Naming the Game Without Saying the Name
When Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, announced the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion (RCA), he did something both cautious and daring at once. The Commission’s terms of reference call for examination of the nature and drivers of Jew hatred, including “ideologically and religiously motivated extremism and radicalisation”, alongside measures to strengthen social cohesion and public safety.¹
Yet conspicuously absent is any explicit naming of Islam or its doctrine. That omission matters, because the current global wave of Jew hatred, particularly in its post-2001 manifestations cannot be examined seriously without confronting politics, violent jihad, Sharia and the treatment of non-Muslims embedded within Islamic primary texts.
The result is a paradox. Mr. Albanese has invited scrutiny of “extremism” while leaving the ideology, Political Islam, which is embedded in the Islamic primary doctrine, unnamed. He has, in effect, opened the door without putting a sign on the room.
Mr. Albanese’s approach is not weakness but tactical courage. He is attempting to keep his eye on the ball of Jew hatred and social cohesion, while the powerful doctrinal and political pressures attempt to divert attention away from full and accurate disclosure of Islamic political teaching.
Doctrine and the Prohibition of Critique
Classical Islamic jurisprudence does not treat critique as neutral scholarship. It treats it as moral offence. In Reliance of the Traveller (RoT) , an authoritative manual of Sharia in the Sunni tradition, the definition of slander (ghiba) is remarkably broad:
“If he notices something bad, it is unlawful to mention it, as this is slander.” (RoT g2.5)
And further:
“Slander means mentioning anything concerning a person that he would dislike.” (RoT r2.2)
Applied doctrinally, this framing means that critical examination of Islamic political and legal content is not merely disagreement; it becomes prohibited speech.
The Koran reinforces obedience over inquiry:
“And it becometh not a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His messenger have decided an affair (for them), that they should (after that) claim any say in their affair; and whoso is rebellious to Allah and His messenger, he verily goeth astray in error manifest.” (Koran 33:36)
“O ye who believe! Come, all of you, into submission [Islam] (unto Him); and follow not the footsteps of the devil. Lo! he is an open enemy for you.” (Koran 2:208)
“He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religion. And Allah sufficeth as a Witness.” (Koran 48:28)
Taken together, these sources frame Islam not simply as faith, but as complete civilization. Legal, political and social ideology. Questioning its structure is, as described by the Islamic doctrine itself, an act bordering on blasphemy.
This matters for the RCA because any investigation into “religiously motivated extremism” that touches doctrine is immediately subject to pressure not to ask certain questions, not to use certain words, and not to disclose certain texts.
That pressure is not accidental. It is doctrinal.
Rushdie and the Cost of Looking Too Closely
The sensitivity of doctrinal exposure is not hypothetical. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, a fictional and indirect engagement with Mohammed’s Hadith material, resulted in a fatwa that remains in effect decades later. Mr. Rushdie did not run a Royal Commission. He wrote a novel.
If a novelist’s imagination can trigger such reaction, one should not underestimate the resistance faced by political leaders who are tasked with asking whether religious doctrine itself contributes to hostility, violence, or antisemitism.
Mr. Albanese’s RCA, although far more cautious, nonetheless places pressure on a protected zone: doctrine itself. It asks whether antisemitism arises socially alone, or whether theological and legal frameworks embedded in religious systems play a role.
The difficulty is that Islamic jurisprudence traditionally frames such inquiry not as civic necessity, but as insult. The fatwa on Mr. Rushdie is an implied pressure that many dare not test.
Education Without Disclosure
Before the RCA, Mr. Albanese appointed two special envoys — one on antisemitism and one on Islamophobia, whose reports called for education almost one hundred times. Education is presented as the cure-all.
The Endless Answer to the Wrong Question
Education, apparently, is our national incense: wave it at any problem and hope the smoke clears.
Yet Australia already teaches Islamic studies extensively. Hundreds of units, thousands of books, decades of scholarship. What exactly remains undiscovered?
The issue is not absence of education, it is selective education.
Victorian research into 21 years of Islamic studies examinations found that only 3 (1.5%) of questions addressed management, subjugation, or violence against non-Muslims. The overwhelming majority focused on devotional, ethical and domestic matters. The fact is that 6.7% of the Koran’s content is an anti-Jewish text, 8.7% is dedicated to jihad. All together Koran focuses 64% of its content to non-Muslims. This is not balance. It is structurally and systemically selective.
