Zaky Mallah, the former terrorism suspect at the centre of a storm between the ABC and Liberal MPs, says Muslim youth feel they are “openly targeted” by the Abbott government.

Mr Mallah was at the heart of calls to use the Australian Federal Police to increase security for the Q&A audience after he said Parliamentary Secretary Steve Ciobo “justified” Muslims leaving to fight with ISIS.

“The so-called Islamic State would be extremely happy to hear what Steve Ciobo had to say on Q&A. It feeds into their recruitment propaganda,” he wrote in an opinion piece published in The Guardian.

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“Some young Australian Muslims – who were already feeling vilified – now feel they are being openly targeted by this government. They are saying they would love to leave and join jihadist groups.

“They ask themselves: ‘Why should we Muslims live here, and be subject to this bullying, when in Iraq and Syria, Isis tell us we are welcome?’

“The harder the Abbott government pushes its counterterrorism agenda, the more radicalised some young people feel.”

On Monday night, Mr Ciobo told Mr Mallah: “As an Australian, I would be happy to see you out of this country.

“I don’t apologise for this point of view. My understanding is the reason you got off terrorist offences was because they weren’t retrospective in application.”

Mr Mallah’s article comes as the full force of the Australian government has been mustered against the ABC talk show after his comments.

In Parliament, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he had spoken to the managing director and chairman of the ABC and called for the AFP to check who goes in to the Q&A audience after the “grave error of judgement” in letting Mr Mallah ask a question.

“He had travelled to Syria in the pursuit of what he described as jihad. His social media presence is vile, abusive and violent. He is a very, very known quantity. It beggars belief that he was included in a live audience,” Mr Turnbull said.

In Tuesday’s party room meeting, Prime Minister Tony Abbott told MPs that “we all know the program is a lefty lynch mob”.

“What our national broadcaster has done is give a platform to a convicted criminal and terrorist sympathiser,” he said in a press conference.

“They have given this individual, this disgraceful individual, a platform and in so doing, I believe the national broadcaster has badly let us down.

“I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself, and to answer a question which I have posed before – whose side are you on?”

In his response to the rhetoric aimed at him, Mr Mallah denied claims he supported ISIS and wrote that “the government needs to hear from people like me because I’ve been there, done that. I’ve been to Syria, I’ve spent time with the Free Syrian Army. I know how some young Muslims look at the world”.

He said since his arrest he was in regular contact with ASIO and counter-terrorism police who seek his views on national security.

“They know I’m an idiot at times, they know I like to stir the pot. They would have watched last night laughing and shaking their heads,” he wrote.

After his arrest in 2003 for making threats against law enforcement officers, his case was acquitted after a two-year stint in Goulburn Supermax prison. He said an undercover operative “paid me money to hear a good terrorism story”, which resulted in his arrest.

“They decided I was not guilty of the most serious offences and no threat. I was dumb and naive at the time. I was only 20,” he wrote.

One of Mr Mallah’s YouTube videos calls for extremism to be “condemned”.

He also labelled the Lindt Café siege, where two people died in a police raid, as “atrocious”, and he condemned the siege as “horrendous”.

“Anyone in the community who condones this attack, then you, my friend, are either not a Muslim, or you are simply an idiot,” he said on the video.

In The Guardian, Mr Mallah wrote: “I am strongly standing up for Australians who are under threat from this outrageous, Islamophobic government that is weakening the rule of law and replacing it with a dictatorial system like that which exists in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad and his ministers have the power to do whatever they like to people without trial. This a very dangerous step Australia is taking.”