Muhammad Ayman Al-Hassan Hoolash: No rehabilitation for Perth youth jailed over Islamic State beheading videos

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT A young wannabe jihadist who was jailed in WA for posting videos of beheadings online is not having any de-radicalisation programs behind bars, as concerns mount about rising instances of homegrown extremism. Muhammad Ayman Al-Hassan Hoolash was 18 in June 2024 when counterterrorism authorities saw him transmitting ultra-violent content to Islamic State-aligned Telegram chat groups. He was an administrator of one of them, which was open to the public with 105 members, and promoted killing various groups of people including Russians, Jews and Christians in Syria. Hoolash also posted vile material to his Instagram account, and referred to “getting 13 year-old Yazidis slaves”, “wanting a 15 year-old bride” and ”shooting pregnant women in the stomach”. He became the first person in Australia to be jailed under Commonwealth counterterrorism laws covering social media use in March last year, when District Court Judge Belinda Lonsdale sentenced him to three years jail. “You use highly offensive terms to describe persons of other races,” she said. “You refer to wanting to rape, kill, and immolate women, Jews, and children, and raping the daughters of Shia Muslims.” While he will be eligible for parole in May, his release will be up to Commonwealth Attorney-General Michelle Rowland to decide. Asked about the case, her spokesman said it would not be appropriate to disclose the details of individual federal offenders. “There is a very high threshold that must be met for a person who has been convicted of terrorism offences to be granted parole,” he said. “The safety of the community is the Government’s highest priority.” While Judge Lonsdale told Hoolash that she hoped “community corrections does everything that it can to provide you with treatment whilst you are in prison”, a hearing for his appeal against the length of his sentence this week was told he had not undergone any de-radicalisation programs. “There has not been any courses available to him — and will not — while he’s in the special handling unit,” defence barrister Steven Whybrow told the full bench of the Court of Appeal, including Chief Justice Peter Quinlan. “It’s a bit of a catch-22.” A Department of Justice spokeswoman said commenting on individual cases or matters before the court could not be provided. “More generally however, Corrective Services delivers a range of programs and interventions to address offending needs. This includes intervention related to violent extremism,” she said. “Being housed in the special handling unit at Casuarina Prison does not inhibit a prisoner from accessing intervention programs.” It comes after Bindoon man Jayson Joseph Michaels, 20, last week became the first person in WA to be arrested and charged with preparing a terrorist attack, accused of plotting a “mass casualty”. And on Australia Day, Warwick man Liam Alexander Hall, 32, allegedly hurled an improvised grenade into about 2500 demonstrators in Forrest Chase, and is the first person to be charged in WA with engaging in a terrorist attack. Then there was the 16-year-old boy who was shot dead by police in Willetton in 2024 after stabbing a stranger in a Bunnings carpark, when he was two years into a de-radicalisation program. Ben Rich, director of the Curtin Extremism Research Network, said authorities were facing an uphill battle in this space, with abhorrent content at the fingertips of increasingly disenfranchised youths. Algorithms kept serving it up, making them angrier and angrier. “Kids will find a way to access this stuff,” Mr Rich said. “They’ll catch one like this (Hoolash) and put him through the wringer. “But for every one that ends up in court, there will be at least 999 lads looking at it. “You have a cohort of people radicalising faster and faster, and it’s getting harder and harder to pick up.” Hoolash began viewing extremist material around age seven, but was very immature and “not necessarily a religious extremist”, his lawyer said. “He’s distributed (extremist material), but not intending or seeking to incite violence,” Mr Whybrow said. “This is a pre-terrorism offence. It’s a very unsophisticated barracking in a cool-being-tough way.” The Chief Justice replied that unsophisticated people were “exactly the type of people ISIS want to recruit”. “It seems there was an active interest in ISIS, an active interest in violence,” he said. One of the other appeal judges, Justice Joshua Thomson, said such crimes were “quite an insidious and important thing to eradicate”. “It normalises the violence. It prepares the person who sees it to think this kind of thing happens,” he said. In the execution videos Hoolash posted, the victims were shot and had their throats cut, while one had his head crushed by a large rock. But Mr Whybrow’s argument against the sentence include that Judge Lonsdale erred in “conflating the seriousness of the material with the seriousness of the offence”. He noted the “toxic masculinity” coursing through his client’s online remarks, which included references to making Shia boys “rape their mothers before burning them alive”. Alarmingly, the “manosphere” phenomenon has gone mainstream, embraced not just by radical Islam and followers of social media misogynist Andrew Tate, but also white nationalists. Mr Rich warned against knee-jerk policy responses by posturing politicians wanting to be seen to be doing something. He said that instead, whole of community vigilance was required, after deep questioning around why younger generations felt disconnected from society, including the housing crisis issue. “This is not just something we consign to the government to deal with,” Mr Rich said. “The solutions to all these problems aren’t more laws.” On Hoolash, a Mauritius-born Australian citizen, Mr Rich said de-radicalisation programs inside prisons required the consent of the inmate and could not be forced upon them. “He seems exactly like the guy you would want to offer a pathway while they’re serving time,” he said. “And if he wasn’t offered it, why not?” The office of Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia was asked about program offers to Hoolash but declined to comment, deferring to the department response. Shadow Corrective Services Minister Adam Hort said that if such offenders didn’t undergo programs in prison, they would leave posing “the same threat to our community that put them behind bars in the first place”. The judges reserved their decision, with the chief justice warning there was actually a possibility Hoolash’s sentence would be increased.