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The decision yesterday by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith to expel a Mossad agent working in the Israeli Embassy in Canberra for his role in his country's forging of four Australian passports used in an assassination of a senior Hamas figure in Dubai earlier this year is one that may help to reduce violent extremism in Australia.

In fact, this one action of standing up to Israel might do more good in reducing home grown extremism than the $9.7 million the Rudd government announced on May 11 it was throwing at the issue.

To the extent that there are fundamentalist Islamic extremist cells in Australia - and this is by no means clear given that we only have the government's word for it - one of the key selling points for those cells in recruiting members has been Australia's toadying to Israel and the United States over the past decade.

The argument runs something like this. The Australian government is an enemy of Islam. Like the US, it tolerates Israel's ill-treatment of the Palestinian people and participates in conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan which kill innocent Muslims. So Australia is the enemy of Islam and it should be attacked.