When is a Terrorist Act Not a Terrorist Act?

"He had a long history of violent crime, infatuation with extremism and mental instability. As the siege unfolded yesterday, he sought to cloak his actions with the symbolism of (Islamic State). Tragically, there are people in our community ready to engage in politically motivated violence."
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

"Hello everybody. Send an (Islamic State) flag as soon as possible and one hostage will be released ... please broadcast on all media that this is an attack on Australia by the Islamic State."
"And number three is that we need Tony Abbott to contact the brother on a live feed and five hostages will be released."
Video with unnamed hostage delivering message from hostage-holder, Sydney, Australia

Police had asked the courts not to grant bail to Monis

Two hostages dead, others injured, including a policeman, shot in the face. The hostage taker identified as Iranian refugee, 50-year-old Man Haron Monis, a Muslim cleric and just incidentally criminal, who despite his clearly Islamist views and assaults on Australian values while promulgating his Islamist credentials hadn't made it to the list of those several hundred Muslim immigrants to Australia whom intelligence had pointed to as potential state threats.

Mother of three, 38-year-old Sydney lawyer Katrina Dawson, dead. With her, 34-year-old store manager Tori Johnson who is reputed to have made an attempt to disarm the aggrieved and threatening Iranian cleric and paid for that bit of courage with his life when he was shot to death.
Well-known to police, the hostage taker distinguished himself as a threat to public civility and Western values when he sent foul letters of condemnation to families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

A man with a clearly dysfunctional personality whose request for asylum in Australia as a refugee from a theocratic ideological government in the Islamic Republic of Iran hadn't been thoroughly investigated. He seems on the evidence, in fact, to have much in common with the ideology of Iran. Other than he appears to have switched sectarian allegiance from his original Shiite culture to embrace Sunni Islam, in reflection of his ISIS admiration.

But then, of course, the UN High Commission for Refugees is not too keen on discrimination when it comes to refugee asylum. On the other hand, it would appear that the signals of prospective disequilibrium with Australia's core culture and values were blatantly present.

Charged with being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife; certainly a serious enough charge, and later charges of sexual assault on a handful of other women. Australia is obviously a hugely forgiving country when anyone faced with such serious charges would be on bail on the charges for the past decade...?

"This is a one-off random individual. It's not a concerted terrorism event or act. It's a damaged-goods individual who's done something outrageous", as far as his former lawyer is concerned.

The Lindt Chocolat Cafe is cordoned off while police investigate the crime scene

Hold on here a moment. To iterate and reiterate assurances that what this man embarked upon, the way in which he did so, the messages he promulgated along with his demands, speak to the new type of Islamist jihadi attacks, the "lone wolf" messengers of jihad, intent on martyrdom for the cause for which the Islamic State which he championed and which urges upon their myriad followers such attacks, have been recognized as the wave of the present.

Unplanned, spontaneous, deadly.

As opposed to the carefully planned attacks of covert groups intent on their mission of inflicting pain and bloodshed upon their enemies either by travelling abroad to dispatch the plan of attack, or having concocted it within the country by those living there, but loyal not to the country which accepted them as immigrants, but the viral and deadly ideology of a warped religious tradition of bloody conquest. Intelligence communities have become skilled at detecting and apprehending such plans.

But how to plan against these lone-wolf attacks is now a subject that is giving nightmares to government intelligence agencies. They are recognized for what they are: individuals who have been "radicalized" accepting their responsibility to jihad by embarking on the journey to achieving martyrdom through slaughtering anyone whom they identify as an enemy of Islam. But the public acknowledgement of this simple enough deduction is held to be unappealing.

A reality that speaks volumes, in defiance of the denials by Australian government officials that what has occurred is the act of a demented loser, not that of an Islamist devoted to the cause of a global caliphate, though he sent the message clearly enough with the black flag of Islam and its message of the Shahada that There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.