from crikey:

Ned O'Sama: the resonance of transgenerational anxiety
Jeff Sparrow writes:

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

A small group of bearded young men commit an outrageous multiple murder. The youths belong to an immigrant community that perceives itself under siege from the police; they practice a minority religion regarded with suspicion by much of the population. In self-justification, they talk about the persecution inflicted on their co-religionists overseas; eventually, they commit themselves to the creation of a homeland here in Australia.

In the midst of a full-blown panic, the Victorian parliament passes draconian laws drastically curtailing civil liberties, and the police launch indiscriminate raids on ethnic minorities. The bearded men make a suicidal final stand; most of them are killed, without a chance to surrender, by a special police squad, and the leader is taken into custody and executed after a dubious trial.

Ned Kelly has been a Rorschach test for so many generations that, with the news that his bones may (or may not) have been located at Pentridge, it seems appropriate to remix his story for the Age of Terror.

Kelly, of course, identified as Irish and Catholic rather than, say, Arab and Muslim but the relationship of those identities to the mainstream was not so dissimilar. Rather than an inner city posse, Ned belonged to the "Greta Mob", a gang of flash youths who stole horses rather than cars and signalled their identity by wearing their hat straps under their noses in a nineteenth century equivalent of the reversed baseball cap.

His outlawry might have been sparked by clashes between police and his family but he also saw himself as fighting for something much bigger. Ian Jones, the pre-eminent Kelly historian, claims that the gang planned, after the Glenrowan confrontation, to declare a Republic of North-Eastern Victoria. Not quite the Caliphate but not so very different, either.

"It will pay the government," Kelly explained in his Jerilderie Letter, "to give those people who are suffering innocence justice and liberty if not I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victorian Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army."

It’s the kind of message that these days features on Al Jazeera.

The government response sounds equally familiar. New laws allowed the Kellys to be shot on sight, and gave the police the power raid houses without warrants and prosecute anyone withholding information. In January 1879, some twenty men went to jail for "having given information to an outlaw and his accomplices, contrary to the fifth section of the Outlawry Act" and for "withholding information relative to the Kelly gang".

As for Kelly’s trial, it might not have been a military commission but nor was it full and fair: Kelly’s barrister lacked experience; key witnesses were never presented; Redmond Barry was clearly biased.

Of course, historical parallels are never identical. Kelly was neither Osama bin Laden nor Che Guevara nor Chopper Read; his story needs, ultimately, to be understood on its own terms. But the comparison still bears thinking about.

In the wake of 9/11, we were told the world had changed for ever, that this was a situation with no antecedents, and thus we couldn’t even debate the extraordinary measures put in place.

It rather changes matters to consider an Australian icon as a terrorist of the 1870s.

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Accused 'wanted to make bombs'

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23332867-31477,00.html?from=public_rss

THE alleged leader of a Melbourne Muslim terror group was caught on a secret listening device asking an undercover intelligence agent to show him how to make explosives using fertiliser.

"Can you show me, as soon as possible, how to do it?" Abdul Nacer Benbrika is heard asking the agent during the recording played to a Victorian Supreme Court jury yesterday.

"I need to learn ... need to learn myself."

Earlier in the meeting at Mr Benbrika's home in Melbourne on September 22, 2004, the undercover agent explained how he had learned to make explosives from ammonium nitrate while working on farms in Tasmania and had used it to blow tree stumps out of the ground.

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Terror accused deserve better: judge

http://news.smh.com.au/terror-accused-deserve-better-judge/20080320-20pn.html

The judge in Australia's largest terrorism trial has ordered sweeping changes be made in the conditions under which the 12 men standing trial are imprisoned.

The order follows concerns expressed by lawyers for the 12, who are on trial in the Supreme Court in Melbourne on charges including being members of a terrorist organisation, and that they planned to commit a terrorist act.

The court has been told the accused have been held in Victoria's highest security prison from more than two years while awaiting trial in conditions likely to lead to them suffering psychiatric problems.

Their trial began last month and is expected to continue until at least the end of the year.

Justice Bernard Bongiorno on Thursday ordered the accused men be given extra time out of their cells and that they should not be strip-searched when going to and from court.