Let's fight barbarism overseas but let's keep it civilised here in Australia too

Australia is joining civilisation's effort to defeat the latest outbreak of barbarism, as it should. The federal government is, as Tony Abbott put it on Friday, seeking to disrupt and degrade the terrorists of so-called Islamic State "at home and abroad".

Lethal force against their fighters is necessary, but not sufficient, to defeat the movement. The top US warfare officer has told us so. "While the military will certainly be part of this fight, there is no military-only solution," the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, says.

Because you cannot defeat an idea with bombs and bullets. Dempsey tells us that the struggle is far wider than Iraq and Syria, that it will be measured in generations and not in years, and that it is about something much bigger than kinetics: "It's ideological."

An ideology cannot be killed, but it can be discredited and it can be overpowered by a superior ideology. The discrediting we can leave to the barbarians themselves. Their butchery and fanaticism sickens good people and will turn moderate Muslims against them.

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The overpowering, however, is something that we can do. Tony Abbott set out succinctly the superior ideology that Australia represents: "Our objective," he told the house on Wednesday, "is to allow people to live their own lives in their own way and to worship in whatever way they choose."

Except, of course, for Muslim women who live in Australia. The Prime Minister apparently believes that they are in a separate category.

In the midst of great matters of ideology, war, terrorism and national purpose, Abbott returns again and again to his preferences for how Muslim women should worship. Of all 23 million Australians, this subset of a quarter-million women is subject to special prime ministerial critique in the way they choose to worship their God. He offered his opinion gratuitously on Wednesday and again on Friday that he finds the burqa "confronting" and wishes it were not worn.

To be fair, Abbott is being consistent. He used this same formulation when he was opposition leader. But he is no longer opposition leader, no longer tribal chief. He is national leader. And he is the leader of a nation and a national ideology committed to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of expression and freedom of belief. And civilised values are under challenge.

Abbott is always careful to say that people are free to wear what they choose in a free country. So if this is the great principle, why not leave it at that? Why immediately qualify the principle by singling out one group for particular criticism?

Every time Abbott indulges himself in expressing his personal preferences for Muslim women's attire, he commits an act of hypocrisy and harms the cause he claims to champion. It is a sick fetish unworthy of the leader of a great nation going to war in the name of freedom.

People concerned about the proposed segregation of women in burquas at Parliament House were dismissed on Friday as "a bunch of left-wing activists" by one of the government backbenchers pushing the idea of a ban on burqas, George Christensen. In Christensen's conception, it is all just a political parlour game.

For promoting the idea of a ban, we knew Christensen to be a bigot. For dismissing the concerns as ideological, we also know him to be ignorant.

In the big mixed communities of Sydney and Melbourne, this is a live issue creating real problems. "You have given a voice to the extremists and the radicals and the racists," says Sydney's Dr Jamal Rifi, a founder of Australian Muslim Doctors Against Violence.

The Rise Up Australia Party on Friday circulated an email promising to confront Muslim women wearing face cover: "We welcome the media to join us," wrote Daniel Nalliah, "sometime next week as we take to the streets of Victoria to check this out, as RUAP meets up with the general public to ask the question, 'Do you support the burqa Ban??' "And also speak to Muslim woman with the Burqa and ask them to show their face??"

Tony Abbott's personal indulgence is not cost free. "You need to be the voice of wisdom and judgment because you are the leader of all Australians," the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, Samier Dandan, tells me in words he addresses to the Prime Minister.

"We are asking ourselves, what is the agenda of this debate at this time? What's the point of your discrimination to fuel hatred? There is a great level of frustration in the community. We are being angered, disenchanted, profiled and victimised. Muslim women are being abused and spat at."

Not many Muslim women wear a burqa. "We joke about it, nobody wears a burqa in Australia," guffaws the president of the Muslim Women's Association, Silma Ihram. "Call it the right thing. It's a niqab. For most Muslim women, it's so irrelevant. We are already in the spotlight. Why hammer us more? Young men are worried that their mums will be getting more attention on the street and they are getting pretty sensitive."

Members of Parliament whose electorates include Muslim communities are deeply troubled. One, Labor's Jason Clare, this week told a couple of stories from his western Sydney electorate of Blaxland, where about a quarter of people are Muslims.

