Following the massacre on Bondi Beach earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters that the murderers were adherents of a "radical perversion of Islam."
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett added that the men who gunned down 15 Jews, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, were aligned with the Islamic State, which she claimed is a terrorist organization – "not a religion."
Really, mates?
It's been a generation since Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Back then, most people had no idea who Osama bin Laden was, much less what he believed.
No one wanted to tar all Muslims with the terrorist brush. That was admirable. Just days after 9/11/01, President George W. Bush proclaimed that "Islam is peace." That was morally generous but analytically incorrect.
These many years later, it's no longer excusable for powerful and influential people like Mr. Albanese and Ms. Barrett to not know much about history and even less about theology.
Cutting to the chase: members of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, the regime that rules Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Boko Haram are all terrorists but we may presume that they also are true believers whose interpretations of the Koran and the Hadiths (collections of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad) are not insupportable.
Many members of these bellicose groups self-identify as "Salafi-Jihadis," meaning they see their version of Islam as akin to that of the Prophet Muhammad's 7th century companions and followers whose armies marched out of Arabia, swords raised, conquering foreign peoples and settling in foreign lands.
Vast Islamic empires and caliphates soon dominated much of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as significant swaths of Europe and Asia.
It was not until the 1920s, in the aftermath of World War I, that the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid II, boarded the Orient Express at a station near Istanbul, heading for exile among the unbelievers of Europe.
Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian school teacher, saw this as a historic tragedy. In 1928, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Its mission was – and still is – to reestablish Islamic supremacy and domination everywhere and anywhere.
Since then, Brotherhood theologians have provided inspiration to pretty much every group committed to waging jihad against Jews, Christians, Hindus, and others.
Those "others" include Muslims who decline to embrace the jihadis' reading of Islam and the obligations the jihadis insist are incumbent upon Muslims.
Under a doctrine known as takfir, these jihadis excommunicate and, on many occasions, kill Muslims who decline to toe their theological line.
This has been happening in Nigeria where Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Fulani militias slaughter Muslims who prefer to peacefully coexist with their Christian neighbors.
Similarly, Gazans uninterested in fighting an endless war against Israelis are denounced as "collaborators," a crime for which Hamas has summarily executed dozens over recent months.
Takfiris insist it's their way or the highway because Islam is not open to interpretation, unlike Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
But we know that claim is false because Shia Islam diverged from Sunni Islam nearly 1,400 years ago. And, over the centuries since, many other Islamic denominations have evolved. To name just a few: Sufis, Alevis, Ibadis, and Ahmadiyya. And within modern Shiism, there are three distinct traditions.
You'll also recall that the Islamic State split from Al Qaeda. Among their theological differences: Al Qaeda opposed the premature declaration of a caliphate.
Al Qaeda reasoned that if a caliphate was declared and then crushed, with the caliph killed by infidels, millions of Muslims would conclude that the jihad lacked divine endorsement.
As it turned out, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS founder and its first self-proclaimed caliph, was killed during a U.S. raid in Syria in 2019. The three caliphs who succeeded him also came to untimely ends.
But there's now a fourth caliph, and the Islamic State carries on, not least in Syria and Nigeria – two locations where its forces have recently been bombed on President Trump's orders.
Meanwhile, over recent years Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been reforming "Wahhabism," the state theology of Saudi Arabia based on the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century scholar whose goal was to establish a singular, rigorous, and pristine school of Islamic law.
The Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed in Saudi Arabia, as it is in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE even has a Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence. In 2023, he opened an Abrahamic Family House – a complex containing a mosque, church, and synagogue intended to convey "interfaith unity, tolerance, moderation, and peaceful coexistence."
Who has the authority to tell the Saudis and the Emiratis they're not good Muslims? By the same token, who has the authority to tell Jew-hating Muslim gunmen in Australia that they're "perverting" a peaceful religion that doesn't countenance terrorism?
That concludes my sermon for today but, in the few column inches I have left, I want to tell you a story.
In 2009, the State Department sent me to Pakistan under a "U.S. Speaker and Specialist program."
One of my meetings was with a group of religious leaders from different Muslim sects. One spoke of "moderate Islam." Another objected: "There is no such thing as 'moderate Islam.'"
Not one expressed support for Osama bin Laden (who was then secretly living in Pakistan). But neither would any label him an apostate or heretic.
This conversation prompted me to start reading and thinking about the subject of today's column. It's high time Mr. Albanese, Ms. Barrett, and many others in government, law enforcement, and academia did the same.