Fresh terror busts in Australia expose a common Achilles’ heel of the West: Indiscriminate refugee policies turn free countries into breeding grounds for jihad. It’s the same game in America. Soldiers of Islam have weaponized our blind generosity against us.
In Sydney this week, authorities detained a half-dozen Muslim plotters and arrested a top collaborator in an alleged conspiracy to kidnap and behead a random Australian citizen. The accused mastermind? Mohammad Ali Baryalei, an Afghan refugee turned Aussie Islamic State recruiter. He and his aristocratic family were welcomed Down Under decades ago. Baryalei returned the favor by taking to the streets of Sydney to recruit and radicalize dozens of fellow Muslim immigrants or their children.
Baryalei’s minions include Australian jihadist Khaled Sharrouf, the homicidal son of Lebanese immigrants. Sharrouf is now based in Syria, where he infamously tweeted a photo of his elementary-school-age son brandishing a severed human head.
The Sydney Beheading Bust comes on the heels of a separate outbreak of violence by Afghan refugees aligned with the terror group Hezbollah. In late August, Aussie police broke up a bloody riot involving members of the “420 gang” — Muslim teenage boys and young men who post sword-wielding, AK-47-toting selfies on social media. The self-described “Shia soldiers” quote Hezbollah militant imam Hassan Nasrallah online, while wreaking havoc in Sydney slums offline.
International “human rights” wags have attacked Australian officials for trying to crack down on unfettered immigration from terror-sponsoring states. Now, many of those ungrateful imports are crying “Islamophobia” as law-enforcement authorities try to stop the head-choppers from spilling blood on their soil.
Australia, we feel your pain. America’s unselective and desultory asylum and refugee policies have also enabled jihadists of all stripes and blades to recruit, convert, plot, pillage, rape, and kill.
In our heartland, Minneapolis has become “Little Mogadishu” — a haven for Somali refugees targeted by Islamic supremacists. It’s a deadly two-way street. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted in The Grand Jihad: “We not only import Somali aliens, including their ‘traditional leaders.’ We also send back aspiring Islamist militants, including suicide bombers. Since 2006, the FBI has detected that many Somalis are returning to fight on behalf of al-Shabaab, and more are launched from Minneapolis than from any other U.S. haven.”