"I had an Anglo-Celtic woman come up to me in the shops on Friday and say, 'look, you're the local member, you know, is it safe to take my kids to school?'" he told 3AW.

He told a story of a Muslim woman who lives in his electorate: "A leader in the community, worked in domestic violence for 30 years, has an Order of Australia, got a phone call last Thursday night from a man, in a very loud voice saying, 'I know where you live, I'm coming around to cut your head off'." Clare adds: "This is exactly what organisations like [Islamic State] want. They want to divide us."

A Liberal MP, Craig Laundy, representing the inner-western Sydney seat of Reid, came across an unpleasant incident in Auburn in his electorate. A Muslim man, a refugee who arrived from Somalia in 1999, was kicking a football in the park with his two young sons. When the ball rolled some half-dozen metres from where some workers were erecting a stage, his seven-year-old went to retrieve it. The father said that he heard one of the workers yell at his son "f--- off from here, you little black c---." The shocked boy broke down in tears and the father approached the workers to ask for an apology. The foreman responded by telling the man he was "Muslim scum". Remarks Craig Laundy: "You know the ultimate irony? While these two fellows see what they see, I and the people of Reid see a father kicking a footy with his two boys. Does it get any more Australian than that?"

There have been some well publicised incidents too. The Muslim woman pushed from a train in Melbourne. The man carrying a knife walking into a Sydney Islamic school and asking for "Muslims".

But isn't the idea of a burqa ban in Parliament House a security measure? That's what government backbenchers George Christensen and Cory Bernadi say. No. It's not. Everyone entering the building, other than MPs and senators, is required to walk through a metal detector and put personal items on a tray for screening. Members of the public have never had their ID checked. And even if a woman wearing a burqa, or niqab, were to enter, and even if, for some reason, security guards needed to check her identity, so what?

As Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said this week, this is a routine matter for police in Sydney and Melbourne. NSW police have protocols that have been operating for years. Christensen and Bernardi claim to be concerned for security. So, what other measures do they propose in their suite of security precautions to protect Australians? None. Their agendas are exposed. They are peddling hate, not security.

When the so-called presiding officers of Parliament genuflected to this pathetic agenda this week and proposed putting women in burqas in a separate glass-walled gallery of Parliament, independent MP Andrew Wilkie named it for what it was: "Religious apartheid".

Picking on Muslims, rather than any sort of security measure, directly undercuts security.

"Rather than us being able to concentrate on what we need to do to stop our young people being continually influenced by negative propaganda from the Middle East, we have had to divert mental and physical energy to this non-issue that we thought was long dead and buried," says Jamal Rifi.

Gratefully, Abbott has asked the presiding officers to reconsider. As they're both Liberal politicians, they'll no doubt oblige. They probably imagined that they were following his lead in the first place.

Abbott should follow this with a robust and consistent defence of the principles that Australian liberal democracy represents. No ifs, no buts, no exceptions.

It doesn't take any sort of bravery for a conservative prime minister to order the armed forces into combat. It takes more courage for a conservative prime minister to stand up to the prejudices of a few bigots who happen to be part of his support base. But that's what real leaders do.

Abbott could learn from one of his own ministers. Scott Morrison, while ferocious in stopping the boats, has been ceaseless in fostering warm relations with Australia's Muslims.

"He's been working his butt off because, more than others, he understands the importance of social harmony and social cohesion," says Rifi.

In Parliament this week, Morrison said: "I am not terribly interested in what is in people's wardrobes; I am interested in what is in people's hearts. I am interested in the values they proclaim and stand by. We have had periods in our history where the divide has been on issues of ethnicity and race. Australia is such an overwhelming idea that it overwhelms those divisions of ethnicity and race. I know that Australia, as an idea – as an ideology even – and as an experience, will overwhelm these divisions."

Morrison and his friend Jamal Rifi are off to the Rugby League grand final on Sunday together. Though Morrison is a Cronulla Sharks man, Rifi is going to introduce him to his friends in the Canterbury Bulldogs. "We have already won," says Rifi, "because from being tense and concerned the Bulldogs have made us happy. And we won't let this debate spoil it for us."

Peter Hartcher is the political editor.

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