Most of us don’t have the luxury to choose our battles. Our battles choose us: we pay the rent/mortgage, put food on the table, keep the business afloat, get the kids through school and so on. To people trying to survive in our rapidly declining economy, the few alternatives invariably incur crippling costs or failure.
Governments, however, do have that luxury. They can spend tens of billions of dollars in an effort to make the weather on 30 December 2035 as mildly pleasant as it is today, or build an entire bureaucracy dedicated to restricting what kids can see on their phones. Neither of these objectives is within the government’s technical capabilities, let alone remit, but nobody in government cares because they never pay the cost or suffer the consequences.
This is all well and good under normal circumstances. But when a situation arises that demands the government responds with competence and resolve, as happened more than two weeks ago when two Muslim psychopaths armed to the teeth opened fire at Bondi Beach, killing 15 people and wounding 40 more, the government’s ineptness is exposed like a headless chook in the headlights.
At a press conference yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that he had decided to conduct a fast and superficial review into the government’s handling of the incident, rather than a full-blown royal commission, because the latter would take years to complete, and this issue required “urgency”. Only a senior member of the most retarded government in Australian history could describe a decision that took 15 days to make as “urgent”.
Besides, if it’s urgent now, why wasn’t it urgent two years ago, when Jews and others around the country were warning that a massacre was imminent? The answer to that is awkward. By ignoring the warnings, Albanese enabled the massacre to occur. His sudden interest in the issue, now that 15 people are dead and others are recovering from horrific wounds in hospital, is an admission of culpability, which his refusal to conduct a thorough inquiry only confirms. The last thing he needs now is for the public to know that he had a dog in this race all along, and its name wasn’t Wolfowitz.
On 6 October 2023, Albanese visited the Lakemba Mosque, the biggest in Australia, to personally appeal to Muslims to vote Yes in his signature project, the Voice referendum, which would be held eight days later.
The imams were only too willing to ally with him. “The Prime Minister’s visit to Lakemba Mosque is part of a national initiative in co-ordinating all mosques in Australia to dedicate their Friday sermons leading up the Referendum, in support of the Voice, as the Australian Muslim community has been proudly supporting the Voice,” said Australian National Imams Council President Sheikh Shadi Alsuleiman.
It was a quid pro quo. Albo got a block of votes for the Voice (not enough to alter the outcome, mind), and in return the imams received the implicit assurance that their own most important issue, the liberation of “Palestine” and the destruction of Israel, would continue to receive all the support it could from Canberra, especially from Albanese, who had been vilifying Israel and sanctifying Palestinians since his early days in Parliament.
Albo wasn’t to know that the next day Hamas would attack southern Israel, murdering, raping and kidnapping civilians in the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. The timing turned out handy for the imams.
Albanese’s government never compromised on its commitment to the Palestinian cause. It pledged more than $130 million in “aid” for Gaza and Palestine, including a $21.5 million bonus to the UN’s Gaza agency, UNRWA, for granting 12 of its staff leave to participate in the attack. (It’s now becoming apparent, to the surprise of nobody, that “aid” to Gaza often winds up buying guns and bombs for Hamas.) It recognised Palestine as a state. And Immigration Minister Tony Burke allowed in thousands of Gazan refugees, exactly the type of people Egypt built the most impenetrable border wall in the world to keep out.
In January 2024 The Australian reported that a sheikh in western Sydney, Kamal Abu Mariam, had preached for Jews to be killed “one by one”. Neither state nor federal law enforcers considered it worthy of serious investigation. Nor was anybody in government or law enforcement concerned about the radical jihad being expounded by Wisam Haddad at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Bankstown. When the centre was finally shut down a week ago, it was for operating illegally under council bylaws. Undeterred, Haddad has said he will keep preaching anyway. Why wouldn’t he?
The imams know whose side the government is on, and continue to foment antipathy towards Jews with impunity, even now, after the worst attack on Jews in Australian history and the worst in the world in more than two years.
Burke’s contribution to yesterday’s press conference was equally sappy and obscure. While Albo emphasised the “urgency” of conducting a quick inquiry, Burke said the investigation needed to be strictly limited in order to maintain the “unity” of our precious multicultural society.
This type of inquiry “will not provide a platform for some of the worst voices,” he said cryptically before elaborating with an alphabet soup of mindless gibberish.
“I’ve been deeply concerned in terms of social cohesion, when you think through some of the terms of reference that have been circulated for other forms of inquiry, where, because of issues that have been raised in different terms of reference, the necessary outcome would be to re-platform and provide a public platform, for some of the worst statements and worst voices.”
I don’t speak politicese, but I think he meant that a royal commission would compel his Muslim constituents to repeat on an official platform what Jews have been warning they’ve been saying for more than two years. The danger for Burke is that this would shed even more light on the catastrophic state of our supposedly harmonious multicultural society, and what kind of migrants the government has been allowing to settle in parts of the country where Jews no longer dare visit. Burke’s own western-Sydney electorate of Watson, which is 31 per cent Muslim, is one of them.
Again, this is an admission of culpability. Burke knows that what’s being said in mosques in western Sydney is the root cause of the attack in Bondi, and wants to throw a blanket over it lest he be forced to answer uncomfortable questions about it.
Albanese said in passing during yesterday’s press conference: “I was in Bondi yesterday, meeting privately with people who’ve lost loved ones, and discussing the full range of issues and support that’s available.”
Was he, though? I seriously doubt the facts of this statement. Albanese only travels east of his Marrickville electorate to stay at the Prime Minister’s luxurious Kirribilli mansion, go to the airport or attend mass at St Mary’s if there is an election going on. He’s simply not interested in visiting places where he risks being heckled, which these days is most of the country, and certainly includes Sydney’s eastern suburbs, as we saw when he attended the memorial to the victims at Bondi on 21 December. But that aside, the implication of his claim, that he is welcome in Jewish households in Bondi, is as about as reliable as an Indian truck-driving licence.
Grieving Jewish families yesterday published a letter to Albanese saying, “You owe us answers. You owe us accountability. And you owe Australians the truth.
“We demand answers and solutions. We need to know why clear warning signs were ignored, how anti-Semitic hatred and Islamic extremism were allowed to grow dangerously unchecked and what changes must be made to protect all Australians going forward.”
On Christmas Day, the Rabbinical Association of Australia issued a similarly worded press release, urging Albanese to call a royal commission.
“This call is not an endorsement of any political party or political agenda. It is a moral and ethical imperative. Our tradition and our history teach that when lives are lost and danger persists, silence is not neutrality. On the contrary, the Bible - the bedrock of our Judeo-Christian civilisation — enjoins us ‘not to stand passively when the blood of your neighbour is shed’ (Leviticus 19:16).
“To be silent at this time is to abdicate responsibility.”
Yes, but responsibility to whom? Albanese’s responsibility to his Muslim constituents remains as solid as ever. Unlike us, Albanese, in the end, can choose his battles.
