Melee in a Mosque

By Bruce Bawer

The closest I’ve ever come to visiting Australia is reading wonderful novels by Nevil Shute, Patrick White, Colleen McCullough, Tim Winton, and David Malouf and watching terrific movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and My Brilliant Career. Compared to taking a year-long course in Australian history or spending a student year in Melbourne or Brisbane, it wasn’t much, really. But I never really felt as if I had to do any more than read those books and see those movies to get a sense of Australia. Perhaps I was wrong, but for a long time I had the impression that Australia was kind of like America, only moreso: a sprawling settler country populated by hard-working English-speaking people who prized their freedom and who were justifiably proud of having conquered a challenging landscape – of having made an alien land their own.

Most countries around the world have national anthems that sound amazingly alike. The national anthem is a genre unto itself. You might think that countries in East Asia and South America, say, would have very different anthems. No. Almost all of them sound as if they were churned out by the same computer program. But Australia’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda,” was always an exception. I loved it, even though, or perhaps because, I could barely understand a word of it: it transported you to a land that spoke English but that nonetheless had a language of its own, a unique and colorful language that had been born of a need to describe a world far away from England, where, in April, as Robert Browning put it, “the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf / Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, / While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough.” Ponder, by contrast, the opening lines of “Waltzing Matilda”:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
“You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me.”

What is a swagman, a billabong, a coolibah tree, a billy? In the age of the Internet, the answers are easily found: a swagman is “a man who travelled the country looking for work”; a billabong is a small body of water; a coolibah tree is a kind of eucalyptus; a billy is “a can for boiling water.” And even “waltzing Matilda,” which sounds straightforward enough – isn’t it just about waltzing with a girl named Matilda? – actually refers to the act of the swagman traveling the countryside with his possessions, which would have been wrapped in cloth, and which, for reasons lost in the mists of history, were called “Matilda.” When I was a kid, I never knew any of this; and yet hearing these first lines of “Waltzing Matilda” always moved me, because I knew they were the authentic product of a culture all its own.

Aside from which, all I know is that Australians were proud participants in both World War I (notably in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign) and World War II, and were stalwart allies during the Cold War, fighting alongside Americans in Korea and Vietnam, and afterwards, when they took part in the Gulf War and the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. Until very recently, Australia seemed to be as reliable an American ally as possible. Above all, it seemed to be an immensely sane country, populated by strong, down-to-earth, independent-minded folks who were really not all that different from the descendants of the Englishmen who first settled America.

Then in 1972, the Labor Party took power, expanding welfare entitlements, introducing government healthcare, pandering to aborigines, and proclaiming “Advance Australia Fair” the national anthem. It’s generic, banal, colorless, essentially indistinguishable from many other anthems: “Australians all let us rejoice, / For we are one and free; / We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, / Our home is girt by sea.” And so on. Perhaps the adoption of this bland tune as the national anthem isn’t really as big a deal as I think it is. But in retrospect it certainly looks like the signal of a sea change – a sign of Australia ceasing to be a country apart, with its own uniquely tough, unpretentious culture, and instead becoming one more postwar Western nation, governed by technocrats and pursuing left-wing policies.

Which brings us to COVID. In 2022, a controversy arose surrounding Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis player who, to quote from Wikipedia, “has been ranked as the world No. 1 in men’s singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) for a record 428 weeks, finished as the year-end No. 1 a record eight times, and has been ranked No. 1 at least once in a year for a record 13 different years.” When Djokovic made it clear that he was opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine and would refuse to take it in order to participate in that year’s Australian Open, his visa was cancelled and he was denied the right to play in the Open, which he was favored to win. While his case was being adjudicated, he was held prisoner in a hotel room. After Alex Hawke, the Minister for Immigration, cancelled his visa for a second time, the Federal Court of Australia upheld his ruling, whereupon Djokovic was deported. Terrorists have been treated better. Because of his principled stance, Djokovik lost the No. 1 ranking that he had held for over eight years.

