It was said of Trotsky that, had he never existed, Stalin would have had to invent him, useful as he was for focusing discontent on an elusive, handy enemy. Today, faced with the implacable evil of Islamist assaults, we invent a talking head to diminish our society’s will to respond.
It is not easy to avoid Waleed Aly. See him holding forth with that blonde and those boys on The Project and the urge to switch channels is immediate and irresistible. But no, it doesn’t work. There he is again, whack-a-mole style on the ABC! Twist the nob to “off” and still it does no good, for Ubiquitous Aly pops up again in the Fairfax Press. If the ACCC wishes to set aside its quest to make consumers pay more for petrol, it might find a fruitful topic for investigation in Aly’s apparent monopoly of the media spots available to contextualisers of Muslim misbehaviour. It is a booming industry, yet few other representatives of the Religion of Peace seem to get a look-in.
To be fair, Aly is in such high demand because he has no peer. The Chief Imam is a such a proud exponent of multi-culturalism that he has not bothered to learn English and Hizbee honcho Uthman Badar might launch into a rave about honour killings or the inevitability of sharia, so he and his ardent ilk are appropriate only during the dull, relaxed interregnums between Islamist assaults. Q&A tried out convicted criminal Zaky Malah as a spokesman for Muslim youth, but that little exercise backfired badly, obliging the ABC to pay friend-of-the ABC Ray Martin a presumably large, but undisclosed, consultancy fee to give his former ABC colleagues the once-over. Certification that all hands are clean and everything sanitary at the national broadcaster is expected any day now.
Ubiquitous Aly would have been a much safer proposition. So quiet, so reasonable and so measured, he is once again the toast of those who reckon a massacre in Paris, the latest one, needs to be taken in our ho-hum stride, as doing more than sporting flowers and expressions of mournful forbearance will play into the hands of ISIS. It is a perspective aired but by no means coherently explained in Aly’s newly famous TV editorial, said to have become one of the hottest draws on YouTube. Again, it is easy to understand why that might be so. Watch below and see the magic of the man. There is, first of all, his definite talent for timing and theatrical certainty, for the light and shade of pace and emphasis. But most appealing of all is his salesman’s gift for dressing shallow slogans as penetrating insight.
It seems there is no cliché nor vapid truism that cannot be buffed into a faux profundity at a touch of those oh-so-reasonable, un-accented lips. Nor do they recoil from insinuation. Who is the “them” of which he speaks, that same “them” being just as bad by implication as his own creed’s fundamentalist firebrands? A less gifted rationaliser could not have dared to make such a smooth, slick case for relativism and moral equivalence, not with the shocking footage from Paris still vivid in the public mind. It seems Western politicians (including an un-named “has-been” wink wink) critical of Islam are infected with much the same moral leprosy as those with the Kalashnikovs and body bombs. By the beard of the Prophet the man is slick! If Olympic judges were to rate the daring, degree of difficulty and execution of such a glib dive into obfuscation’s bottomless pool, a gold medal would dangle from Aly’s neck. For the moment, however, he must content himself with a Local Hero nomination, a Walkley, a mantelpiece of other awards and a bank account fattened by talk-show bookers’ constant need to have grim reality reassuringly framed by hardly-anything-to-see-here sophistries.
