Straya!

[Brian Peacock]

To make a minority group feel safe we need to restrict the rights and police the language of everybody else, thus raising the temperature of community discord and making that minority feel even less safe.

So where have we picked up the idea that the psychological or physical security of a minority group depends on a kind of zero sum, where protecting the rights and well-being of one section of the community can only be achieved by legislating a diminution of the rights and well-being of the rest of the community?

Similarly, why do we think that a particular word only ever has a single meaning and therefore is only ever used in a specific, negative and threatening manner?



The Right has spent decades decrying exactly this kind of language absolutism as 'political correctness gone mad' - usually in cases where the charges language was being sinisterly (albeit mostly socially) legislated against were constructed entirely from straw. One might think that the proverb "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" has become the justifying basis of political persecution.

[rainbow]

IMG_20251217_161918_245.jpg

How does Bernie know they were innocent?

Maybe they were IOF sympathisers, or potential IOF combatants. Maybe even having undergone training in gentilecide...

[Sean Hayden]

To make a minority group feel safe we need to restrict the rights and police the language of everybody else, thus raising the temperature of community discord and making that minority feel even less safe.

So where have we picked up the idea that the psychological or physical security of a minority group depends on a kind of zero sum, where protecting the rights and well-being of one section of the community can only be achieved by legislating a diminution of the rights and well-being of the rest of the community?

Similarly, why do we think that a particular word only ever has a single meaning and therefore is only ever used in a specific, negative and threatening manner?



The Right has spent decades decrying exactly this kind of language absolutism as 'political correctness gone mad' - usually in cases where the charges language was being sinisterly (albeit mostly socially) legislated against were constructed entirely from straw. One might think that the proverb "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" has become the justifying basis of political persecution.

In my experience it is antisemitism. But to say that these people are hateful in the same way as an American Klansman, or German Nazi, is dishonest, and wickedly so. Certainly anyone chanting "from the river to the sea" was longing for the day Israel was destroyed (I'm obviously not hanging out with a lot of young people chanting this). But people are complicated; those same chanters could also acknowledge that "jews aren't a problem". --go figure, people are strange...

What I'd probably focus on are the reasons for these feelings. If you want to say it's never okay to feel a certain way then in my opinion you can't be taken seriously, you're a hopeless bullshitter. Hate is a normal reaction to being treated like vermin, and given our capacity for empathy, we can expect to take on some of that hate as witnesses as well. This goes both ways.

The solution is to stop killing. You'll never police our natures out of existence, especially by wagging your finger at some other guy who's just like you. Just stop killing, extend rights and protections to everyone, and police the remaining killers long enough, and then maybe you can get to something like a lasting peace. You'll have to do all that while hating the other guy for awhile of course...

[Svartalf]

it's not antisemitism. a) the israelis are really commiting atrocities. b) the palestinians are fully as semitic as the jews.

[Sean Hayden]

Nonsense, hate ain't that tidy. If it were, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation.

[Brian Peacock]

I guess that's about right. I'm still going to wag my finger though.

[JimC]

Here is an excellent article on the political aspects of the events at Bondi:

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/fede ... 5nozn.html

There is an entire area of legal doctrine devoted to causation, as any recovering law graduate knows.

This week’s orgy of blame and counter-blame, of attack and counter-attack, has felt like a highly politicised, and at times inappropriate, version of what jurists call the “but for” test.

This test asks: “But for the action or inaction of Person A, would the harm to Person B have occurred?”

Trying to apply the test to the senseless tragedy of Bondi, as many have this week, is incredibly difficult, but still, the attempt has been made.

It reached its natural conclusion on Wednesday when former treasurer Josh Frydenberg said that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had to accept “personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a 10-year-old child”.

It was an extraordinary claim, a high-water mark of ad hominem rhetoric in Australian political life.

For me, the most enduring image from the week was the smiling face of the 10-year-old victim Matilda, delight beaming from her as she was photographed minutes before her death.

The nihilism of the people who killed her is almost too awful to stare down. But examining causation should be separate from the angry assignment of blame.

