the former IRA operative – but there was one thing he said that has stuck with me: ‘You know, Anne,’ he began, ‘life is just a series of negotiations, isn’t it? You wake up in the morning and you negotiate your choices – am I going to go to work or am I going to stay home, get drunk and watch TV? And you negotiate the big things too. But what if, Anne, what if you never had to negotiate anything? What if you didn’t have a choice? What if there were no other options? It’s not rocket science, you know. It’s just about giving these kids a choice. Something to negotiate.’

  As I walked back to my hotel that night I rang Dave to tell him about my day. He knew who I was going to meet and the risks it involved, and he was anxiously awaiting my call. ‘He’s pretty amazing,’ I gushed over the phone. ‘His insights are just so interesting.’

  Dave stopped me. ‘Honey. Honey. He killed cops.’ Yes. Of course he did. And Dave was once a police officer.

  I had thought about Sean O’Callaghan and his story many times since that meeting. That afternoon talking to Matt, I thought about it once again. ‘Have you ever been to Perth?’ I asked Matt. Three days later I had booked him a flight and a hotel room.

  I asked Dave to pick Matt up from the airport on the evening he was to arrive and bring him to our home, where I was preparing dinner for the three of us. ‘What does he look like?’ Dave asked. Good question. I hadn’t really thought to ask in the thirty minutes or so I had spent talking to him on the phone before inviting him to join us in our home.

  Matt’s story, like the stories of hundreds of other formers, begins with the day he left behind violence and hatred. And that story always begins with a personal experience – an encounter with the enemy that jolts them so hard, it causes a seismic shift in the belief system of those who once felt nothing but hate and animosity. In Matt’s case, it was the unexpected help of a stranger – an Asian man – in a time of need that interrupted his thinking and led him down a different path.

  Over the course of the evening in my house I asked him, ‘So was there a time when you would have wanted to hurt me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘and I couldn’t believe it when you just invited me to come to Perth and to your home. I couldn’t believe that you’d want to know me.’

  ‘Do you still want to hurt me? Is it something that you think about now?’

  ‘Nah.’ And we laughed awkwardly as we broke bread and ate our halal chicken. And from the strange circumstances of that meeting years ago, Matt and I have forged a kinship that he would have once thought impossible.

  25

  Drown Her in Pig’s Blood

  By 2014, among the academics and practitioners in the field of terrorism and counterterrorism studies, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden who had been captured and killed three years earlier were hardly spoken about. There was a new kid on the block emerging in the Middle East out of the ashes of an illegal war waged on the false pretence of weapons of mass destruction. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had morphed into something much more barbaric – so barbaric in fact that even the new senior leadership of al-Qaeda proper tried to distance themselves. When the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was first declared, it was received with a mixture of confusion, trepidation and utter dread.

  The new beast made its mark early by almost immediately declaring the establishment of a proper state – an Islamic State that would open its arms to any disaffected Muslim searching for a new, more bloody theatre of violent jihad. It also launched head-on into a campaign of violence so savage that it virtually guaranteed it would only attract those most primed for bloodshed. And it was all captured on film and streamed right to the heart of their targets. ISIL harnessed the anger of a generation of Muslims who had watched as the United States and her allies failed to bring democracy to Iraq through a decade-long war that displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands.

  But it was the image of a young boy no older than five or six holding up a severed head next to his proud father that encapsulated the sheer depravity of the new (but actually not-so-new) wave of terror so far away and yet so close to home. I’ll never fully understand why every major newspaper chose to broadcast that image on their front page. Margaret Thatcher once accused the media of being the oxygen that terrorists crave. And she was right. Even if ISIL didn’t have the internet, they had the Daily Telegraph, and they could be sure that the press in countries as far away as Australia would always give them the publicity they craved.

  It was around that time that I was contacted by a Western Australian journalist who was writing a story about ISIL and religion. She had a number of questions about Islam that she wanted me to comment on. Among them was the question of beheadings and whether or not such heinous acts were sanctioned in the religion. ‘Absolutely not,’ was my immediate response. The story appeared in the West Australian newspaper the next day under the headline, ‘There’s nothing Islamic about beheadings’. I thought it was pretty common sense and pretty straightforward. I was not prepared for the onslaught of hate it was about to unleash.

  The article in a relatively small local publication was picked up by the United States–based Jihad Watch – a self-proclaimed vigilante type of website with a blatantly anti-Islam message. The site’s creator, Robert Spencer, is well known and well received among far-right groups and white supremacists alike. For some reason, unbeknown to me, he had stumbled across that article and he really didn’t like it. Spencer took it upon himself to discredit everything I was quoted on in that article.

