One of Australia’s most notorious anti-Islam activists and former head of the far-right group United Patriots Front has converted to Islam, joining a trend of prominent right-wing figures who’ve embraced the religion for its conservative stance towards masculinity, gender roles and the LGBTQIA+ community.
Shermon Burgess became a national figure during the 2010s for his involvement in now-defunct far-right nationalist groups United Patriots Front (UPF), Reclaim Australia and the Australian Defence League.
Notorious for his role in the 2015 anti-Islam protests that centred on the construction of a mosque in Bendigo, Burgess was instrumental in organising dozens of protests alongside neo-Nazis Blair Cottrell and Neil Erikson. At its height, his social media page “The Great Aussie Patriot” would share racist, inflammatory content to tens of thousands of followers.
Half a decade on, Burgess’ personal Facebook account is now adorned with a cover photo of a Palestinian flag overlaid with the Shahada and features posts praising an Islamic prayer mural in the regional town of Jindabyne.
Burgess confirmed to Crikey that he and another former anti-Islamic activist had taken their Shahada, an Arabic term for an Islamic oath, had converted to the religion and had been welcomed by his local mosque.
“The Muslim community is so kind and amazing, if you need help they are there,” he said.
Burgess said he’d backflipped on his beliefs (once saying that “multiculturalism has failed, Islam is not compatible with our way of life”) after witnessing the strength of Australia’s freedom movement — the anti-vaccine, anti-government, conspiracy-fuelled multicultural activism that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its protests attracted a diverse crowd of different ethnic, cultural and religious communities united by their opposition to pandemic health measures.
Burgess’ meeting with Muslim Freedom Movement leader Youssra Rose was instrumental in providing him a “clearer outlook towards Islam”.
Speaking on his Facebook page in December last year, Burgess said “going back to 2015-2016, you would not have seen me stand side by side with a Muslim fighting for the same cause, not in a million years, but now — things have changed. Now I will stand side by side with the Muslims, to fight against these zionist and freemason oppressors who are ruling over us.”
Burgess said that former UPF members attacked him online when they found out about his conversion.
“Many of them were heavy booze-drinking alcoholics and degenerates,” he said. “I liked the health aspect of Islam, how they train hard and refrain from alcohol and drugs.”
Islam as a reaction against ‘wokeism’
The former activist’s conversion is part of a global trend of prominent right-wing figures courting Muslim fanbases, sometimes by converting to Islam.
In the eyes of a new generation of conservatives, changing societal expectations around gender norms, masculinity and LGBTQIA+ rights have superseded asylum seekers, Islamic terrorism and sharia law as the single greatest threat to Western values.
The intersection of homophobia, transphobia and misogyny between former adversaries has led to an unlikely allyship between the far-right and conservative Muslims, particularly with young men.
“Most religions changed their value system and turned on their own beliefs in order to please the modern world,” Burgess told Crikey.
Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist at the centre of sex-trafficking allegations in Romania, is perhaps the most high-profile recent convert to Islam. Tate, who considers himself conservative, opposes the LGBTQIA+ community and promotes archaic gender ideas like the ownership of women. Since his conversion, Tate has alluded to supporting some sharia laws, such as a statement in which he claimed to be “collecting bricks” to stone his partner if she ever cheated.
Tate told Piers Morgan that he believed “Islam was the last true religion on earth” and later declared it the “cure to degeneracy”.
These figures position the appeal of Islam as a reaction to progressive changes in some parts of modern Christianity.
“If you look at a lot of the garbage coming out about Christian preachers now in America who are trans and Christian preachers with gay flags on the church, and all this insanity, I think that Christianity has lost its way,” Tate said on his podcast.
Another popular creator who has spoken about converting to Islam is live-streamer and anti-LGBTQIA+ influencer “Sneako”, who has more than 559,000 followers on Instagram. Sneako praised the religion for its conservative values.
On February 24, Sneako tweeted “Islam is the strongest force resisting wokeness” before posting a photo from Dubai where he appeared in Islamic robes alongside the caption “Allahu Akbar”.
Similar sentiments were posted in far-right social media influencer and Pizzagate promoter Mike Cernovich. Previously, he had criticised the religion: “The problem with Islam is not just the extremists. It’s the mainstream. It’s the fact that so many Muslims around the world support sharia law, which is fundamentally incompatible with Western values.”
More recently, Cernovich has suggested that “the moderated form of Islam is probably the West’s only hope”. Self-proclaimed “anti-woke” journalist Sameera Khan echoed this belief when she tweeted “at the end of the day, the greatest weapon we have against this disgusting woke filth is Islam”.
Other members of the far-right, such as self-proclaimed “theocratic-fascist” Matt Walsh and commentators Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson, have been capitalising on their new-found popularity amongst the Muslim community.
Clips from Walsh’s anti-transgender documentary What is a Woman? subtitled in Arabic have been gaining traction amongst young Muslim men on social media, despite the fact that Walsh has condemned Islam.
In Europe, several prominent Islamophobic politicians went on to convert to Islam, such as far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ former right-hand man Joram van Klaveren, who converted in 2012 after studying the Quran for an anti-Islam book he intended to publish. Arthur Wagner, a leading party official for the far-right German party Alternative for Germany converted to Islam in the same year, even as his party claims “Islam does not belong in Germany”. In France, Maxene Buttey, a local councillor for the far-right party Front National, converted to Islam before being suspended from the party.
These examples represent a trend amongst the far-right to diversify by embracing conservative sentiment in migrant communities. With the global culture war now squarely focused on issues of gender roles, sexuality and the trans community, popular misogynistic far-right figures are latching onto Islam as the strongest ideological framework to fight their battles against the modern world.
