Australian Justice Minister Michael Keenan said, Australia and Southeast Asia must re-double efforts to share intelligence and make sure Paris-style militant attacks can’t be replicated in the region.
Hundreds of Indonesian ISIS sympathizers and some Malaysians and Singaporeans are believed to have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq.
Malaysia has said that Southeast Asia faces the risk of attack when they return.
“The fact that the national security situation has significantly deteriorated for all of the countries in the region, including Australia, means we need to re-double those efforts,” Keenan, who is also minister assisting the prime minister on counter terrorism, told Reuters in an interview in Singapore.
Keenan also denounced comments by U.S. republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump who has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States,
“Look, I think that is entirely the wrong response. When we look at Southeast Asia, we get a good example that we are not somehow at war with a particular religion and neither do we need to target Muslim Australians or anywhere else in the world. That’s exactly what the terrorist would like us to do. We need to think much smarter than that. In Australia, we have a substantial Muslim population, and we made priority talking to them that they understand, whilst we never make apologies for going after terrorists, we are going after individuals, not a whole community. That’s very important, I think, to continue to make that point. Southeast Asia is a great model for the fact that people can easily peacefully co-exist, as they do all around this region,” Keenan said.
Keenan added that the government is targeting social media to counter propaganda sent out by militants.
“We’re working very closely with social media companies, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to tear down terrorist propaganda. We don’t want this barbaric, ultra-violent stuff on the internet, wherever we find it, we got to take it down. Secondly, we need to make an effort to get better messages out there to explain to people what this barbarous organization actually does, how they behave, and what will become of people if they think of going there is somehow a glamorous option for some pioneer in this new state. We need to get the truth out about Islamic State and the truth is pretty shocking and we do need to make sure we’re continuing to invest in doing that,” Kennan added.
Australia next week marks the anniversary of a siege in central Sydney in which a gunman with radical Islamist sympathies took over a central city cafe. Two hostages and the gunman were killed when police stormed the building.