When the issue of gun control was raised soon after the attack, former prime minister John Howard, slavishly echoed by sections of the media, said any such talk was a distraction from the real issue, which was antisemitism.

Howard, with all his stature, gave the cue for the partisan politicking that followed, a lot of it taking place on the site of the massacre.

When the issue of gun control was raised soon after the attack, John Howard said any such talk was a distraction from the real issue, which was antisemitism.

Gun control is just about the most basic and commonsense issue to raise in the immediate aftermath of such an atrocity.

As the Herald and The Age reported on Thursday, in a story about ASIO’s contact with the younger alleged shooter: “all official sources across multiple agencies” said there was “consensus in the law enforcement community that Australia’s firearms monitoring systems are badly outdated and plagued by siloing and jurisdictional inconsistencies”.

Such a polarised reaction – if you are talking about X, then you are wilfully and maliciously ignoring Y – is a large part of the problem we are now faced with.

We cannot allow the politics of the internet, the zero-sum reasoning of the anonymous troll-hordes, to filter into our civic life.

We can and should discuss all the causative factors of this event – and they include gun control, national security, immigration screening, intelligence sharing and of course, the most decisive one – antisemitism in all its forms.

And it does have many forms. There is a huge gap between the protests of university students and the murderous actions of ISIS-inspired radicals.

We have told ourselves a story about the pluralism and tolerance we like to think defines Australia.

But can we cling to the narrative that we are the world’s most successful multicultural nation when Jewish children go to school under armed guard?

Can we condemn Pauline Hanson for wearing the burqa in a horrible parliamentary stunt while ignoring the fact that there are parts of Sydney where a man might feel unsafe wearing a yarmulke?

A lazy byproduct of Australia’s relative comfort – we are one of the richest, best educated and most peaceful countries in the world – is our complacency in that comfort.

Bondi shattered that.

Ever since the horror of October 7, we have debated the war in Gaza, and the public has become increasingly horrified by the death and suffering there.

But we have undoubtedly allowed antisemitism to slip into the edges of our discourse.

Certain communities and institutions (rightly) maintained the line that criticism of the Israeli government’s actions cannot be conflated with antisemitism.

But those same communities, the ones that pride themselves on their progressivism, have become increasingly illiberal over the issue of Israel.

Some have used their horror over the actions of the Israeli government as a pretext to attack Jewish people.

As a result, Jewish Australians have been doxxed and sidelined from cultural festivals. Jewish kids feel unwelcome at some of our best universities.

Pro-Palestine rally organisers have failed to condemn, let alone cast out, the antisemitism and extremism that exists in their movement.

Many Jewish Australians say they feel unsafe and unwelcome in the same quarters of cultural life that their forebears helped build during the great wave of post-war middle-European migration.

We can blame our government and the prime minister for all of it, but it is more pragmatic to focus on our own accountability where it applies.

Anthony Albanese is no Jacinda Ardern; the former Kiwi prime minister who was remarkable in her response to the Christchurch mosque massacre in 2019, and whose displays of empathy led to a global conversation about the nature of true leadership.

But perhaps the most tragic part of the eruption in anger over Bondi is that it fulfils the goals of terrorism.

Islamic terrorists, just like Nazis, hate Australian pluralism.

They hate the spirit of mutual tolerance that has most usually defined Australian society.

They want to rupture it.

They want to sow division and foment bitter arguments between citizens who were previously co-existing peacefully.

They don’t want a Bondi Beach replete with laughing children and loping surfers.

They want Bondi Beach covered in blood, first, and next, a Bondi Beach populated by citizens and politicians blaming one another.

Causation is a tortured area of law, and of life, and the “but for” test is not considered an optimal tool for harms which have multiple causes.

That’s why jurists have overlaid it with something else, something that non-lawyers can understand just fine: the commonsense test.

Common sense is what is needed from our leaders now.

That includes a duty to absorb the wild emotion and raw rage of people affected by the tragedy.

And then, a duty to put aside bitter partisanship in moments of national crisis, and get to work, in Canberra.