Then, in 2022, Anthony Albanese of the Labor Party was elected Prime Minister. His pet causes include transgenderism and Islamic rights. It was on December 14, 2025, that he faced his first major international challenge. On that day, two ISIS-inspired jihadists shot to death fifteen Jews who were celebrating Hanukkah on Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach. It was the worst terrorist attack ever in Australia. And the perpetrators were obviously Muslims. But Albanese, like others of his ilk in Europe and North America, was slow to acknowledge this fact. As Mark Tapson reported at the time, Albanese, on the day following the atrocity, “blathered more than 5000 words in press conferences, interviews and statements. Not once did he say the words ‘Muslim,’ ‘Islam,’ or even ‘Islamic extremism.’ He did, however, twice raise the threat of ‘right-wing extremist groups,’ because that’s the go-to boogeyman for Left-wing politicians.” In the end, Albanese’s response to the Bondi Beach atrocity was a combination of classically fatuous left-wing measures: he further tightened Australia’s already strict gun legislation and intensified laws against hate speech. In short, he failed a critically important test.

Then came another test: the case of the Iranian women’s soccer team. Before their first game at the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, the Iranian players chose not to sing their national anthem. After the Iranian government condemned this action, they requested asylum in Australia, and were summarily refused – whereupon Trump weighed in, urging Albanese to grant them asylum and promising that if he said no, they would be given residency in the U.S. Trump’s intervention led Albanese to change his mind; but when Iran’s leaders made it clear to the soccer players that if they didn’t return home their families would pay the price, the women caved in and went back to Iran. It was, yes, a messy situation, but Albanese didn’t emerge from it with flying colors: his denial of asylum to the Iranian athletes came off as motivated by fear of Australian Muslims, period.

Cut to March 20. It was Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. So of course, Albanese paid a visit, along with Immigration Minister Tony Burke, to the Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, the country’s largest Muslim house of worship, during a morning prayer service in order to engage in the usual acts of submission – namely, to tell the Muslims present how wonderful they are and to condemn the critics of their vile excuse for a religion as Islamophobes. Yet the natives were restless. Instead of sitting down and listening to Albanese, they stood up, waved their fists in the air, and jostled one another. “Get him out of here!” yelled one bearded chap. In a reference to an incident last month, when police dragged away Muslims who were praying outside Sydney’s Town Hall in protest against a visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, one man shrieked: “It’s his government that pulled them while they were praying!” Even though Albanese has criticized Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War, voted for an anti-Israel UN resolution, and sent tens of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza in the last couple of years, it wasn’t enough to keep members of the Lakemba Mosque from calling Albanese and Burke “genocide supporters” and from telling them: “You have killed our brothers and sisters!” And a great many of these pious folks bellowed “Allahu akbar!”

A mosque official tried to calm what seemed a lot less like a congregation of worshipers than an unruly mob bent on violence. “Dear brothers and sisters, keep calm a little bit,” the official said. “It is Eid. ​It is a joyful day.” But the effort was futile. Muslim fury is not so easily quelled. And so they made their noise, heckling and harassing Albanese while he sat there looking scared to death and utterly impotent. (Can you imagine President Trump allowing himself for one second to be put in such a situation?) The mob even followed Albanese and Burke after they left the mosque, chanting: “Shame on you! Shame on you!” Any prime minister who respected himself and his country would’ve instantly closed down the mosque until further notice and ordered a probe into its finances. He’d have commanded police to study the videos of the event that were posted online, identify the malcontents, investigate them, arrest anyone who could reasonably be accused of threatening a public official, and deport anyone who turned out to be living in Australia illegally or to have ties to a recognized terrorist group.

But Albanese did none of these things. After the mosque debacle, he described it as “incredibly positive,” telling reporters that “if you got a couple of people heckling in a crowd of 30,000, that should be put in ​that perspective.” Sheer nonsense. Anyone who understands anything about Islam could have told him that it was folly to enter that mosque in the first place. For there is no appeasing these people. Such mosque visits  by political leaders communicate nothing but fear and weakness. Muhammed was, let it be remembered, a warrior – a brutal and ruthless one – and no true Muslim has any respect whatsoever for a leader who doesn’t come off as a warrior, prepared to do battle for his people. Those men at that mosque, after all, weren’t singing “Waltzing Matilda” or “Advance Australia Fair” – they were howling “Allahu akbar,” which is nothing other than a bold, barefaced assertion of Islamic power. And Albanese, if he doesn’t want to see Australia go down the same road as Germany and France and Britain, had better start trying to wrap his mind around that unsettling little fact – and doing something about it.

First published in Front Page Magazine