Deport the Hate Preachers. Now.
The Government should have acted long ago. It was warned.
It should not have taken the deaths of 15 innocent people for the Albanese government to crack down hard on the incitements to violence that have been rampant since the October 7 atrocity.
Only if the government really has had a big change of mind – and heart – can its belated moves to deport or prosecute hate preachers, ban or punish hate marches, and deny visas to people in favour of “death to the infidel” be taken seriously, given that it’s done none of these things before, even though the need was obvious and much could have been done under existing law.
As Sussan Ley has said, the government has consistently treated Jew hatred as a political problem to be managed, rather than a moral evil to be eradicated.
I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to see a government of social justice campaigners suddenly becoming the national security warriors that our country needs in these perilous times, to keep us safe against external aggressors as well as against the enemy within.
Make no mistake: the Bondi shooters might have been targeting Jews last Sunday, but it was the entire Australia way of life, our democratic freedoms of belief, conscience and association, that they were really taking aim at.
It is not as if the government wasn’t warned, in increasingly strident terms, that something like the Bondi massacre was coming – and not just from its political opponents and critics.
In February, ASIO head Mike Burgess said: “The normalisation of violent protest and intimidating behaviour (has) lowered the threshold for provocative and potentially violent acts. Narratives originally centred on ‘freeing Palestine’ (have) expanded to include incitements to ‘kill the Jews’. Threats (have) transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship and prominent figures. I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
Yet when asked this week, the Prime Minister said he had never imagined Bondi Beach could be turned into a shooting gallery.
Was his mind on something else when Burgess and others delivered their warnings?
Despite local hate preachers publicly exulting in the October 7 atrocity; despite the October 9 riot at the Opera House demanding “f..k the Jews” and what sounded like “gas the Jews”; despite the Sydney Harbour Bridge marchers chanting “death to the IDF” and “globalise the intifada”; and despite the vandalism against Jewish property and the firebombings of synagogues?
For years, the leftist mindset has seen Jews as possessors of “white privilege” and Israel as an exemplar of “settler colonialism” and therefore as “oppressors” – hence the absurdity of “Queers for Palestine” and the insistence, even from ministers in the Albanese government, that October 7 should be seen “in context”.
What else can explain the government’s increasingly harsh denunciations of Israel, its alacrity in issuing visas to largely unvetted people from Gaza, its secret repatriation of “ISIS brides”, and its recognition of Palestine in a massive concession to the “river to the sea” protesters?
The basic problem with the Albanese government is the leftist instincts that constantly distort its moral lens.
Hence the government’s inability to have an envoy against anti-Semitism without also appointing one against an almost non-existent Islamophobia; the PM’s apparent greater comfort in Beijing than in Washington; and the government’s inability to open its mouth without acknowledging “country”, or the neurotic flying of three flags as some kind of atonement for the original settlement of Australia.
Maybe the Bondi massacre will turn out to have been a “road to Damascus” moment, with Anthony Albanese and his ministers henceforth ruthless and relentless in monitoring hate preachers and closing them down if they utter so much as a word from the Koran urging the killing of Jews; in comprehensively vetting visa applicants to ensure that their beliefs and their social media history really are consistent with the democratic instincts Australians should be able to rely on; and in forever putting behind them any ambivalence about our country and its symbols, such as the flag, Australia Day and Anzac Day.
Never again, let’s hope, will we get from this government vacuous slogans about “our diversity is our strength”, as if there’s something embarrassing about our Anglo-Celtic core culture and our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos.
Yet the PM’s inability to apologise for the government’s failures, and inability to say definitely Islamist hate slogans will be as banned as nazi salutes, does not augur well.
Australia’s immigration program need not discriminate on the basis of race or religion, but it should discriminate on the basis of values if we are to last as a free and fair society.
As the citizenship pledge goes, all of us must be absolutely committed “to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”.
It’s a modern version of Ruth’s biblical declaration that “your people will be my people and your God my God”. People who can’t say it, mean it, and live it, should not be here.