Bondi Beach is for the swimmers and the surfers and the people, for all the ones who paddled out and held hands in the water off our famous beach on Friday.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

[Sean Hayden]

I don’t feel like you ever wag your finger Brian. You seem pretty down to earth, and understanding of our shared struggles —more than most.

[JimC]

The concept of anti-semitism is complex, politicised and polarised. In the past, it was largely the preserve of the extreme right, white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Now, it is inextricably connected to the Palestinian cause and the actions of the Israeli government. In Australia, a significant proportion of the Jewish community are blaming both State and Federal governments (all Labour Party at the moment) for allowing constant pro-Palestinian protests, that they allege have primed the pump for violence against Jews. The Liberal opposition is using this anger to attack the Labour Party.

The pro-Palestinian movement and its political position involve a spectrum of ideas. At the moderate end, there is acceptance that the initial attack by Hamas was inherently evil, but that the reaction of the Israeli armed forces has been disproportionate and has caused excessive civilian casualties, and protests against these Israeli actions are justified. Such a position is hardly extreme - most centrist Western governments would concur.

At the other end of the spectrum, both by the extreme left and some Muslim hardliners (uneasy bedfellows at best) is a determination that the state of Israel should not exist (the "from the river to the sea" chant springs to mind) and that violence against Israelis is a legitimate response to Israeli oppression in Gaza and the West Bank. From violence against Israelis to violence towards Jews in general is a step that many at this end of the spectrum have made - there have been many attacks against Jewish businesses (some also by neo-Nazis).

However, the father and son responsible for the Bondi attacks seem to have been definitely radicalised by Isis propaganda - the extreme Islamic position has not been a significant part of the pro-Palestinian protest movement. Hamas is less motivated by religion than by Palestinian nationalism, and opposition to Israel.

[JimC]

I sometimes wonder what the Australian neo-Nazi movement is thinking of this, given their detestation of both Jews and Muslims. Probably smug satisfaction about the violence between their two enemies, the arseholes...

[Svartalf]

the problem with anti jew sentiment (sorry, but to me, 'antisemitism' is a totally inappropriate term given that there are other semitic ethnic groups that can be the target of hatred), is that the Jews, or at least the nazisraelis, use it as a shield... they do stuff that does raise hatred and desapproval toward them, but have the nerve to cry 'foul, nobody has a right to bother us since the Germans tried to rid the world of us' as soon as they are confronted with their own wrong doings.

[JimC]

Look, Svarty, I agree that Netanyahu and his ilk use the cry of antisemitism against any reasonable critique of the wrongful actions of the current Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank, but that does not change the fact that hatred and attacks on Jews anywhere is a reality, whether sourced from neo-Nazis or the extremes of the pro-Palestinian movement. The response to this needs to be measured and nuanced, not unthinkingly partisan.

[Svartalf]

well, I'm afraid that measure and nuance won't be anywhere in the picture so long as israel goes on reproducing what nazi germany did to their ancestors...

[Brian Peacock]

Svarty. I know people who are ethnically, if not observantly Jewish, and while they were obviously extremely disturbed, horrified and saddened by the Oct 7 attacks they have been and are appalled by the action of the Israeli state and outraged that they have been made to feel less safe in their community - not by pro-Palestinian protests but by the action and rhetoric of Israel's Zionist political cabal.

It's up to everyone to challenge the Zionists framing of the conflict as being undertaken on behalf of and at the behest of the safety of Jews everywhere. Netanyahu may earnestly desire (or simply politically require) the world believe Judaism represents a single, monolithic culture and political outlook, and that all Jews share a common purpose, endorse the same actions, and seek identical outcomes. But that is not the case, and so, as I said, it's up to everyone to resist that (essentially racist) idea that "The Jews" are somehow all of a single type or kind.

[Svartalf]

that's why I do differentiate between Jews in general, and the israeli government of netanyahu and its cronies... <i'm not going to go bother my neighbours in the shtetl, but yes, I'm going to say lots of bad things about those who rule israel, and those who support them. and that's a lot of people, since israel as a nation reproducing the evil actions of the 33-45 Germans is a bad habit that started with the founding of the Nazisraeli state.