The weekend Australian 29 May 2026
Jason Thomas
ISIS brides: Australia has played into the hands of its enemies
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Debate continues over national security, migration, and social cohesion in Australian cities. Picture: Andrew Batsch
5:00AMMay 29, 2026
It is said that an intelligent enemy is better than a foolish friend and, with the return of the ISIS wives, the global Islamist insurgency has no better friend than Australia. Stroking evil and expecting it to become less evil is a sign of weakness and instead of being thanked will continue to be exploited, leading to what is becoming an irreversible phenomenon and a permanent, self-inflicted security failure.
By enabling the return of ISIS wives, the Australian government is playing into the hands of a protracted, ideologically driven, military struggle employing “pen and gun, word and bullet, tongue and teeth” to achieve its long-term objective; that is, turning anthills into Islamist safe havens and the political transformation of Australia.
In the history of irregular warfare, insurgencies enjoying a sanctuary are rarely defeated. This lesson, forged in Algeria, Vietnam, The Philippines, Afghanistan and beyond, now applies to Australia. Successive governments have created the conditions for the global Islamist insurgency – al-Qa’ida remnants, ISIS networks, Hamas sympathisers, Hezbollah supporters, and Iranian regime activists – to establish safe havens in our cities. Through lax immigration, moral equivocation and a misguided multiculturalism elevating imported grievances over national cohesion, we have welcomed the enemy through the gate. Because once the first demands were met out of weakness, the greater demands are now met out of fear.
French colonel Roger Trinquier, in his book Modern Warfare, taught that the real battlefield is the mind and soul of the population. Insurgents succeed by turning civilians into both shield and sword. Another French counterinsurgency expert, the late David Galula, stressed the population is the centre of gravity. And in his classic Small Wars, from 1896, British colonel CE Callwell, described how irregular fighters blend into the landscape, exploiting local sympathy and mobility to outlast superior forces. Australia has provided all three: physical sanctuary, psychological space, and demographic footholds.
What the West missed during the global war on terror is what the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, Hamas, and ISIS always understood: jihad is a state of mind. Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, this ideology has been massively reinvigorated across the West, including Australia. As TE Lawrence understood, without front or back, such movements bypass conventional defence and security frontlines. Abu Musab al-Suri, al-Qa’ida’s key strategist, transformed jihad into a decentralised movement capable of mass mobilisation. He saw the Palestinian intifada as a prototype for global participation. That strategy is now successfully embedding in Australia.
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 shapes preaching and curriculums. This is Trinquier’s “subversive warfare” in action – parallel structures eroding loyalty to the state from within. No physical caliphate in the Middle East is required when one can be built suburb by suburb through influence operations, demographic concentration and the exploitation of liberal democracy’s openness.
Decades of generous refugee programs, chain migration and weak vetting are permanently altering the human terrain. Fighting-age males continue arriving, often importing ideologies: antisemitism, sharia advocacy, honour-based violence, rejection of our Judeo-Christian values. This is not integration – it is infiltration.
Parallel societies are forming in Sydney’s Lakemba, Melbourne’s Broadmeadows and elsewhere. Radical preachers operate with relative impunity, shielded by a political class terrified of “Islamophobia” labels and new hate speech laws. Loyalty to Australia often ranks second to transnational militancy. The disturbing rationalisation of October 7 atrocities by some segments of society, including many white liberal women, reveals how far ideological capture has spread.
Britain offers a grim warning. Similar policies of openness have delivered grooming gang scandals, no-go areas, mainstreamed antisemitism, and a political elite more focused on silencing critics than confronting the threat. Parallel societies breed alienation, grievance and violence. Australia is on the same trajectory unless we change course.
The global Islamist insurgency did not end with ISIS’s territorial defeat. It evolved into subversion, political warfare, education system infiltration and long-term demographic strategy. Terrorism incidents such as the Bondi attack are tactical. The strategic danger is the steady erosion of social cohesion and will, and national demoralisation. And once demoralised, education becomes indoctrination, news becomes propaganda. No better example than the recent New York Times opinion piece, The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’ whose writer, relying on Hamas sources, claimed Israeli guards trained dogs to rape prisoners. The other main source was Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, whose chairman, Ramy Abdu, has expressed extreme views, including reportedly saying Israel “deserves a million October 7ths”.
Australia needs an unflinching national human terrain assessment of radicalisation hotspots. Immigration policy requires root-and-branch reform: rigorous cultural compatibility screening, and an end to automatic return for those who rejected Australia to fight abroad, and sharp reductions from high-risk regions. Foreign funding of religious and educational institutions must cease. Parallel authority structures should be dismantled. Where deradicalisation fails, exclusion and deportation must be the default.
As the great Athenian leader Pericles warned in the Peloponnesian War: “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.” No one forced us to do this to ourselves. Yet right now, before our nation is irreversibly transformed, the human terrain must be reclaimed unless these anthills become fortresses.