  His posted response attracted comments from followers in Australia. One of his followers posted my contact details and encouraged others to email me and mansplain (because they were almost exclusively men) about why I was wrong and they were right, and no matter what I would always be wrong and they would always be right because, you know I’m brown and a woman and they’re, you know, white and male and so they must just naturally have an inherent claim to rightness, right! In a matter of hours, my inbox was flooded with emai
ls, ranging from some trying to engage me in a faux intellectual debate to expressions of outright violence and thuggery to blatant death threats.

  It was the first time I’d been confronted by such unreserved hatred. I had become somewhat accustomed to the usual veiled questions about Islam that sometimes masked a much more sinister belief (though more often motivated by unconscious bias), but I had never had my life threatened like this. When another journalist called me a week or so later to get some background on a different story, I told him that I had been receiving death threats and read him some of the offending emails. He decided to write a story on that instead. Somehow, that story also found its way to Robert Spencer and his charming band of merry followers, and again I became the subject of their ire. I reasoned that these people must have a whole lot of time on their hands if their days could be so consumed by anything that I said or didn’t say.

  It was the first time I heard the term taqiyya. If you look up taqiyya, be prepared to wade through dozens of right-wing, anti-Islam websites that will explain to you that it is an Islamic concept that basically means Muslims can lie to further their cause. Each one will claim some kind of expertise in Islam because they have read the Quran or the Hadith or both, or have lived in a Muslim country et cetera, et cetera. If there was anything in religion that actually gave permission to lie, I would have used it for much more important things – like getting out of after-school detention or convincing my parents to let me go to a concert. In Arabic, the word taqiyya (pronounced with a soft q) actually means cap – like one you would wear on your head. So when I was first accused of taqiyya, I responded with a mixture of amusement and confusion. I actually had to look up the word to clarify that it is a concept that was once used by Shia Muslims when they were under threat of being persecuted. The concept meant that they could basically lie about being Shia to save their lives – much like the Jews who ‘converted’ during the Inquisition to avoid certain death.

  ‘Taqiyya’ and ‘terrorist sympathiser’ are just two of the terms invoked by those on the far right, white supremacists and anti-Islam groups to discredit anything I (along with a handful of other people) say. Mind you, they’re the same people who will also accuse me of not wanting to debate them or discuss anything with them. Here’s a little hint to those people. If you really, really want to engage someone in a discussion, it’s probably best not to start the conversation with ‘I don’t believe anything you are going to say anyway’ – it kind of defeats the purpose of discussion.

  Some days, I wish I’d never picked up the phone when that journalist called to ask me about beheadings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and killings. Some days, I wish I had chosen an easier path – a quiet path away from the accusations, the finger pointing and the constant scrutiny. Some days, I’ve felt broken and beaten by it all – by the death threats and the calls to ‘hang [her] from a tree’, ‘drown her in pig’s blood’ and ‘put a bullet in the bag’. I wish I hadn’t opened the handwritten letter calling me a ‘fucking Muslim cunt slut’ (whatever that means) and that I hadn’t read the email telling me to ‘fuck off out of my country’. Some days, I wish that my childhood memories of playing cricket on the streets of Western Sydney weren’t fading so fast. Because some days, I really need those memories to be in full colour and as real and as tangible as they were back then. Some days, I’ve found it hard to smile and let it wash over me, and I have curled up into a ball and cried. Some days it’s just too hard.

  In response to the new level of attention I was getting and the threats, the university offered to move my small team of researchers and me to new offices that were more secure. We moved twice in that year, each time with strict instructions to not reveal our office location and thoroughly vet any visitors. Not everyone was happy about the new security upgrades that were necessitated by my presence, but it was out of my control.

  Earlier that year, I was asked to give a talk at the Indonesian Muslim Students Association at the university. The topic was ‘democracy and Islam’ and I was keen to talk about how secular democracy and Islam were compatible and dispel some of the myths perpetrated by both sides that Islam and democracy could not co-exist.

