The outpouring is hysterical. Yesterday, I thought to myself, “Should I even bother writing about this batshit craziness? What’s to say, other than ‘The political right is batshit crazy’? They can’t keep it up”.

Oh yes, they can. They did. They are.

“Which side are you on?”, asked the prime minister, after suggesting that the nation had been “betrayed”. “A grave error”, said the communications minister. “A form of sedition”, said a Liberal MP. The minister for justice arranged for the Federal Police to assist the ABC in making sure there are security arrangements and screening processes in place in the future.

The Murdoch tabloids today variously labelled the national broadcaster “Traitor TV”, “Terror Vision”, and the “ABC of Jihad”. Two depicted Islamic State flags with the ABC logo.

Why? Because a young audience member on Monday’s Q&A program, Zaky Mallah, said something fairly incontrovertible: “The Liberals now have justified to many Australian Muslims in the community to leave and go to Syria and join Isis because of ministers like him.”

Mallah doesn’t support the Islamic State. As he wrote in the Guardian (which, to its credit, allowed him some space to address the storm of lies and abuse that he faced): “For the record: I am not a supporter of Isis. I hate Isis.” Nor did he urge people to join the Islamic State.

Mallah was specifically responding to Liberal MP Steve Ciobo’s comment: “I’m happy to look you straight in the eye and say that I’d be pleased to be part of a government that would say you are out of the country”. This from a man who is a leading member of an organisation that oversees the torture of asylum seekers in concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea; an organisation that has forcibly deported people back to danger and disappearance in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Yes, his government wants more power to do such things even to Australian citizens.

When Mallah responded, “As an Australian I would be happy to see you out of the country”, Ciobo said, “The difference is, I haven’t threatened to kill anybody”. His organisation, the Liberal Party, was involved in what can only be described as an international conspiracy to invade and later destroy an entire country, Iraq. Forget “threats”. Hundreds of thousands, by some accounts more than one million, are dead as a result. Before that it was Afghanistan. Now it is Iraq again.

Yet Mallah, who admits that he regularly meets with Asio, is treated as the great danger? Give me a break. In fact, he said nothing that analysts haven’t been saying for years. For example, the British House of Commons Home Affairs Committee’s 2012 Roots of violent radicalisation report noted: “One of the few clear conclusions we were able to draw about the drivers of radicalisation is that a sense of grievance is key to the process …

“The Prevent Review [published by the Home Department in 2011] found that sources of grievance included ‘stop and search’ powers used by the police under counter-terrorism legislation; the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy more generally; a perception of biased and Islamophobic media coverage; and UK foreign policy, notably with regard to Muslim countries, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq. This was supported by evidence to our inquiry.”

A more recent 2013 study published in the Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Science noted:

“Another broad risk factor [regarding radicalisation] is the perceived injustice of Western policies towards Muslim countries … Using the British context as an example, the BBC’s opinion poll of Muslims showed that the majority felt the ‘war on terror’ was actually a war on Islam. The British government also found in their independent studies that there was an apparent relationship between British foreign policy in the Middle East and growth of terror cells.

“In the United States, grievance in the country’s military involvement in Afghanistan was found to highly relate with the notion that the US was engaged in a war with Islam.”

“Perceived injustices”, “apparent relationship”, “highly relate”. Yeah, duh: Many Muslims are aware that Western imperialism has obliterated sections of the Muslim world using utterly false justifications such as “spreading freedom and democracy”; they are aware that hated Middle Eastern dictatorships such as the Saudi Monarchy and the Egyptian regime are propped up by the West and that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine gets the thumbs up in the form of US$3 billion per year in US military aid; they are aware that there is a major offensive against Islam in the West.

Many, curiously, are pissed off about this. Who would have thought? The paper goes on: “Findings have shown that when people are ostracised or treated badly they frequently exhibit hostility toward others”. No shit – I’m astonished. And it took a peer-reviewed scientific journal to say it without being denounced as traitorous.

The Islamic State is reactionary. But how different is the process through which people are mobilised to its cause, compared with that for other radical organisations?

At the turn of last century, sections of the Filipino Catholic population were making exhortations little different in form from IS propaganda. Arcadio Maxilom, for example, a member of the pro-independence Katipunan organisation, said during the military campaign against the United States on the island of Cebu:

“Should the starry flag of the Union dominate these islands, our children will not receive the Christian [read: Catholic] education which is found in the Philippines, through the grace of God, now strongly rooted, and should they be converted to Protestantism and will continue corrupting Christian customs … Let us fight then without hesitation or dismay, because God is in us and his power is great.”

Do any historians claim that a radical brand of Catholicism can be blamed for the fact that tens of thousands joined the revolution? Of course not. US imperialism was occupying the archipelago; that clearly was the issue radicalising people.

Mallah on Monday night offered an opinion that is reasonable by any fair interpretation and is backed (in general terms) even by the research of one of the governments fighting the war on terror. He said that the Liberal government is, by attacking Muslims, helping to radicalise some of them to the extent that they might decide to join a terrorist organisation.

The only thing that he can be said to be wrong on is his statement that “many” will do so. Despite constant provocations from the government, state security and police agencies and the media, Muslims in Australia have shown remarkable restraint in their responses to the ongoing war against them. Only the tiniest fraction has turned even to thoughts of terrorism, something that cannot be said of the "civilised" leaders of the West.

Either way, if the government and the News Corp. nutjobs genuinely were concerned about terrorism, they would take the advice of the eminent intellectual, Noam Chomsky: “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it … That alone will reduce the amount of terrorism in the world by an enormous quantity.”