In 401 BC, the Greek general Xenophon addressed his men amid the peril of the Ten Thousand’s retreat: ‘In soldiering, the people whose one aim is to keep alive usually find a wretched and dishonourable death, while the people who, realising that death is the common lot of all men, make it their endeavour to die with honour, somehow seem more often to reach old age and to have a happier life when they are alive.’

Xenophon understood that the greatest danger is not the enemy who meets you in open battle, but the one who first breaks your will to fight. An old Arabic parable makes the same point with brutal clarity. Three bulls lived in safety as long as they stood together. A lion, unable to defeat them by force, approached each in turn with whispers and lies until suspicion divided them. Once they stood alone, the lion destroyed them one by one.

That is the strategy now being used against the West – and against Australia. Right when we need them most – to fight for Western civilisation with all their might – our political class seeks a life of safety through accommodation with an advancing Islamist global insurgency – let us name the so-called pro-Palestinian mob for what it is. Across the Western world, and nowhere more clearly than in Australia, a political oligarchy is responsible for the wretched and wicked erosion of the freedoms that define us.

There is no starker illustration than this: Australian authorities fund a Melbourne-based, radical Islamist cleric alleged to have had as a congregant the FlyDubai terrorist hijacker pilot, while an estimated $300 million has been spent targeting and destroying the lives of Australian SAS soldiers – men who fought with the same spirit as Xenophon, only to be dishonoured by the men of safety.

If, after twenty years fighting the war on terror ‘over there’, anyone had predicted we would potentially be funding the Islamist global insurgency right here at home, you would have called them mad. Yet here we are. Australia – and Victoria in particular – has apparently become a safe haven for Islamists and terrorist sympathisers. In 2014, the UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan warned that the future would see far more Islamist radicals and terrorists emerging from the West than from anywhere else. He was right.

In contrast to our soldiers, we have witnessed a catastrophic failure of courage. Our political class treating freedom as a limitless resource that can be extended to our enemies without consequence. George Orwell reminded us in 1942 that there is no neutral ground when civilisation is under assault. The tanks we send to Ukraine and the aid we dispatch abroad are meaningless if we lack the moral courage to defend our own society at home.

Our soldiers did not fight fascism, Japanese militarism or Islamist extremism only to return home and watch their successors be hounded by their own government and miserable journalists – while that same government opened the gates to the very ideology those soldiers had risked their lives to contain. Again, here we are.

And last weekend the irony was almost too perfect to bear. At the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, on the 25th anniversary of Australia’s service in Afghanistan, the men of safety were forced to sit in solemn recognition of the very men of honour and courage they are now seeking to ruin. Ben Roberts-Smith – Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Victoria Cross recipient, and the living embodiment of the SAS spirit – laid a wreath at the Stone of Remembrance.

Beside him and among the hundreds of veterans stood the politicians and officials of the class that has spent years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, pursuing him and his comrades through courts, inquiries and media campaigns. Prime ministers past and present, defence ministers, opposition leaders – all were required, for one brief morning, to honour the soldiers whose lives and reputations many have helped to shred. The Chinook that flew overhead was a reminder of the battlefield these men once owned. The political class that now owns the inquiries and the prosecutors could only sit and clap.

Our permissive environment has allowed Islamist networks to dominate key nodes of influence: mosques, schools, universities, community organisations, even political circles. Foreign funding from adversarial states, non-state actors and Wahhabi sources shape preaching and curricula. The Islamist infiltration, multiplied by political accommodation, means it will soon be too late to reverse. The necessary solutions would no longer be tolerated; the elites are too captured and too frightened.

The single best example of a Western nation on the cusp of being lost to the Islamists is the United Kingdom: uncontrolled mass migration of violent, fighting-age males, a rape-gang crisis, a police force sympathetic to Islamism, and a system infiltrated by its enemies at every level of society except the working class. You know, the actual people who do the fighting. Pretty soon the UK will no longer be a tier-one Western ally and will become an unreliable Aukus partner.

As much of our education class and many parents encourage children to become anti-Western protestors, chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’, we see the Islamist global insurgency’s mission advancing on schedule. When education becomes indoctrination, radical preachers become community leaders and lies become truth, we should fear what will happen when these children enter the workforce.

This is our gravest threat: not tanks from China, but erosion from within. Our security teeters on demographic shifts, ideological infiltration and policy cowardice. The lion does not need to roar at the gates when the bulls have already been taught to fear one another more than the predator among them.

If Australia continues down this path – funding its ideological enemies while persecuting its defenders, importing the very forces its soldiers once fought to contain, and teaching its children to despise the civilisation that gave them freedom – it will not remain the Australia we know. The choice is still ours, but the window is closing. Honour, once abandoned, is not easily recovered; and a nation that chooses safety over courage will, as Xenophon warned, find only a wretched and dishonourable end.