  Sometime before then, I had given a few media interviews about a radical new group that had started to form in Perth. The group had named itself Millatu Ibrahim and were meeting regularly in a centre not far from where we lived in Perth’s southern suburbs. Millatu Ibrahim was banned in Germany for its extremist ideology, but was hardly heard of here in Australia and especially not in the sleepy suburbs of Perth. The ringleader was a young upstart named Junaid Thorne, who had first come to the media’s attention when he and his brother Shayden were detained in Saudi Arabia under terrorism-related offences. I had done some research into his case when I was first asked to comment in the media and had followed his return to Australia. Thorne was a young Aboriginal man who had left Perth at a young age to study in Saudi Arabia. Upon his return, he established himself as a self-styled sheikh and set up the radical group. Thorne used his experience in Saudi Arabia to gain a following of vulnerable young men who were impressed by his credentials. He wore his detention at the hands of the Saudi authorities as a badge of honour, and advertised it in his sermons and public speeches, where he rallied angry young men to rage against the system that he claimed was oppressing them. His support and admiration for the so-called Islamic State were no secret, but the danger he posed was underestimated.

  Thorne and his troupe decided that they wanted to hear what I had to say about democracy and Islam – particularly since I had bad-mouthed them so much in the media. So they came along to my talk that day. There were around ten of them, including Thorne. There were a couple that I thought I knew – their newly grown beards didn’t stop me from recognising them as the little shits who were into drugs and rap music as young teens not so long ago – suddenly, they’d found God and a whole new holier-than-thou attitude to boot.

  They were a motley crew: there was the angry Somali kid who threw his hands up in the air and proclaimed that nobody ever listened to them; the lost-and-found boys who were on their way to being fully fledged gang members before they could grow beards; the sinister-looking convert who stared at everyone with an air of superiority and disgust; the ring-ins who hovered around Thorne, and Thorne himself. He was a skinny kid with a thirst for attention. He puffed up his chest each time he spoke with a Cheshire-like grin that gave off an air of smugness. He had found his much-craved fame right here in the suburbs of Perth among the lost boys and the angry men.

  Needless to say, my talk didn’t go down too well with Thorne and his troupe. Thorne challenged me to a theological debate, which made me laugh. I told him that I knew of some people who were keen to have a debate, but that he and Robert Spencer would probably find a lot more in common with each other than they realised. They didn’t stop there though. For weeks they continued to post comments on the Facebook page advertising my talk.

  I was in Washington when I got the call. The news had broken and it was all over the front pages of newspapers: a young Australian had left the country to fight and die alongside ISIL. The family left behind needed help. I put the phone down and searched my brain for that name. How did I know that name? I pulled out my laptop and scanned through the screen shots I had taken of that Facebook page that Thorne and his troupe had been commenting on. That’s how I knew that name. Mohammed had posted a comment on that very page lauding ISIL and declaring his allegiance.

  As the community closed ranks around their youth and came together to prevent the spread of Millatu Ibrahim, Thorne left for the eastern states. It was a small victory for the community that had banded together to make sure that he was not given a platform at any of the established mosques. As word spread, more mothers closed their doors to Thorne and prevented their sons from hanging out with him or his associates. Claiming that he could no longer work in Perth, Thorne and a handful of his followers left. But some stayed behind. That was how I m
et G. I had started working with a small group of active Muslim youth in Perth. I brought them into PaVE and got them involved in some of our programs. Our home became an open house for them, where they could meet and talk about their ideas for new projects and leadership within their communities.

  G came to see me at the recommendation of his friends. He was a nice-looking and polite young man who seemed keen to do something positive with his life. ‘Do you want a job?’ I asked him.

  He smiled. ‘Why wouldn’t I want a job?’ was his response.

  ‘That’s not how you answer a question. Do you want a job or not?’ He said he did, and I agreed to take him on two days a week for the next three months as an administrative assistant at the university. It was all I could afford from my research funds, but I promised him that I would help him get the experience he needed to apply for a full-time office position after three months.

  I was flying out the week that G was supposed to start so I gave him instructions about the project he would be working on. It was a database I was setting up which traced the life histories of 100 violent jihadi terrorists from Western countries. G’s task was to scour open sources to find out as much as he could about the lives and paths of the terrorist actors – many of whom were either dead or in jail – and enter those details into a database so that I could look at patterns of behaviour and histories. He was to spend eight hours a day, two days a week doing this kind of intensive research work along with any other administration work that Carmen gave him. I kept up with his progress by phone and email while I was away and made sure that he was on track.

  When I returned to work, G came to see me. ‘How are you going?’ I asked. ‘How is the project going? I hear you’ve been doing well.’

  He bowed his head and in his soft, polite voice said, ‘I don’t want to work on that project anymore please, Anne.’