Australia intends to add far-right extremist group The Base and the entirety of the Lebanese group Hezbollah to its list of outlawed terrorist organisations.

Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation has been listed since 2003, but including all Hezbollah entities as terrorist organisations would make being a member of, or supporting, those entities a criminal offense.

“The group continues to threaten terrorist attacks and provides support to terrorist organisations,” Home Affairs minister Karen Andrews said in a statement.

The Base, which originated in the United States, would become only the second far-right group to be designated a terrorist organisation in Australia after the British-based Sonnenkrieg Division was listed in August.

The remaining 25 terrorist organisations on Australia’s list are Muslim groups.

“The Base is a violent, racist, neo-Nazi group known by security agencies to be planning and preparing terrorist attacks,” Mrs Andrews said.

“The Base is currently proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom and is known to have organised paramilitary training camps overseas,” she added.

Britain’s youngest terrorist – who plotted to murder police officers in Australia on Anzac Day – can be freed from jail, the Parole Board has ruled.

The 20-year-old, from Blackburn, Lancashire, who can only be identified as RXG, sent encrypted messages instructing an Australian jihadist to launch attacks during a 2015 parade.

He was jailed for life in October 2015 after admitting inciting terrorism overseas.

In a document detailing the decision, the Parole Board said: “After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in detention, and the evidence presented at the hearings, the panel was satisfied that RXG was suitable for release.”

At the age of just 14, the teenager took on the role of “organiser and adviser” and suggested beheading or using a car to kill officers during the annual April 25 commemoration of Australians and New Zealanders killed in conflict, which that year marked the centenary of the First World War battle in Gallipoli.

After being recruited online by Islamic State propagandist Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, over nine days RXG sent thousands of messages to 18-year-old Sevdet Besim, instructing him to kill police officers at the remembrance parade in Melbourne.

Australian police were alerted to the plot after British officers discovered material on the teenager’s phone.

The Parole Board cleared him to leave prison at his first review after he became eligible for release in October.

But the body said he will be subject to strict licence conditions, including having to live at a designated address, wearing an electronic tag and attending supervision appointments as well as adhering to restrictions on his movements, contacting people and using technology.

This plan is considered “robust enough to manage RXG in the community”, according to the decision papers.

The Parole Board said it could only direct release if it was “satisfied that it was no longer necessary for the protection of the public that RXG remained confined in prison”.

Two hearings took place, in September and earlier this month, before the decision was made, during which RXG said he hoped he would be freed.

As well as hearing evidence from RXG, the panel also considered submissions from his lawyer, probation officer, other officials, an imam, psychologists and psychiatrists.

According to the Parole Board document, at the time of his offending “risk factors” he displayed included “not coping well with feelings of anger, being manipulative, not being open and honest with people, his lack of maturity, obsessional behaviour, the influence on him of associates, unhelpful beliefs and extremist views, his radicalisation and his affiliation with ISIS”.

He was diagnosed with autism in 2017 and while behind bars has worked to “address his offending behaviour, his understanding of Islam and to develop his level of maturity”.

The document said witnesses had described the “considerable progress that had been made” and had recommended RXG be released, adding: “No one at the hearing considered there to be a need for further time within the custodial estate.”

His identity will remain a secret for the rest of his life after a High Court ruling last year.

Granting RXG lifelong anonymity, Dame Victoria Sharp said identifying him was likely to cause him “serious harm” and it was therefore necessary for the rare step – taken in only a small number of cases.

Only a handful of similar orders have been made, including those granted to Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who murdered Liverpool toddler James Bulger, and child killer Mary Bell.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and all major political parties on Wednesday condemned a speech by a minor senator who used the term “final solution” in calling for a revival of a “White Australia” restrictive immigration policy.

In one of the most divisive speeches seen in parliament since 1996 when far-right politician Pauline Hanson declared incorrectly that Australia was being swamped by Asians, Senator Fraser Anning on Tuesday called for a national vote on whether to ban Muslim migration.

Anning said Muslims were responsible for acts of terror and crime and were dependant on welfare. Muslims account for less than three per cent of Australia’s population, census data shows.

Amid national outrage Turnbull, who will head to the polls within nine months, quickly condemned Anning.

“We reject, we condemn racism in any form, and the remarks by Senator Anning are justly condemned and rejected by us all,” Turnbull told Australia’s parliament.