CSPII’s statistical methodology shows a similar pattern in Western security discourse. For example, in the USA, words such as jihad, Islamic, Sharia, and Islamist quietly disappeared from official lexicons after 2007, replaced with generic euphemisms (Acts of Violent Jihad and Ideological War of Political Islam 2020).² The doctrine did not change; the language did.
Education became reassurance rather than instruction.
As a result, students graduate knowing how followers of Islamic doctrine pray and eat, but not how the doctrine governs law, authority, obedience, jihad, or relations with non-Muslims, the very elements relevant to antisemitism, extremism and a fracturing of social coehesion.
Parliament’s Long Memory, Academia’s Short One
Hansard from the early post-9/11 period reveals that Australian leaders from Canberra to all corners of Australia called for deeper, not shallower, inquiry. Parliamentary debates recognized that ideology, political doctrine mattered.
At the same time, representatives also warned about sensitivities. One 2002 ACT Assembly debate argued that repeatedly linking terrorism and Islamic doctrine would provoke division.³ That caution gradually hardened into avoidance.
Instead of confronting doctrine carefully, institutions learned to scope it out.
Ironically, Australia’s own terrorism cases Jack Roche, Joseph “Jihad Jack” Thomas and others explicitly referenced doctrinal motivation in legal proceedings.⁴ These were not sociological accidents. They were ideologically informed acts.
Yet doctrine vanished from education while remaining central to security law.
Implied Pressure and the Art of the Mark
Implied pressure on our leaders can be found in the wider civilizational context surrounding the issue, reflected starkly in more than 49,000 recorded jihad events worldwide.5 These are not merely statistics; they form a background hum of consequence that shapes political behaviour. In such an environment, leadership decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. They are influenced by anticipation of reaction, backlash, and destabilisation long before any policy is publicly articulated.
Here the Australian football metaphor becomes useful. When a player goes back with the flight of the ball, the hardest part is not the mark itself; it is the implied pressure. Knees rise, bodies close, eyes wander. The instinct is to look for who is coming rather than where the ball is. Fear diverts attention. The mark is missed not because the ball is difficult, but because the player becomes preoccupied with impact. The best players don’t do this. They absorb the risk, block out the noise, and keep their eyes on the ball.
In the present debate, Islamic doctrine exerts precisely this kind of implied and actual pressure. It pressures institutions, politicians, and academics to look sideways: toward offence, toward community backlash, toward reputational risk anything except full disclosure of texts, law, jihad, authority structures, and the doctrinal treatment of non-Muslims. The consequence is hesitation disguised as sensitivity, avoidance framed as tolerance, and silence justified as prudence. Only through careful management of political levers and disciplined public discourse can such a delicate subject be explored without dire consequences and only if leaders, like elite players, keep their eyes on the ball rather than the oncoming collision.
Many drop their eyes.
Mr. Albanese, however, has not. By establishing the RCA around antisemitism and extremism, he is going for the mark. It is clear that criticism will come. But he has kept the ball in sight: understanding the real drivers of antisemitism rather than merely its social symptoms. It is courage under pressure.
Conclusion: Education, But Not as Before
Education will indeed be central to the Royal Commission’s work as evidenced by the government’s establishment of an Antisemitism Education Taskforce and its endorsement of curriculum reform. (Department of Education)
But the critical question remains: education about what? Unless Australians confront the doctrinal dimensions underlying current global wave of antisemitism and ideological violence, we risk producing more textbooks than understanding, more institutions than insight.
As Louie Simmons used to say: “Doing the same bad drills and expecting a different result is nuts.”
The RCA has begun a conversation that many have avoided. The next step is ensuring what is taught includes the elements long excluded. Only then can education fulfill its promise — and the implied pressure exerted by this Commission be translated into structural clarity, not just cautious rhetoric.
Read Our Submission to the Royal Commission:
Contact for Australia
Gregory Francis Hearn
CSPII 🇦🇺 Education Director & C4WU Director
[email protected]
Sources
- Letters Patent, Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Terms of Reference, Commonwealth of Australia.
- Center for the Study of Political Islam International (CSPII), Acts of Violent Jihad and Ideological War of Political Islam, statistical analysis of lexicon disappearance.
- Hansard, ACT Legislative Assembly, 12 November 2002, debate on terrorism and religion.
- R v Roche (2003); R v Thomas (2006), Australian terrorism prosecutions referencing ideological motivation.
- The Religion of Peace, online resource, www.thereligionofpeace.com
- Pickthall, Marmaduke. 1930. The Meaning of The Glorious Koran, An Explanatory Translation, New York: Alfred AKnopf.
- Keller, Nuh Ha Mim, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classical Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, Amana Publications.