Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, released his report, entitled A National Response to Islamophobia, last week. Below is where I believe it has failed Australian Muslims.

1. Islamophobia is framed as a national issue, divorced from its global roots.

The report frames Islamophobia as a domestic social cohesion issue, ignoring its global roots in Western wars and geopolitics. Its “license to hate” section avoids naming the state’s role in legitimising Islamophobia through mass violence against Muslims abroad. By reducing the War on Terror to a mere “consequence” of 9/11, it recasts Islamophobia as public sentiment rather than statecraft of warfare. This leads to recommendations that trim the tips of the problem rather than expose its roots.

Australia was not a bystander but an active participant in constructing Muslims as terrorists, thereby legitimising invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and now supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Structural Islamophobia is not just in politicians’ rhetoric or domestic laws; it is embedded in the state’s willingness to sanction Muslim deaths abroad under the logic of “containing Islamic terrorism”.

The same logic resurged after 7 October 2023, when the Australian parliament declared bipartisan support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” even as Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza — promising there would be “no food, no water, no electricity” — and referred to Palestinians as “human animals”. On that day, and until this very moment, Australia aligned itself with a genocidal “civilisational war”, through refusing to sanction Israel and continuing to export military hardware, echoing War on Terror narratives that dehumanised Muslims as expendable.

To claim concern for Muslims’ welfare at home while enabling their mass killing abroad is not just contradictory — it is profound hypocrisy. The Islamophobia report’s failure to mention Australia’s complicity in the ongoing genocide and how this has allowed domestic Islamophobia levels to rise is a foundational failure.

The racialisation of Muslims as a global threat ensures that what Australia does abroad always rebounds on Muslim communities at home.

2. The report treats Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism as distinct.

Islamophobia cannot be separated from anti-Palestinian racism. They are not. Their logics are intertwined.

Yes, a white Christian or Jewish protester wearing a keffiyeh may not face the same daily Islamophobic harassment as a visibly Muslim woman on public transport. But when they are attacked for marching for Palestine, the logic is the same: they are perceived as siding with the “terrorist Other” — Muslims. Islamophobia works precisely by racialising “the Muslim” as inherently threatening, then extending that racialisation to anyone who defends or associates with them.

This link is not accidental. Zionist-aligned actors have long invested in an Islamophobia industry that codes “the Muslim” as a terrorist threat and reframes Palestinian liberation as “terrorism”. From Netanyahu’s terrorism conferences in the 1970s and 1980s, to the neoconservative canon that welded “terrorism” to Arab/Islamic identity, to US-based Israel-aligned groups embedding anti-Palestinian aims into counterterrorism law— this architecture, copied by Australia, has ensured that Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism reinforce one another.

At its core, Islamophobia projects Muslims and Palestinians as “annihilatory predators” to be eliminated for the West’s survival. Israel performs this “dirty work” on behalf of the “civilised” and “free world”.

This “civilisational self-defence” narrative fuses US and Israeli violence under the banner of counterterrorism supported by allied Western states, including Australia. Australia’s structural alignment with Israel and the US, through material support, diplomatic backing, and strategic alliances, positions it as a signatory to this civilizational self-defence narrative.

3. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism operates as a distinctly Islamophobic device.

One of the most common tools for silencing Muslims in Australia is the strategic conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Institutionalised through the IHRA definition, it reframes legitimate criticism of Israel as racial hatred and casts Muslims and Arabs as presumptive antisemites and terrorist suspects.

Since October 7, this framing has intensified: Pro-Palestine groups are smeared as “antisemitic” and “pro-Hamas”, Muslim critics likened to Nazis or ISIS, and Muslims are cast as presumptive “Jew-haters”. Muslims’ dissent and cries for justice are pathologised as antisemitism by default, and the “terrorist-adjacent” are stripped of the possibility of principled opposition grounded in justice or human rights.

The fact that the report neither mentions nor interrogates how this tactic interlinks with Islamophobia, nor recommends protections for Muslims’ political expression, is a glaring omission.

4. Pro-Palestine activism is criminalised through an Islamophobic lens of social cohesion.

The consequence of the above is the criminalisation of Palestinian solidarity through the familiar Islamophobia script of “terrorism” and “antisemitism”, replaying the tired tropes that mark Arabs and Muslims as security threats and enemies of “social cohesion”.

Sound familiar?

The same logic that powered the War on Terror and the daily policing of Muslims for the past twenty-five years is now redeployed to silence dissent. “Social cohesion”, the velvet glove over the iron fist — once wielded to pressure Muslims into cultural conformity — is now weaponised to enforce political silence. Muslims are no longer being told to integrate on the state’s terms: they are being told to remain silent.

From the outset of the War on Gaza, the Home Affairs Department flagged Australian Muslims’ “extreme anger” and sense of “betrayal” at the government’s support for Israel as a social cohesion risk, transforming legitimate political grievance into a problem of national stability. Since October 7, this has been visible everywhere: Albanese’s urging activists to “take the temperature down” not to destabilise the nation’s social cohesion; Victoria codifying “social cohesion” into law with bans on Palestinian symbols in healthcare facilities; keffiyeh in parliament; mandatory “social cohesion pledges” for multicultural organisations; NSW police attempting to ban protests in court; universities expelling students, censoring flags, and using Wi-Fi surveillance to monitor activists; galleries covering Palestinian art; and police violence justified by “anti-protest” laws. Across institutions, Palestine solidarity is reframed as a threat to national security rather than recognition of Australia’s complicity in genocide.

The government’s own terms of reference for the Islamophobia envoy mark Muslims as a security risk. Antisemitism is framed as an existential crisis: “threatening not only Jewish Australians but Australia as a whole.” Islamophobia, by contrast, is reduced to “harmful perceptions”, positioning Muslims as outsiders whose safety is only valuable insofar as it benefits “social cohesion.” The statement that

Muslim Australians, like all Australians, have the right to feel safe and secure; and their safety and security will, in turn, contribute to Australia’s future as a peaceful, free, cohesive and diverse multicultural society

places the well-being of Muslims as a secondary factor that benefits the nation rather than an urgent priority in itself.

By criminalising Palestine solidarity through this lens, the state extends War on Terror governance into the present, ensuring Muslim political expression is silenced as a danger to “cohesion”. Islamophobia is not merely prejudice — it is a form of power, disciplining Muslims when they resist state violence against their people.

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The report’s call for a commission into anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia is welcome in principle. But unless grounded in the realities outlined above — and unless it operates independently of government — it risks becoming another bureaucratic tool to manage dissent. Worse, embedded in the same “social cohesion” frameworks, it may reproduce the very logic it claims to oppose, casting Muslims as objects of grievance management rather than political agents.

In its current form, the report does not chart a path toward justice simply because it failed to place Australian Muslims’ grievances within the power mechanisms that created them in the first place.

Image: a detail from the cover of the report