News Corp spear carriers like to bang on about radical Islam, but they’ve been left looking isolated by Abbott’s response to the Sydney Siege. Does anyone actually agree with them?

Now and then culture warriors are forced to get creative. Perhaps the facts won’t easily support their prefabricated opinions. Maybe the complicity of their political enemies with evil can’t be shown in any straightforward or honest way. Sometimes it’s necessary to reinflate the opinion bubble as it sags under the pressure of outside events. The risk they run is that their selective and partisan retellings begin to seem delusional.

At the conclusion of the siege at the Lindt cafe in Sydney’s Martin Place, the NSW police commissioner confirmed it was not an organised terror attack but an “isolated incident” carried out by an individual. There were overwhelmingly good reasons for thinking that Man Haron Monis was no more in death than what he had been in life — a violent, troubled, mendacious and misogynistic man.

You might think that the absence of a plot would make it difficult for rightwing columnists to smear “the left” on the basis that they are “soft on terror”. After all, how could Monis be labelled a terrorist without expanding that category to include the everyday horrors perpetrated by all of those weak men who compensate for their failures by abusing or killing others?

Miranda Devine’s ingenuity in finding a way to indict her opponents for this tragedy shows us why she gets the big bucks. Her last column argued that “the left” was culpable because they offered assistance to those who might be subject to racist attacks through the #illridewithyou campaign – because Monis was a Muslim. Devine says:

Denial, deflection, projection. They see themselves as morally superior to the rest of Australia, which they imagine as a sea of ignorant rednecks. In their eyes the threat is not terrorism but Islamophobia.

Given the upsurge in strangers physically and verbally abusing Muslim women since Australia upgraded its terror alert; and that race riots have started in Sydney over far less than what occurred in Martin Place; and that we’ve already seen public displays of racism in places far removed from the scene of the siege, offering support may not seem like such a bad idea.

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Devine’s comments also show how little the culture warriors now matter on the grand stage of national policy. Devine, Bolt, and the rest of News’s hard right club are so far adrift from the official response to the siege, that they seem barely to be in contact with reality at all. Just as the police commissioner and Mike Baird emphasised that Monis acted alone, Abbott refused to blame Islam for what Monis did, saying that it would be like blaming the Pope for the actions of the IRA.

This isn’t the first time Abbott has left his rightwing supporters swinging in the wind: think of how the “reform” of 18C was traded away so that security agencies could get their way on enhanced terror laws.

News Corp spear carriers like to bang on about the threat from radical Islam; the government that was meant to confirm their triumph has also left them looking like isolated outsiders on this issue, too. Abbott and Baird won’t endorse the view that there’s a violent culture war waiting to explode, as rightwing columnists often imply. Ironically, the “harmony” that Devine celebrates may be most threatened by the reactionary imagination that the columns of her and her colleagues give succour to.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/18/illridewithyou-do-australias-rightwingers-hate-it-because-they-dont-know-their-own-readers