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The politics of the demagogic opposition leader Peter Dutton is unimaginatively dull and almost always inaccurate.

Select your marginal group,�� elevate it as a “threat”, condemn it for various misattributed defects, demonise its members and tar any alleged supporters as foolish, at best, unpatriotic at worst.

The latest group to rankle Dutton and his front bench of security hysterics are Palestinians, notably those trying to flee Israel’s war in Gaza to sanctuary in Australia.

Since last October 7, Hamas attacks on Israel, only 2922 visas have been granted to those possessing Palestinian Authority travel documents, with roughly 350 being visitor visas.

A much larger total of 7111 visa applications����by Labor.

So far, a mere 1300 Palestinians have made it to Australia, on temporary visitor visas that do not enable them to receive government aid or engage in meaningful employment. (Labor is ruminating on whether to create a new category of visa that would lift such impediments.)

With such figures, Dutton has little to work with.

Undeterred, he has spent the best part of last week dog whistling to his anti-refugee base. “If people are coming in from that war zone and we’re uncertain about their identity or allegiances,”����Sky News on August 14, it was “not prudent” to let them in.

Education Minister Jason Clare, whose Western Sydney seat includes a sizeable Muslim population,����Dutton to pay a visit to people from Gaza. “I’ve met them, great people.” ��They had “had their homes blown up, their schools blown up, their hospitals blown up, who have had their kids blown up.”

Shadow Home Secretary James Paterson has also����the government has simply not convinced “us and the Australian people that the security and identity checks that they’re doing are sufficiently thorough and robust to protect the Australian people”.

While Australia had an “important role to play” in confronting “a very serious need,” safety and security comes first.

What constitutes a satisfactory measure for Paterson? A blanket refusal to grant visas to any “supporters” of Hamas.

All applications from Palestinians fleeing Gaza have to be referred to the domestic intelligence service, ASIO, and “robust in-person interviews and biometric tests” conducted.

Paterson����the Australian Financial Review:��“Governments make choices all the time about who they prioritise to bring to Australia. If the Albanese government picks this cohort ahead of others it will be a revealing choice.”

These objections have an air of stifling unreality to them. For one thing, they are scornful of the views of ASIO director general Mike Burgess who, on August 11,����that “there are security checks” or “criteria by which people are referred to my service for review and when they are, we deal with that effectively”.

Burgess drew a distinction between the provision of financial or material aid to the organisation, something which might tickle the interest of a screening officer and that of “rhetorical support”.

“If it’s just rhetorical support, and they don’t have an ideology or support for a violent extremism ideology, then that’s not a problem.”

The logic of preventing individuals coming to Australia purely because of a supporting link with Hamas falsely imputes that the individual is a potential terrorist, eschewing any broader understanding. The insinuation is that the only acceptable Palestinian is an apolitical one.

The Coalition opposition to granting visas to Palestinians voicing support for Hamas is also implausible in another respect.�� While claiming to be defenders of “social cohesion”, Dutton and his stormtroopers seek to demolish it.

Manufacturing insecurity becomes the pretext for battling it.

Boiled down to its essentials, the views of Dutton and his colleagues that any support for Palestinian autonomy and independence, manifested through any political or military arm, must be suspect. This line of argument is wholly drawn��from Israel’s security narrative.

[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]