Racist hysteria directed at Muslims has been a staple of Australian politics for a decade and a half. Over the last year, and in particular in the last few months, the level of vitriol has reached extraordinary new heights.

According to Tony Abbott, the Islamic State “is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: ‘Submit or die’”.

Foreign minister Julie Bishop recently told the Sydney Institute that terrorism represents “the most significant threat to the global rules-based order to emerge in the past 70 years – and included in my considerations is the rise of communism and the Cold War”.

That’s right. After all, the Cold War only threatened a nuclear war that could have led to the extinction of the human race. What is that next to a few kids making inflammatory YouTube clips and trying to go join a war on the other side of the planet?

In the wake of 9/11, politicians and the media created an atmosphere of warmongering and racism to build support for the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that war, by the way, is the reason we have ISIS today – not Facebook or the ABC).

The atmosphere in that period was vile and reactionary. But at least in the wake of a major terrorist attack the right wing nuttery was vaguely comprehensible.

Today, Abbott is working the country into a frenzy of paranoia that makes John Howard look like the rational centre. He is doing so for absolutely no reason other than the fact that he quite likes his job and wants to keep it.

What is the threat exactly? ISIS might be creating hell in the Middle East, but the idea it is a threat to Australia is ludicrous. ISIS doesn’t even aspire to major terrorist attacks on the West.

Its idea of creating fear in the imperialist countries is suggesting young Muslims should go out and run someone down in their car or knife a stranger in a public mall. Not pleasant, but as a threat to national security, it’s on par with injuries sustained by walking off badly signposted cliffs. Maybe the park rangers responsible for that should also be stripped of their citizenship?

But then, maybe ISIS knows what it is doing. When Osama Bin Laden wanted to provoke the US into invading Iraq and instituting widespread repression and victimisation of Arab and Muslims at home, he considered it necessary to fly planes into the World Trade Centre.

Today, it seems, all you need to do is convince some Muslim kids in the West to say they think the Abbott government is pretty bloody appalling and bang, there’s your national security emergency.