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If you think the abuse of our Prime Minister during his visit to the Lakemba Mosque was spontaneous… think again. That meeting went exactly the way organisers intended for it to.

The Prime Minister visited a mosque in Western Sydney last Friday morning, expecting to hear cries of “Allahu Akbar”.

As it turned out, some of his Muslim friends don’t think he’s half as great as he thinks he is.

Now we’re supposed to believe this was all a spontaneous outburst, a sudden eruption, just one of those things that happens when a crowd, a grievance and a microphone accidentally collide in a mosque.

How convenient.

Deflection and Victim Mentality

If Anthony Albanese walks away from Friday thinking it was merely bad luck, just one of those things that happens, then he’s learned precisely nothing.

This was not a meeting that got a little out of hand. This was a meeting that went exactly as intended.

The gathering at Lakemba to celebrate the end of Ramadan began well enough. Anthony Albanese was given pride of place at the front of Australia’s largest mosque, where he sat cross-legged alongside his minister for Gazan refugees and ISIS brides, Tony Burke.

The Prime Minister might have brought more of his Labor MPs along, except for the fact that Albanese’s majority women’s caucus wouldn’t have been welcome at the men-only affair.

Whatever. International Women’s Day was almost two weeks ago, and Albanese had already tweeted about that extensively.

As the Australian Prime Minister’s security detail watched over him in their socks, Gamel Kheir, a senior figure with the Lebanese Muslim Association, rose to speak.

Before we get to the speech, a word about Mr Kheir. This is the man who, when asked his first thoughts upon hearing about the Bondi terror attack, replied like this:

“We as a Muslim community have suffered from the Cronulla riots till now. Everything that happens somehow we’re collectively to blame. Collectively we wear the guilt. Collectively we have to wear the disownment of that person or that individual, and that’s what I reflected on. God help us, we’re going to be under raid again. That was my first thought process.”

So, when Australian Jews were slaughtered on Bondi Beach, this gentleman’s first thoughts were about how it would affect… Muslims.

Now, to be fair, he explicitly condemned the Bondi attack, denying it had anything to do with extreme Islam, radical Islam, moderate Islam, token Islam, Islamists or Islamism.

“Religion has nothing to do with it. Anyone that studies the basics of the prophet’s rules of warfare — automatically, automatically. What happened in Bondi has nothing to do with the religion.”

I never knew the religion of peace had… rules of warfare. If only the Bondi gunmen had studied the Islamic rules of warfare, they’d have realised that Jews on the beach in Sydney are out of bounds.

I showed you that so you know the measure of the man at whose feet our Prime Minister sat cross-legged and shoeless on Friday morning.

Provoking a Reaction

I want you to listen very carefully to what was said on Friday as Anthony Albanese adopted a submissive position on the floor, because whilst all the news reports at the weekend focused on the reaction to Albanese, no one has pointed out what was said to provoke and to incite that reaction.

“Some three years ago, we stood in this very place with the Prime Minister advocating for the ‘Yes’ referendum in regards to our First Nations people, who we acknowledge as the rightful historical custodians of this land. Little did we know the very next day, our lives would be forever changed. The same First Nations people of Palestine also sought recognition and legitimacy.”

How dare the PM wait to be thrown out of the mosque by a rowdy Muslim mob? The PM should have removed himself from the mosque there and then.

It’s bad enough that Albanese sat there passively as Australian Aboriginals were compared to Palestinians. That’s a ridiculous comparison, and the PM should know it.

The only commonality between Aboriginals and Palestinians is that their self-appointed representatives of the two groups lately like to exchange flags in Sydney’s Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons whilst chanting about genocides that never happened.

October 7 Labelled Legitimate at Lakemba Mosque

But even if the PM overlooked that, how could he not have removed himself from the gathering after Gamel Kheir described the October 7 terror attack as the act of an oppressed people seeking legitimacy?

The last time Albanese was at Lakemba mosque was indeed three years ago. To be exact, Albanese was in the Lakemba mosque on 6 October 2023.

So, when Gamel Kheir told Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke that the very next day our lives would be forever changed as Palestinians sought recognition and legitimacy, he’s talking about the October 7 terror attack in which 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered.

