While Australia sent over 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan – with 41 killed, hundreds wounded, even more with invisible scars – little did we know the global Islamist insurgency was bedding down right here in our country.

The tragic Islamist terrorist attack on Bondi Beach is what happens when you allow snakes to live in your sleeve. Stroking evil and expecting it to be less evil is weakness.

The Islamist global insurgency has been provided sanctuary in Australia by all sides of our political leadership who believed that by acquiescing to those with evil in intent, they would eventually become less evil.

By welcoming back those who joined ISIS, by ignoring the burning of our Australian flag, through protests which praised Hamas, the recognition of a non-existent Palestinian State, and labelling of anyone who stood up for Australian Judeo-Christian values as ‘Islamophobic’ – through all of this our policy makers thought they could do what no other Western nations have done and satisfy the Islamists.

Islamists no doubt believe there is no point persevering with the creation of a Caliphate in Syria and Iraq that can be bombed when it is easier to flourish in the West. Far better to cultivate networks within your enemy’s system as Marine Corps Colonel Thomas Xavier Hammes warns in The Sling and the Stone.

I have attempted to explain this before.

To take a village, insurgents apply a simple framework. They co-opt or kill the nodes of leadership.

Remember when it was argued that night-raids by US Special Forces against the Taliban infringed their human rights? Recall that when the ISIS insurgency metastasised around the world, we had to endure the nonsense of not calling them Islamist extremists, despite the fact they were raping hundreds of Yazidi women, selling others as sex-slaves, and beheading and burning alive those who refused to submit to their barbaric cult? Having burned their Western passports, these same people then demanded all the rights and privileges of their former nations when their jihad was over. The terrorists turned themselves into the victims with the willing participation of our own academics, lawyers, media, politicians, and NGOs.

The civilian nature of the Bondi Beach attack, in terms of the victims and the methods used, is morally and mentally disorientating, causing enormous entropy for the public as well as law enforcement.

It is Do-it-Yourself terrorism being played out through a global strategy. There is no frontline.

What we missed in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), but what the Taliban, AQ, Hamas, and ISIS understand, is the most transformative components of conflict are moral and mental. Being a member of the Taliban or Hamas or ISIS is a state-of-mind. This is the Jihad we are witnessing in Australia and other Western countries since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. For over a generation, governments assumed our national security and our freedoms could be protected by a conventional military means. Yet without a front or back line, this movement by-passed traditional counter-terror methods.

In Australia, we have growing numbers of Islamist sympathisers and Jihadist supporters changing the minds of politicians, university staff, and senior leaders across civil society, businesses, and the media. Our foreign policy has dramatically been changed because of this influence.

Just think … our democracy is being cultivated, coerced, and co-opted to support one of the most anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-Christian movements in the world. Anyone who questions this phenomenon is labelled a racist. And now in the UK, you could be arrested.

One of the least known, yet most strategically influential al Qaeda figures was Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al Suri, arrested during a 2005 counterterrorism raid in Pakistan. No other individual did more to transform al Qaeda’s strategy into a globalised umbrella. Now Jihad is becoming mainstreamed into many aspects of Western society, involving not just physical acts of terrorism, but also the kind of struggle we see around Western cities every week.

Abu Musab al Suri recognised there would need to be a great mobilisation to achieve mass participation in a jihadist movement. He saw the Palestinian Intifada as the ‘prototype’ but on a broader basis reaching the home of the American invaders and their infidel allies from every race and place. And now Australia.

The gut-wrenching irony of it all is we sent some of our best this country produces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. We convinced ourselves the fight was over there. If only we knew a sanctuary for Islamist extremism was being built right here. A sanctuary to undermine all that is good, and decent and generous about Australia.

In Australia and across the West we have large pools of disgruntled, impressionable, narcissistic individuals nurtured on identity politics, envy, and hate and self-loathing; a generation grown up on fear other than the fear of losing the soul of the West. The weak can be lured by fantasies. One interesting aspect of fear and human psychology is that people can be persuaded to do things against their own interests. It’s a generation ripe for exploitation.

The fact is the Islamist extremist global insurgency never ended with the demise of ISIS. Instead, it manoeuvred into the next phase of its plan. Notice how now there is no globally recognised leader calling the shots and doing threatening monologues down the camera.

All the Islamist insurgency had to do was patiently wait for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries to drive their campaign into the heart of all facets of our society. The plan has been evolutionary, with moments of revolutionary fever, as we are now witnessing. In the history of guerrilla warfare, insurgents have rarely been defeated when they have had sanctuary. Now that sanctuary is here. Before being killed in mid-2003, Saudi-born Shaykh Youssef Al-Ayyiri, one of al-Qaeda’s key strategists and best communicators, said, ‘The entire world has become a battlefield and not in theory.’ It is a fight beyond geography.

Our values, patriotism, mateship, community trust – and the sacrifices of generations past – must not be taken for granted. But we are all being taken for granted. Especially by those who create government policy allowing the insurgency to thrive.

While the risk from Islamist terrorism is real, so is the risk to society from poor leadership. Winston Churchill lamented the fatal fallacies that beset the West before the second world war: delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, pursuit of popularity irrespective of the state’s vital interests. Our political class today offers a picture of fatuity and fickleness – devoid of guile yet not of guilt, free from wickedness yet complicit in unleashing an undesirable society.