Opposition Labor party leader Bill Shorten told parliament on Wednesday: “You have to be pretty outrageous to be condemned by everybody in the Australian parliament, but Senator Anning has managed to do just this”.

Australians will return to the polls by May 2019, and recent polls show the majority of the electorate back multiculturalism, but far-right politicians are expected to pose a challenge to the mainstream parties.

“Turnbull can and must bat this away,” said Haydon Manning, a political science professor at Flinders University in South Australia.

Anning, who has been in parliament for less than a year has entered into a loose alliance with several conservative independent lawmakers that has boosted his otherwise inconsequential role in Australia’s upper house.

Anning split from Hanson’s One Nation party shortly after being sworn in, though his speech had many of the hallmarks of his former leader who has called for cuts to Asian and Muslim immigration.

“The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote,” Anning told parliament in his maiden speech.

The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide or extermination of the Jews during World War Two. Anning has since said he did not know the history of the phrase.

Hanson joined the condemnation, telling the Senate she was appalled by Anning’s speech.

“We are a multi-racial society and I have always advocated you do not have to be white to be Australian,” she said.

Under what was commonly called a “White Australia” policy Australia restricted non-European immigration from 1901 until the late 1960s using various laws.

A former Australian archbishop, the most senior Catholic cleric in the world convicted of concealing child sex abuse, was spared jail on Tuesday when he was ordered to serve his one-year sentence at home.

Newcastle Court Magistrate Robert Stone allowed Philip Wilson, 67, to serve his detention at home after an assessment by prison authorities due to a range of health issues, including heart disease, faced by the former archbishop.

Wilson was ordered to begin serving his detention on Tuesday in New South Wales state and would be eligible for parole in February 2019, the court said, without disclosing the address of where he would be held.

Australian Broadcasting Corp. Television showed Wilson being driven away from the court in Newcastle, about 170 km (105 miles) north of Sydney. It said he would be staying at his sister’s house.

Wilson has said he planned to appeal against his conviction for failing to disclose to police abuse by a priest, Father James Fletcher, after being told about it in 1976 by two victims.

An angry victim of Fletcher who was not involved in the case against Wilson confronted the former archbishop outside the court, pressing him to apologise and saying the appeal process would prolong the pain suffered by abuse victims.

“Where is the contrition from former Archbishop Wilson? His Grace, as somebody just said upstairs, has shown no grace,” abuse survivor Peter Gogarty said outside the court.

“This man said two weeks ago he was resigning as the Archbishop of Adelaide because of the hurt done to people like me, but I am still here and still hurting,” he said.

Wilson resigned as archbishop of Adelaide in July, two months after being convicted. He wanted to hold on to the position until he completed his appeal but came under pressure from Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, fellow clerics and abuse victims to quit.

Pope Francis named Bishop Greg O’Kelly to run the Archdiocese of Adelaide until a new archbishop has been appointed.

“Bishop O’Kelly said he was keeping Archbishop Wilson in his prayers as he formally commences this stage in his life, while also remembering the victims and survivors of abuse in the church,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

Wilson would be staying at a relative’s home, it said.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the country’s top Catholic body that Wilson once led, had no immediate comment.

Australia on Tuesday released what the government says is the world’s first ever how-to-guide for combating radical Islamist propaganda in Southeast Asia, which it hopes will help disrupt local recruitment efforts by groups such as Islamic State.

Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, has been on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown Islamist radicals since 2014 and authorities say they have thwarted a number of plots.

The 43-page document, entitled “Undermining Violent Extremist Narratives in South East Asia”, will be accessible online and aims to provide tools to disrupt the winding path to radicalisation, said Justice Minister Michael Keenan.

“The process of radicalisation to violence is an incredibly complex issue. Terrorist propaganda affects each individual’s state of mind, their thoughts and emotions differently. There is no single pathway to radicalisation,” Keenan told a conference in Canberra, according to an advanced copy of his remarks shared with Reuters.

“This compendium provides practical guidance and insight for governments, policy makers and civil society organisations in Australia and Southeast Asia to support their development of effective counter-narratives that undercut the appeal of terrorist propaganda.”

The document does not make for light reading. It contains tips for a successful strategy such as “protect the messenger” and “consider how military and counter-terrorism actions impact the strategic counter-narrative”.

