Anytime there’s a negative imputation about Islam, which is every day, there is one person the media turns to first.
And Keysar Trad’s great failing is that he cannot say no.
He will go on TV, radio or print, time and again, like marching to his Groundhog Day execution.
People from within his own religion get upset with him; so does mainstream Australia, which increasingly holds Islam in open contempt.
Yet Trad, 53, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, who came from war-torn Lebanon at the age of 12, speaking only Arabic and French, feels compelled to keep explaining that a fondness for terror is not part of the Muslim DNA.
He does not blame the media for quoting “some of the more stupid things I say”.
He says he gets passionate and there’s a part of his personality “where I have this tendency to over-explain”.
But it’s a tough gig, going in to bat for his mentor, former Lakemba mosque imam Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, who made comments about women going about like “uncovered meat"; or Trad’s own recent remarks to Andrew Bolt about the Koran advising that hitting women should only be done as a “last resort”.
“The interview with Andrew showed how I slip up,” he says.
“I couldn’t find a rock big enough to crawl under after that. To me, violence is not a resort at all — you don’t do it.
“It’s a psychological verse to calm down the angry man, to say, ‘Talk it out’.
“I take the blame, I’m not blaming Andrew. I said something that wasn’t intended. Not only do I pay the price, my religion pays the price.”
We’re at a small mosque in Zetland, inner Sydney, for Friday prayers.
Trad, though not a qualified imam, leads the service and gives a sermon about honesty and repentance — the same message that could be heard in any Christian church.
But this place, packed with 300 men, tests an outsider’s prejudices.
There’s the red-haired young bloke with the beard low on his chin, who looks flat-out like a Chechen jihadist; the guy who could be Amrozi’s brother; and many of the same kinds of faces seen on the back of Landcruisers doing black-flag blockies in Raqqa.
Most of them are taxidrivers or have walked off building sites to give praise and thanks to God. It is nothing more or less than that.
They are polite yet distant: they know exactly how they are viewed and the sense is that they are retreating further into Islamic enclaves.
Trad is trying to prevent this.
He left a position as senior officer at the Australian Taxation Office in 1998, at a time, he says, when police and politicians were talking up a Middle-Eastern crime wave.
He started taking media calls, arguing that crime was crime, no matter who committed it. Then came 9/11 and the calls intensified.
Trad says when he and Sheikh Hilaly held four prayer vigils at the Lakemba mosque for the victims of 9/11 he received death threats from his own community, saying they should be praying for Afghans targeted in the US-led response.
Sixteen years on, the young men who self-radicalise in the name of ISIS are the greatest challenge for authorities, and for Trad’s community.
He describes ISIS as “worse than criminals. Their crime has a number of evil elements. On one hand they purport to be acting in the name of Islam; on the other most of their victims are Muslim, and the whole religion of Islam has been tarnished by their actions.”
But the problem is that young Muslim men, who “struggle to get work, which may have something to do with your name and your background” are living with two competing narratives.
“Someone comes to them and says, ‘Australian society will never accept you.’ But the biggest obstacle is not the radicalisers — it’s when Pauline Hanson gets up and says, ‘Assimilate’, and at the same time says, ‘You will never be accepted.’ You can’t have it both ways.”
Trad tried to have it both ways by taking a second wife.
His wife, Hanifeh, 52, has appeared to give it her blessing in some media interviews, but it’s more complicated than that.
Hanifeh, mother of Trad’s nine children (who don’t like the idea of dad’s second wife), says she supports his public role advocating for Islam but thinks he should learn to shut up on some issues, including polygamy.
Trad sits smiling and listening in a Lebanese sweet shop in Regent’s Park as Hanifeh drags him back to earth.
“He’s a smart person, he can get wants he wants. So why doesn’t he do it?” she says.
“He could get married, have affairs. But it doesn’t happen. It’s just something he likes to talk about.
“That part of his brain is flawed. It’s waffle. He’s whistling and he doesn’t know why. He’s just getting attention. I don’t think less of people who live in this situation. But the way he talks about it, nobody would want to marry him.
“It doesn’t make anybody a better Muslim to get more than one wife.”
Trad, who writes romantic poetry (“As my anxious heart in longing burns/Separation brings nought but sorrow”), has lost this battle, but will not stop trying to engage the public with the idea that it is lost individuals, not Islam, that causes problems.
Closer to home, Hanifeh is anxious that her five daughters, who wear the hijab, are finding themselves being stared at more and feeling less comfortable in their own country.
While Trad sometimes says too much, he knows that Hanifeh sometimes says it best: “To be a practising Muslim doesn’t make you a radical, it makes you more aware to do the right things.”