Australia urged to take ‘Al Capone approach’ to hate preachers, extremists

Washington: Leading international experts on Islamic extremism have urged Australia to more aggressively target and deport hate preachers or potential terror threats, including by pursuing their tax and immigration records in what they called the “Al Capone approach”.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials and Republican figures pinned the blame for Sunday’s massacre in Bondi on high levels of Muslim immigration, just as President Donald Trump widened his travel ban to include several other Muslim-majority nations.

Lorenzo Vidino, director of George Washington University’s extremism program, cautioned against faulting law enforcement agencies for “dropping the ball”, despite one of the alleged Bondi perpetrators being on the radar of authorities.

“He was at the periphery of a lot of things. If there are things they could have charged this guy with, they would have,” he said. “But being a radical is not a crime, hanging out with radicals is not a crime, going to radical mosques is not a crime.”

Vidino, who was not commenting specifically on Australian laws, said there was a healthy middle ground to be found between criminalising free speech and a “misguided” approach that tolerated any radical environments.

Under President Emmanuel Macron, France has expelled dozens of imams and others accused of preaching hate, part of the country’s crackdown on “Islamist separatism”.

Last year, it expelled a Tunisian imam for giving a “retrograde, intolerant and violent” vision of Islam, including preaching that Jews were the enemy and calling for the destruction of Western society.

“I don’t think somebody who’s not a citizen of the country should be allowed to be preaching in the country if they preach hate. I think that’s not an unreasonable thing to say,” Vidino said.

Hate speech laws should not subvert liberal democracy, he said, and it was often difficult to assess whether someone fell foul of them. But people could also be targeted by alternative means.

“If a person cannot be expelled because he’s a citizen, do what the Americans call the Al Capone approach,” Vidino said. “Go look at their taxes. Go look if they’ve filed their documents correctly. Have they obeyed the parking laws? Their immigration papers. You can make their life very difficult … just enforce existing laws.”

Former FBI special agent David Zimmermann, who remains in contact with Australian authorities, agreed that was “absolutely the way to go”.

“If we have somebody on the edge of the envelope and we don’t have enough, we will look at their taxes, their finances,” he said.

Prohibition-era gangster Capone was jailed on tax charges.

Zimmermann, also at George Washington University, said it was long overdue for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb ut-Tahrir to be listed as terrorist organisations. “Making it that people cannot support them financially is a good thing. That will save lives, that will protect people.”

But Jason Blazakis, director of the Centre on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said designating terrorist organisations “will not improve the situation”, for the most part.

Gun reform “could help on the margins”, Blazakis said, but combating radicalisation would ultimately require long-term investment in local offices that focused on prevention within communities.

He pointed to a unit in the US Department of Homeland Security, known as CP3, which focuses on localised counter-terrorism prevention – though it faced cuts under Donald Trump, who put a 22-year-old college graduate in charge.

“Prevention, as opposed to bans and designations, is the better approach,” Blazakis said. “These are long-term fixes, and it will take stomach of politicians to do that as opposed to defaulting to the easy.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday that his government was prepared to do more, including on hate speech. “We have outlawed hate speech that can lead to violence. If we need to examine [the laws], if there’s a need to strengthen them, we’re certainly up for whatever is necessary,” he said.

The overseas advice came as Republican figures seized on the Bondi terrorist attack to advocate harsher bans on immigration or travel by Muslims to the US.

Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said in a post on X that the attack “should not come as a surprise to anyone” and was “the direct result of the massive influx of Islamists to Australia”.

“Islamists and Islamism is the greatest threat to the freedom, security and prosperity of the United States and the entire world,” she said. “It is probably too late for Europe - and maybe Australia. It is not too late for the United States of America.”

Florida congressman Randy Fine and Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville were among the elected Republicans calling for some form of ban on Muslims travelling to the US and, in Fine’s words, “radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants”.

Trump on Wednesday (AEDT) expanded a ban on nationals from certain countries entering the US, adding the Muslim-majority nations of Syria, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso to the list, as well as South Sudan and Laos. He also banned the entry of anyone travelling on documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.

Speaking at a Hanukkah event at the White House, Trump again sent love and prayers to the Australian people and the victims of the Bondi attack. “All nations must stand together against the evil forces of radical Islamic terrorism, and we’re doing that,” he said.

More Bondi terror coverage

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• Victims of the Bondi terror attack: ‘Too big for this world’: The father who died a hero at Bondi and ‘went down fighting’ gunman
• Watch: Alleged Bondi gunman tells bystanders to move away, while shooting at Hanukkah crowd
• Who are the alleged Bondi gunmen? Bondi shooters visited Philippines weeks before beach massacre