Jemaah Islamiah operatives in Australia resisted calls from JI leaders in South-East Asia to carry out terrorist attacks here in the late 1990s, a leading terrorism academic, Rohan Gunaratna, said yesterday. Attributing their reluctance to the adoption of a more tolerant ethos by the JI members who had lived in Australia, Dr Gunaratna said JI cells in Malaysia "were very keen to do attacks in Australia. The attack plans were called off because of disagreements between JI cells in Australia and JI cells in Malaysia; otherwise there would have been mass attacks in Australia," he told the National Press Club. Pressed for more details, Dr Gunaratna - who receives briefing from leading intelligence agencies and conducts his own interviews of detained terrorist suspects - was less than expansive, but pointed to the battle for control of a Dee Why mosque several years ago. Abdul Rahim Ayub, the alleged leader of the JI cell who fled Australia days after the Bali bombings, had a physical altercation with the imam of the mosque, Zainal Arifin, as he sought to gain control.
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Arifin, Dr Gunaratna said, was a long-standing JI sympathiser in Australia who was resisting the extremists. Dr Gunaratna said JI had about 100 members and was raising $200,000 a year at the peak of its powers from the late 1990s until the Bali bombings. Many of them had been in Australia for many years, had jobs and sent their children to local schools. That exposure to the "Australian ethos had dulled their ideological convictions: "They were sympathetic to the cause but didn’t want to die for it," Dr Gunaratna said.
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