‘Terrain, terrain. Pull up.’
The flydubai co-pilot’s account of radicalisation in Melbourne should sound an alarm for Australia.
There is a peculiar irony in the case of Hamam al-Hammami.
The Omani co-pilot accused of trying to fly a flydubai jet into Ben Gurion Airport did not, according to the account he gave UAE prosecutors, acquire his hatreds in some lawless corner of the Middle East.
He says he found them in Melbourne, while studying engineering at RMIT, through extremist literature and online content glorifying suicide attacks.
Australia was supposed to be the place that broadened young minds. In his telling, it narrowed one.
Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates reportedly removed British universities from its approved scholarship list, fearing its students would come home radicalised. Just think about that for a second.
A Gulf state that knows the Muslim Brotherhood intimately, and treats it as a terrorist organisation, now regards the campuses of the West as a source of infection rather than a cure.
It is not hard to see why.
On our own campuses, students have marched behind slogans that reject Israel’s existence outright, positions more extreme than those of the Palestinian Authority itself.
When the comfortable children of liberal democracies chant demands that Ramallah’s officials will not put their names to, something has gone wrong with what we are teaching and what we are tolerating.
Look at Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew built a state on the unsentimental premise that racial and religious harmony is not a natural condition but an achievement, defended daily.
In 2017, when a foreign imam prayed from a Singapore pulpit for help against Jews and Christians, he was charged, fined and sent home. Nobody suggested that was intolerance. It was the price of keeping the peace.
Australia has tough laws and capable security agencies, and the minister responsible insists he is using them. Yet the broader instinct here remains the British one: avert your eyes, praise diversity and hope that grievance will somehow dissolve.
Britain has run that experiment for a generation and the results are now visible from Abu Dhabi. If al-Hammami’s account is true, Australia did not merely fail to prevent a radicalisation – it hosted one.
Somewhere in our cockpit, an alarm is sounding.
“Terrain, terrain. Pull up.”