Long known as a peaceful paradise of suntanned folk embracing sand, surf and the good life, Australia is awakening to a new age. This week it was revealed that an extremist Muslim terror strike, focused on the country’s second-largest city, Melbourne, was averted by timely government intervention.

“Some 500 Australian state and federal police raided 23 locations in Melbourne and Sydney on November 8, arresting 17 people in what the government says was a major terrorist plot in the late planning stage of the attack cycle” (Stratfor, November 8).

The foiling of this plot followed on the heels of hastily approved legislation in the Australian parliament designed to enhance the Australian authorities’ efforts to allow for the early arrest of suspects in the pursuit of the nation’s counterterrorism strategies.

As Stratfor pointed out, “The Australians have reason to be concerned. The country has been named in al Qaeda threats, and U.S. troops have captured some Australians at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. In addition, there also is a Wahhabist presence in the Australian Muslim community—and al Qaeda is regarded as a Wahhabist network” (ibid.).

Australia became the enemy of Islamic terrorists when it joined with the United States and Britain in the war on terror. Although this island nation has yet to experience a terrorist strike within its coasts, it has been affected by extremist Muslim terror striking close to home. The bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002 took the lives of 88 Australian citizens. Since then the Australian government has stepped up its counterterrorist efforts.

With its interior and far north filled with vast and empty spaces, its massive coastline largely porous, a scant population barely surpassing that of greater Los Angeles spread largely around the perimeter of a land mass equivalent to that of the U.S., Australia faces unique challenges in keeping terrorists at bay.

In the past it has attracted insurgency groups such as the Croatian Ustashi movement, members of which were once found to be training in isolated areas of the state of Victoria. The Triads of China have tried to penetrate Australia through underground business links. The nation’s universities proved fertile ground for exploitation by various communist insurgency groups in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet the Australian authorities, supported generally by a fairly level-headed electorate, have so far been able to counteract all of these negative influences within their society.

Australia’s population has been built by migration. Because of its original “White Australia” policy, the bulk of the nation’s immigrants, arriving up to the mid-20th century, stemmed from Britain and Europe. When (during the heady days of the 1960s) racism was popularized by the intelligentsia of the nation creating and publicizing myths about the mistreatment of ethnic groups within Australia, the government’s stance on immigration changed.

In the wake of the Vietnam War, boatloads of Asians penetrated the northern shores of Australia and were absorbed into its society. Buddhist temples, something quite alien to the Australian Judeo-Christian culture, started to pop up around the country. This was later followed by waves of immigrants of Islamic persuasion from the Middle East. Then the mosques appeared and the cries of the mullahs were heard ringing out across the cities of Australian suburbs mixing with those of sacrificial goats slaughtered in suburban backyards.

By comparison with other nations, Australia’s absorption of ethnic minorities has been relatively smooth. This is in large part due to the country’s immigration policies. Australia has long guarded its right to choose who it wants as a citizen via well-constructed legislation. This has led to entrenched practices designed to attract the assimilation of émigrés. Following federation, generations of Australians came to the nation’s shores from cultures quite foreign to that of their new homeland. Their progeny readily accepted Australian citizenship and, thus, Australian national aspirations—until recently.

All of those arrested on November 8 are Australian citizens. But they are not Australian ethnics. The culture and the religion they practice are foreign to the majority within the nation of their citizenship. They have not assimilated. Akin to their compatriots in Britain and Europe, they have elected to use the freedoms granted by their citizenship to perpetrate terror on the nation that has granted them a haven from other societies still stuck in a medieval culture of cruelty toward, and deprivation of, their citizenry. Their extremist loyalty to the cause of pan-Islamism via the process of jihad poses an extreme threat to the nation that feeds, clothes, shelters and educates them, and provides them with a means to make a living.

Akin to the Ustashi movement nailed by the Australian authorities in the 1960s, this latest crop of insurgents arrested in Melbourne has been charged with participating in paramilitary training in remote areas of Australia, planning to produce bombs, and having access to firearms and funding for their nefarious operations. The charges also relate to their planning acts of terror using explosives.

Like the anti-terror initiatives currently being used in Britain and the U.S., the Australian government has gone for the religious extremist jugular by seeking to nail the voices that stir the terrorists’ blood: their spiritual leaders. They have arrested an Algerian cleric, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, aka Abu Bakr, having earlier withdrawn his passport. Abu Bakr is reputed to be both the Melbourne terrorist group’s imam and its prime organizer.

Although the Australian authorities have been able to break this particular terrorist cell before it wreaked its wretched havoc on the city of Melbourne, one is forced to consider just how many other such cells are embedded around this vast island nation.

Over 200 million Muslims populate the Indonesian archipelago. Any Islamic extremist could find a haven in this island complex while awaiting safe passage to the land down under. Almost a hundred Aussies have already been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists within Indonesia in the Bali massacre.

Yet Australia’s greatest challenge is not so much keeping extremist imams and their terrorist protégés from now migrating into the country. The most significant terrorist potential lies within the hearts of extremist Islamic Australian citizens already embedded within the country, the sons of earlier migrants, who speak with an Aussie twang, but who never assimilated into Australian society. This is the stranger within Australia‘s gates mentioned in Deuteronomy 28:43!

Match that prophecy with that of Deuteronomy 32:25, and it is clear to those with a perspective on the biblical identity of Australia and on prophecy for these times that the future does not bode well for Australia in respect of this terrorist threat. If you want to know why, turn to Leviticus 26 and read verses 14-16. That’s not a message for the faint-hearted. Nevertheless it’s the binding reality of our day.

If you would like to learn more about Australia’s future, read our booklet Australia in Prophecy.