Monday morning, a radical Iranian cleric burst into a café in Sydney, Australia,holding approximately a dozen people hostage at gunpoint for 16 hours. The standoff ended with two hostages dead and the cleric killed by commandos who raided the cafe. Sadly, the whole tragedy is just the latest example of Glenn's "crazy caliphate" prediction coming true. The world is becoming destabilized, radicalism is destabilizing the world, and we are seeing the fruits of revolution grow. Glenn welcomed TheBlaze's National Security Expert Buck Sexton to the program Monday night to discuss this story and the oft-ignored threat of radical Islam.
Glenn: It’s finally over. Early Monday morning, a radical Iranian cleric — who would’ve seen this? — burst into a café and held approximately a dozen people hostage at gunpoint for 16 hours. Two hostages are now dead. The cleric, darn it, was killed when commandos raided the café this morning. The Prime Minister took an interesting politically correct route and said that he was shocked. Watch.
VIDEOPrime Minister Abbott: It is profoundly shocking that innocent people should be held hostage by an armed person claiming political motivation.
Glenn: Alrighty, an armed person claiming political motivation…I would say that’s the result of being on the bottom of the earth when all of your blood is rushing to your head, but we are this stupid as well. The guy was a radical cleric. He was holding up a store directly across the street from a television news network. He forced hostages to hold a black jihad flag with Arabic writing, not the Islamic State flag, but on his list of demands was a demand, can you get me an ISIS flag?
He posted this hostage video on YouTube:
VIDEOW: One is to send an ISIS flag as soon as possible, and one hostage will be released; to please broadcast on all media that this is an attack on Australia by the Islamic State.
Glenn: By the Islamic State, so I guess yes, technically the cleric was an armed person with political motivations, but it seems to be just a little bit of wishful ignorance given Australia’s jihad problem already which we’ll talk about here in a second.
Hundreds of Australians are fighting for the Islamic State, including this guy, whose idea of a father-son bonding involved tweeting photos of his son holding severed human heads. Australian Islamic State radicals called for the beheading of random Australians. ISIS named Australia one of their main targets and encouraged attacks, lone wolf attacks. “Every Muslim should get out of his house, find a crusader, and kill him. It is important that the killing becomes attributed to patrons of the Islamic State who have obeyed its leadership. ‘Rely upon Allah and stab the crusader’ should be the battle cry for all Islamic State patrons.”
This is what they’re saying to do, but Sydney police say this is an isolated incident, nothing to worry about. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Obviously Australia is taking the jihad problem seriously. They have fought back with tough crackdowns and raids on homegrown terrorists. Jihadists are getting more and more organized in the country, and the government knows it. Why? What is happening?
Do you remember when we talked about the Arab Spring when I was at FOX? We have to go back to what should be the most important thing I ever did at FOX. I didn’t do anything more important than this. I told you radicals, Islamists, Communists, and Socialists would work together against Israel. Has it been done? Yes. Work together against capitalism? Yes. Work together to overturn stability.
Then I added part two. Protests would become then contagious. They would cascade. Have we seen that? Yes. They swept to the Middle East? Yes. Begin to destabilize Europe? Yes. And the rest of the world? Yes. That’s what we’re seeing, the fruits of that revolution.
Radicals are rising up, and we can expect to see more of this type of action. Yes, this particular terrorist attack in Sydney was one guy. Yes, he was an amateur, letting hostages go, letting them use their cell phones, not having the right flag, which was bizarre. It’s easy to dismiss him as a lone wolf, but here’s the point, there’s more than one wolf, and when you have a bunch of lone wolves, they all belong to a pack.
ISIS cannot easily transport militants from one country to the next, so they’ve done the next best thing, they inspire radicalism abroad and let individuals carry out attacks in their name. It’s the perfect system.
Glenn: We have TheBlaze national security editor, Buck Sexton, with us now from our newsroom in New York. Buck, what am I missing here?
Buck: Glenn, you’re not missing anything. I mean, the tie-in to the Islamic State is pretty clear when you have an individual who saying he’s doing this in the name of that entity, and so I think that the debate that’s happening right now as to whether he received a specific exhortation to do this or he just decided to act on previous instructions isn’t really particularly meaningful.
Glenn: Does it matter?
Buck: It doesn’t matter at all. This is exactly what the Islamic State wants, and we can see that the Australians, while they have gotten aggressive, there were hundreds of police officers involved in raids back in September, it’s not enough. They’re not going to catch everyone. We saw a few casualties from this attack. There could’ve been a lot more casualties, Glenn, quite honestly, and I think that the Australians have recognized that this problem is going to continue on. We’re not even counting possible returnees from the main fronts in Iraq and Syria. These are people that are already in Australia.
Glenn: Okay, so we didn’t talk about his criminal record. The guy is not a nobody. What do you have to do to be deported in Australia? Explain his criminal record.
