Malcolm Turnbull is right about the link between immigration and terrorism

Malcolm Turnbull is right about the link between immigration and terrorism and the Belgian ambassador is completely wrong.

From Turnbull's Lowy Foundation address:

European Governments are confronted by a perfect storm of failed or neglected

integration, foreign fighters returning from Iraq and Syria, porous borders and intelligence and security apparatus struggling to keep pace with the scope and breadth of the threat. Bernard Squarcini, a former head of France’s internal intelligence service, described these factors as creating a favourable ecosystem for an Islamist milieu.
For all intents and purposes there are no internal borders in Europe, that has been a great achievement of openness, and the external borders are difficult to manage. Recent intelligence indicates that ISIL is using the refugee crisis to send operatives into Europe.

True enough. But still left unsaid by Turnbull is the clear and critical link between the numbers of Muslims in a Western nation and the danger to the host. More Muslims tends to mean more radicals tends to mean more terrorism.

Simply criticising Western countries for “neglected integration” is to falsely assume that their Muslim minorities can be integrated or even want to be.
So Belgian Ambassador Jean-Luc Bodson is in hopeless denial when he criticises Turnbull’s very mild remarks:

It’s dangerous because it’s precisely what ISIS wants — that we would make a confusion between terrorism and migrants and between terrorism and Islam…
My view is that the terrorists who committed the latest attacks and in Paris and in Belgium are European-raised and born. Maybe from foreign origins, but they are Europeans. So it has nothing to do with the refugee crisis...

False !  This has everything to do with immigration and Islam.
The fact is that the all the terrorists behind the slaughter in Paris and Brussels were Muslim immigrants or the children of them, killing people in the name of their faith..
That has urgent lessons for us:
Counter terrorism expert David Kilcullen suggests we’re not as vulnerable as some European

countries, but his final caveat is critical and undermines his argument:

Australia’s circumstances differ greatly from those in Europe. Australia’s border protection agencies are vastly more effective than the European frontier agencies overstressed by the twin impacts of massive refugee flows and an ongoing financial crisis.
Our police and intelligence services have a much better track record of detecting and wrapping up terrorist plots before attacks can mature.
Australia also lacks the common land border with serious conflict areas in the Middle East that makes Europe more vulnerable, and Australian society is vastly better integrated than some European societies, where marginalised and unemployed youth in poorly serviced housing developments become vulnerable to grooming and recruitment by radical Islamic extremists. These are differences of scale, though, not of kind — Australia is much further down the spectrum than Europe, but the threat is still real.

Former Islamist radical Maajid Nawaz admits it’s the ideology - a popular version of Islam - that is the real problem:

-For many years, small ‘l’ liberals — and I speak as one — have refused to acknowledge the ideology of Islamism…
-Fearing a politically incorrect debate on values with Muslim communities, these same liberals preferred to view the problem as merely criminal, to be dealt with by law, or militaristic, to be dealt with by war…
-And as jihadist attack after ­jihadist attack came, liberals slowly, reluctantly, took to euphemistically naming the problem “violent extremism’’. They used nauseating, insipid phrases such as “al-Qa’ida-inspired extremism” to refer to what was an ideology… [I]t was not al-Qa’ida that had “inspired extremism”; it was extremism that had inspired al-Qa’ida…
-In fact, this struggle is first and foremost an ideological one..  Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam. Not nothing, not everything, but something.
-We can distinguish Islamist extremism from Islam by clarifying that whereas Islam is simply a religion, Islamism is a theocratic desire to impose any version of that religion over society…
-By failing to name the Islamist ideology and isolate it from everyday Islam, we are depriving these reforming voices of a language to deploy against those who are attempting to ­silence their progressive efforts within their own communities.

Nawaz (below) may be right to say Islam is just a faith, without a theocratic desire to impose it on others.

More likely, though, he is wrong, as the terrorists and leaders of Iran would insist. It might make sense for the rest of us to assume the worst while we wait for the Muslim community itself to demonstrate which view is right.
But together, the two points underline why we cannot be smug about how much better we assimilate Muslims.
The key issue here is critical mass. It is easier to assimilate immigrants or police the radicals when there are fewer of them - and when their numbers are not so great that they can form self-sustaining colonies.
So let’s compare.

France, which has suffered horrific mass-murders by Islamists, has more than 5 million Muslims - at least 7.5 per cent of the population.
Belgium, who has just suffered its own mass-murder by Islamists, has around 700,000 Muslims - 6.2 per cent of its small population.
Australia has 500,000 Muslims - about 2.1 per cent of the population.

If we had three times as many Muslims here to match the proportion in Belgium, or three and a half to match that in France, the danger here would almost certainly come close to the matching the danger there. Imagine radicals here having three times more supporters around them to support, supply and hide them.

The Way I See It......we, here in Australia, have the advantage of having the world’s biggest moat around us, but we would be utter fools not to recognise the key factors of this grave danger: the numbers of believers and their faith.

To limit the first and insist on change in the second is thus urgent. Yet both have been fiercely rejected by the Left, and even now Turnbull cannot speak frankly about either and neither will he back his Immigration Minister, Perter Dutton for mentioning. Trump-wise, that we need to be selective in our migrant intake in future to keep Australians from further danger.

NOTE: Dutton finally admitted that prime minister Malcolm Fraser in 1976 made a dangerous mistake by lowering our entry requirements and letting in many illiterate and unqualified Muslims fleeing Lebanon’s civil war. Yes, Dutton conceded, “Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today”.

Oops ! Too late. See the extraordinary crime wave we’ve since imported with Sudanese refugee gangs as well? The carjackings, home invasions and brazen thefts?

Will we never learn?