It also offers case studies and examples, such as the Burqa Avenger cartoon in Pakistan, in which a teenage Muslim heroine battles extremist villains with books, analysing their success in countering narratives put forward by increasingly media-savvy militant groups.

About 100 people have left Australia for Syria to fight alongside organisations such as Islamic State, Australia’s Immigration Minister said this year.

Canberra has been increasingly focused in recent years on preventing the spread of militant Islamism to its neighbours in Southeast Asia, which have large Muslim populations and, it is feared, could link up with its own home-grown militants.

Earlier this year, Australian police arrested five men suspected of planning to sail a small boat from the far north to Indonesia and the Philippines en route to joining Islamic State in Syria.

The men were detained after towing the seven-meter boat almost 3,000 km (1,865 miles) from Melbourne to Cairns in Queensland state.

There have been several “lone wolf” assaults in Australia, including a 2014 cafe siege in Sydney that left two hostages and the gunman dead. Also in 2014, police shot dead a Melbourne teenager after he stabbed two counter-terrorism officers.

In 2015, a 15-year-old boy fired on an accountant at a police headquarters in a Sydney suburb and was killed in a gunfight with police.

A Daily Express article which suggested that burqa sales are on the rise in Blackburn contains some basic errors.

The headline “Burka sales BOOM” can serve to reinforce the imagery of religiosity and violence. Imagery that has featured in counter-jihad circles since 2006.

The Other Islamic Bomb => pic.twitter.com/RlcqQwal2i

— Scott M (@EVdeals1) April 27, 2013

Describing a ‘sales boom’ is a journalistic cliche and not instrincially offensive. In this context, however, it lacks sensitivity.

The central claim of the article weakens under scrutiny. Paul Baldwin, the Express journalist, only interviewed a single store owner. And Baldwin acknowledges that ‘exact figures are hard to establish because many burkas are sold door-to-door’.

Nadeem Siddiqui has seen a rise in sales. His Hijab Centre in Blackburn went from selling ‘one or two burkas a month’ to ‘one or two in a week’. It’s a rise but it hardly meets the inflated claims of the headline.

The Express also carried out a ‘snap survey’ in the town and ‘found around 30 per cent of muslim women completely covered their faces’. That figure sounds daunting when the journalist had just informed readers that Muslims make up 11 per cent of the local population.

It turns out that the journalist spoke to just twenty women who wear the niqab or burqa. And given their campaign to publicly ban this veil is it any wonder they declined to be named or photographed?Nor is the campaign anything new.

The Express ran a front page in favour of a ban on October 21, 2006. It also claimed in 2006 that “An astounding 97% of Daily Express readers agreed a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony.” Much of the 2006 debate was influenced by former Labour MP Jack Straw’s public opposition to the face veil.  Straw reaffirmed his position to the Express a decade later.

Last month the newspaper claimed that 12,000 readers want a ban the burqa. The language of the survey demonstrates how to ask a leading question. Understanding polling methodologies is important.

Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall MEP has also called for a ban in a party where members deploy Islamophobic rhetoric when politically expedient.

Debates on the burqa are nothing new and have stretched as far as Australia. Some European countries have issued public bans despite a minority of women wearing face veils. Cameroon and Chad issued bans following acts of domestic terrorism.

The article claims that the popularity of the niqab and burqa grows in other northern towns and London. In the absence of evidence, however, comes insinuation.

Some individuals direct their anxieties and rage towards Islam and Muslims at individuals they perceive as Muslim. Some white converts experience religious slurs dressed in the language of race. Racialisation means that non-white Muslims, especially Sikhs, face violence and racist abuse.

A decision to wear (or remove) Islamic veils clothing is more nuanced. In one example, a London youth worker started wearing the hijab after suffering Islamophobic abuse. This trend, some argue, continued in a post-9/11 climate. A point raised by Nadeem Siddiqui, who runs the Hijab Centre in Blackburn.

Others removed their headscarf or hid it after experiencing abuse. Violence and verbal abuse against Muslim women who wear Islamic veils continues to cause concern. Comments posted below the Express article or in far-right channels contain many dehumanising slurs.

These views overlook the varieties and experiences of the religious life. And ignores the fact that some just pick and choose the verses that speaks to their own cultural specificities.

The popularity of the Express’s campaign reflects how anxieties and prejudices towards Islam and Muslim evolve and grow. And how misleading stories appeal to the echo-chambers of those prepared to believe the worst about Muslims in Britain.

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