Buck: I want to know what you have to do to be put in prison for a long time in Australia, because he is charged with dozens of different sexual crimes, various assaults, and also on top of that is a suspect, allegedly stabbed or was involved in a stabbing death of his ex-wife and lit her on fire and left her body in the stairwell of an apartment building. So he was a very bad guy with all sorts of outstanding incredibly serious criminal charges before he decided to seize a number of hostages and execute some of them when the assault actually happened today. So I think that’s actually where the Australian government is vulnerable to some real criticism. How was this guy still walking around on the streets?
By the way, Glenn, you can still rifle through his Twitter account which makes it quite clear that he thinks people should join the Islamic State, he hates Australia, and he wants to wage jihad, so he was literally advertising this.
Glenn: Tell me the difference between that guy and an Islamic jihad guy, I mean, somebody who’s with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. It doesn’t matter. He is following their instructions. He’s doing what they ask. He’s doing their bidding. What’s the difference?
Buck: There is no difference. It’s just a command-and-control discussion that doesn’t really mean anything, Glenn, except for the possibility of follow-on attacks, so if he did receive, for example, a direct order from the Islamic State. And by the way, in those September raids in Australia, there was a direct connection. There was an Islamic State member who was Australian who was saying get involved in this strike. They wanted to behead a random civilian in Australia, and that was one of the plots that was disrupted, but the only reason you’d want to know this, Glenn, is in case there are others who may have received similar instructions.
So for investigative purposes, it could be necessary, but for ideological purposes, no, all we need to know is that this was in solidarity with the Islamic State, and there are more of these lone wolves or self-radicalized individuals out there.
Glenn: So is there a reason, Buck, at all that we excuse our politicians, not just in Australia, but here too, that we excuse our politicians? I read the statement, you know, from the Prime Minister, and he said well, you know, it’s just a lone wolf, and we don’t want to give them everything that they want. That is exactly what they wanted. In their order, they said rise up, make sure you give credit to ISIS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is there a reason why we can all just say okay, they don’t want to give ISIS more power, or is that just bull crap?
Buck: No, Glenn, I think that the acting on the instructions here is very much the game plan from the Islamic State’s point of view, and I think the government, the Australian government, is always taking this position of well, you know, this happened this one time, and we need to have these stricter security policies, but let’s not jump to any conclusions. And when you have a guy who’s saying please get me an Islamic State flag so I can really put their signature on this thing, you’re not jumping to a conclusion, you’re just making one. And the Australian government seems to be falling into the same trap that we have here.
Remember, after Fort Hood, we had a general saying, we had a general, a four-star, saying that he hoped diversity wasn’t a casualty, and this was after we had a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. You have Australians already speaking out about how they’re so concerned about a backlash. The backlash never happens here. No one’s worried about an individual or rather about a society deciding to pick on one individual for this.
We’re worried about a society that’s under assault from extremist elements that are working in a systemic fashion over time to try to undermine the very freedoms the Australians enjoy, and the same thing with us here at home. That’s the real concern, not the possibility of there being some sort of an overreach if we just call it what it is. We all know what it is.
Glenn: So we’re going to be launching a show with Buck here soon, and I went up to New York last week, and I started talking to him about showing that basically I would want his show to pretty much center around that chalkboard — radical Islamists, Communists, Socialists, work together against Israel, together against capitalism, together to overturn stability, the protests become contagious, they cascade, sweep the Middle East, begin to destabilize Europe and the rest of the world, and show you those connections, because it’s not just happening here in the United States. It’s happening all over the world, and anybody who thinks that it’s a lone wolf, what’s the difference?
I was at a mall, Buck, this weekend, and I went Christmas shopping. And I’m at a Belk store. Al Sharpton did not call for this no justice, no peace. I’m sure Al Sharpton wasn’t there, but a group of local people got into the mall. They carried the signs, and they were doing no justice, no peace. It’s the same story, is it not? Is that a lone wolf, or is that connected?
Buck: Well, the broader ideology, Glenn, does have an impact, and revolutionary ideology, which we should be clear, global jihad is a revolutionary ideology. It’s based upon individuals and groups around the world acting to overturn existing societies to create a totalitarian Islamic theocracy around the world, so it’s very much a revolutionary ideology, and the whole purpose of it is to be spread, is to be spread through fear, through violence, and through intimidation, and we see various iterations of revolutionary ideology here at home as well.
I walked into a protest also trying to just buy Christmas presents for my family, and I couldn’t believe the things that are being said. They’re talking about racist, murdering cops walking around in the streets. No surprise here, Glenn, we’ve already had now a number of serious assaults against police officers in the city from these protesters. They’re planning to do another big one tomorrow night.
Now, we can either believe that this is all just them venting, letting off some steam, and they don’t actually, none of them, even the hardcore elements among them don’t believe this is going to mean anything, or you can think that they’re actually trying to push for some kind of a real inciting event and a transformation of society. I think the hardliners would say it’s the latter in a moment of honesty, and I’ve heard them say that, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some pretty outrageous stuff from them the weeks ahead.
Glenn: Buck, thank you very much. I appreciate your time.
Buck: Thanks, Glenn.