Now let’s just pause for a moment to remind ourselves what one Palestinian seeking recognition and legitimacy on October 7 sounded like:

“Hi Dad. I’m talking to you from Mefalsim. Open my WhatsApp now and you’ll see all those I killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands!

“Your son killed Jews! Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and I killed her husband.

“I killed ten with my own hands!”

Our Prime Minister and our Home Affairs Minister, the man in charge of national security, sat on the floor, motionless and mute, while that and other atrocities were characterised as a cry for legitimacy.

The outrage is not that Albanese and Burke were later chased out of the mosque. The outrage is that Albanese and Burke didn’t think to remove themselves.

Instead, they sat on their backsides, giving recognition and legitimacy to a speech that, in my opinion, any decent Australian should have walked out on.

Albo Akbar’s Lakemba Lecture

The secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association then started lecturing our Prime Minister, who had folded himself neatly on the floor:

“In response to the positions of the state and federal governments in defending Israel’s actions, we as a collective community decided to actively disengage from any contact or communication with both government, police and the wider Australian community. And I, for one, was all for it.”

Did you get that? If you support Israel, Prime Minister, we’ll have nothing to do with you, the police or the rest of Australia. Nothing says social cohesion quite like announcing you’re not participating in it.

Then the speaker implied that engaging with the Australian Government was pointless before reciting a shopping list of Muslim grievances:

“We must ask ourselves, how effective has this engagement really been? We have seen the dramatic rise of the far right, anti-immigration agendas proudly represented by the likes of Pauline Hanson and certain elements of the Coalition party.

“We have seen the extreme rise in Islamophobia and targeted attacks on the Muslim community, both in the media and in the public. This very mosque has had four threats already.

“We have seen the withering away of our freedoms and, yet worse still, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and now threatening to engulf the whole Middle East, continues unabated.”

Meeting Goes Exactly as Planned

Now, it’s at this point that the crowd in the mosque starts to stir. Are you surprised? They’re being whipped up into a frenzy.

The Muslim men were told by the Muslim speaker that the Australian Government doesn’t listen to Muslims. All this as some in the Muslim crowd became increasingly agitated:

“The Australian Muslim community has had zero impact on the federal election process or the framing of policy and legislation and the dramatic rise in Islamophobic attacks.

“In essence, we have been unable to better lobby and advocate to government regarding policy and legislation that directly impacts our community.”

You can’t tell me this was a meeting that just got a little bit out of hand.

In my opinion, this meeting went exactly as it was supposed to.

The Prime Minister was invited to sit on the floor in front of hundreds of Muslims whilst their leader berated him until the crowd took over.

If you don’t believe me, here’s the final thing said before the crowd took over:

“We can neither totally disengage nor can we invite politicians to our place of worship.”

So they invited the Prime Minister to sit on the floor of the mosque to be told why Australian politicians can’t be invited to mosques before handing him over to the congregation, who quite literally chased him out of the mosque.

A Dangerous Game

Let’s recap.

Our Prime Minister spent Friday morning in a sex-segregated mosque being blamed for everything from Islamophobia to the Middle East war, whilst some of the congregation called him a dog and screamed “Allahu Akbar”.

This, less than 100 days after alleged jihadists took rifles to one of our nation’s most famous landmarks and massacred its own citizens.

And 24 hours later, what did Anthony Albanese do? He tweeted this: “Australia’s diversity is our strength.”

Well, he can say that, can’t he? He’s the one with a personal security team to make sure he survives all of this… diversity.

You know what else Anthony Albanese tweeted after this debacle? “An honour to join thousands at Lakemba mosque this morning.”

Seriously, an honour? The PM thinks he was honoured?

If Anthony Albanese doesn’t respect himself, do we really think he’ll respect the country?

The question isn’t whether or not Muslims in Lakemba honoured Australia’s Prime Minister.

The question is whether Anthony Albanese honours the office of Prime Minister of Australia.

In my opinion, he left it sitting on the floor in the Lakemba mosque.

It’s a dangerous game that he’s playing.

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Image via screenshot of YouTube/ABC News.