I n an otherwise impeccable piece, Janet Albrechtsen wrote recently:

‘It is worth repeating here – for the umpteenth time – that we are focused on radical Islam. Not on the millions of law-abiding Muslims who would rightly regard the Akrams and their Isis fellow travellers as having perverted Islam.’

This apparently benign formula, adopted by most commentators, is a dangerous and facile misrepresentation of a crisis engulfing the West. It suggests that if we weed out the extremists who want to come here, all will be well. A glance at Europe tells a different story. The millions of ostensibly ‘law-abiding’ Muslims who have migrated there in recent decades have helped, unwittingly or otherwise, to create the demographic and cultural conditions in which radicalism flourishes and the cultures of host societies are perverted.

These migrants have not primarily gone to Europe to forge better lives grounded in Western civic values and freedoms. Too many have been drawn by the material and social largesse of Western states, without embracing the moral and cultural foundations that made such prosperity possible.

Since people of Arabic and Middle Eastern descent are as capable of generosity, mercy, and reasoned thought as anyone else, why are so many of their countries of origin among the most violent and dysfunctional on Earth? The answer lies not in race or ethnicity but in Islam itself.

Christianity, rightly, has been criticised for its violent past. Yet no serious commentator today says, ‘The Inquisition was merely a perversion of Christianity.’ The Bible recounts episodes in which Israel smites the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Philistines, but these are understood as accounts of historical inter-tribal conflict, not exhortations for believers to strike the ungodly now. In any case, there are precious few Amalekites left to target. Judaism and Christianity have moved on from the darker aspects of their past, aided by centuries of internal critique, institutional authority, and theological development. Catholicism, for example, possesses mechanisms such as councils, magisterial authority, and the doctrine of papal infallibility that have enabled adaptation to the modern world. Islam, by contrast, has undergone no such reformation.

Violence is embedded in Islamic texts. Numerous passages urge believers to fight unbelievers, including Jews and Christians. To be fair, many also instruct the faithful to show mercy once the infidel converts or submits and pays the jizya. Much of the violence is left in the hands of Allah. As with the Bible, these texts emerged from early struggles for survival and dominance. But unlike the Amalekites, Jews and Christians remain very much present, providing enduring targets to excite the fervour of devout believers.

Like Christianity, Islam is not monolithic. It is entirely possible for benign forms of Islam to be practised by many Muslims, and there are countless ‘cultural Muslims’ who identify with the faith without closely observing its demands.

Yet extremists often argue with some textual justification that they, not the moderates, are the orthodox interpreters of Islam, and that it is the ‘moderates’ who are perverting the religion. The problem is not merely the existence of this view but its prevalence. Those who hold it are not isolated outliers. They constitute a distinct sectarian current within Islam. While numerically a minority, even a small proportion of a global population of 1.6 billion is enormous.

A 2013 Pew Research Centre survey found that up to a quarter of Muslims in Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Tunisia believe suicide bombings and other acts of violence against civilians are sometimes justified. Even if most of these respondents would never participate in such atrocities, their failure to repudiate them is a cause for grave concern that should trouble Muslim leaders as much as it troubles the West.

Following the Bondi massacre, the Australian National Imams Council issued a sermon titled ‘Unity, Harmony, and Standing Together as One Nation’, which declared:

‘Islam is a religion founded on mercy, justice, peace and responsibility toward all people and humanity… The recent acts of terror and violence in Bondi are unequivocally condemned… Islam calls believers to respond to such moments with compassion, justice, wisdom, and moral clarity.’

I have some sympathy for their position but nowhere in this sermon, or over the past two years have Australia’s imams publicly repudiated the violent antisemitic passages of the Koran that extremists routinely cite. Instead, these texts are ignored, as though they do not exist. The prevalence of radical Islam is not evidence that it represents a perversion of the faith; it is evidence that Islam has not undergone an effective reformation.

Theology, however, is not the sole problem. The more immediate issue is the culture that Islam has spawned in many Muslim-majority societies, one that has given rise to practices such as forced child marriage, female genital mutilation, honour killings, compulsory veiling, and the treatment of non-Muslims as ritually unclean, as illustrated by the case of Asia Bibi. Most of these  barbarities are rightly proscribed in Australia. But the fact that they are justified by appeals to religious authority and would be practised by some in the absence of legal restraint demonstrates a profound incompatibility with liberal democratic norms. This culture can be deeply misogynistic, homophobic, and antisemitic, as evidenced by the Pakistani grooming-gang scandals in Britain, where authorities failed to act for years out of fear of confronting religiously inflected cultural practices.

Migrants also bring with them the trauma of life in dysfunctional and violent societies. Even moderate Muslim families are not immune to the radicalisation of their children, particularly where communities become segregated into enclaves with minimal contact with broader society. Europe, the UK and Birmingham, in particular, show where this can lead.

It may be that the antisemitism of many Islamic radicals is shaped as much by geopolitics and inherited grievance as by theology. But the result is no less deadly. The same is often true, to varying degrees, among otherwise ‘moderate’ Muslims. Whether antisemitism is rooted in religion or culture is beside the point. If we are serious about stamping out antisemitism, we must not  import antisemitic migrants to this country. But what are the odds that a royal commission into antisemitism will confront that uncomfortable reality?

Australia’s immigration program should unapologetically serve the national interest and be planned separately from refugee intake, which should be selective and, in most cases, time-limited.

I don’t doubt most Muslims in Australia were as appalled by the massacre at Bondi, as those at Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo. Just not appalled enough to take a long, hard look at their religion and wonder why virtually all the religiously-motivated mayhem in the 21st century has been committed by their co-religionists.