Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / BONDI ATTACK: Josh's Thoughts on Terrorism, Freedom & the Asymmetry of Anti-Semitism

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BONDI ATTACK: Josh's Thoughts on Terrorism, Freedom & the Asymmetry of Anti-Semitism · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas
• 0:06
  Bear with me on this one
• 0:09
  It's terribly terribly sad in Sydney at the moment
• 0:14
  especially amongst Sydney's
• 0:17
  Small but close-knit Jewish community
• 0:21
  If there are any upsides to every tragedy
• 0:24
  Let's start with the positives my eight-year-old twins got to see me cry this morning
• 0:29
  Which is maybe only the third time in their life. They've so that's seen me. So you know wins little wins where you can take them
• 0:37
  Another positive thing today the the bravest character in the horrific events of last night
• 0:44
  The guy who tackled one of the shooters unarmed and wrestled his gun from him and
• 0:50
  Undoubtedly saved many lives
• 0:52
  His name turns out to be Ahmed Ahmed
• 0:56
  So if you were trying to foster a spirit of civility between Jews and Muslims and make sure that we didn't caricature
• 1:02
  The Muslim community as anti-Jewish you couldn't do better than a pick a name like Ahmed Ahmed
• 1:09
  Which does not exactly hide its Arabian origins under a bushel so good news to start good news to start
• 1:17
  the bad news I suppose is
• 1:20
  It certainly feels like
• 1:23
  I belong to the only
• 1:27
  Ethnicity in Australia
• 1:29
  that cannot visibly congregate in public
• 1:34
  With the exception of maybe neo-nazis wearing swastikers
• 1:38
  I can't I can't think of any other community in Australia that cannot have a picnic today
• 1:45
  without
• 1:46
  Fearing for their lives and the fact that we've gotten to this
• 1:52
  Situation like a frog in boiling water
• 1:55
  How we got here and what we might do about it is something I want to hear myself work through today
• 2:03
  It's the worst terrorist attack ever on Australian soil of any kind
• 2:08
  It's the deadliest mass shooting in nearly 30 years since the port Arthur Massacre which I should in
• 2:14
  Australia's gun law reforms
• 2:18
  Currently as I record 16 people are dead
• 2:22
  40 are injured
• 2:25
  29 were rushed to hospital at the time of the shooting which
• 2:30
  occurred a little after quarter to seven p.m. on Sunday evening at Bondi Beach
• 2:36
  Two gunmen open fire
• 2:39
  Onto a crowd at a Hanukkah event
• 2:42
  The youngest person killed is a 10-year-old girl who died in hospital. She was one of the
• 2:48
  29 rushed to hospital two of those were police officers who were wounded in the shootout
• 2:54
  the oldest
• 2:56
  person slain as an 87-year-old man. It's a big it was a big family event everyone from all over
• 3:03
  The various diverse Jewish communities in Sydney hundreds of people and these
• 3:10
  This pair of gunmen swaggered around you can see video of their kind of
• 3:17
  careless insuciance as they just wander around
• 3:21
  picking people off and
• 3:23
  Encourage you not to try to find those videos anyway
• 3:28
  Apparently the
• 3:29
  person who's in custody as one of the suspects is a 24-year-old Pakistani Australian
• 3:36
  gentleman apparently born here
• 3:39
  And his assailant his co-assailant was his own father
• 3:44
  Who's a 50-year-old
• 3:46
  bloke apparently
• 3:48
  Australia's domestic spy agency azeo looked into the younger of these
• 3:54
  alleged shooters six years ago for possible ties to ISIS apparently
• 4:00
  This isn't confirmed by the authorities, but
• 4:02
  reputable news organizations have it on background from the intelligence services and from the joint counterterrorism team
• 4:10
  that
• 4:11
  This shooter had an ISIS flag in his vehicle which also contained improvised explosives which the bomb squad
• 4:18
  Was working on by the time I went to bed last night
• 4:23
  Um, it's worth noting also through a bit of context what
• 4:27
  Bondi beach means in the kind of iconography of Australia in the national imagination
• 4:35
  um
• 4:36
  I wrote a piece for an American outlet
• 4:39
  last night
• 4:40
  I needed to hear myself
• 4:42
  Work through it a little bit and the way I put it was this which is probably better than I can do by ad-libbing Bondi beach
• 4:48
  Is a long wide arc of shimmering golden sand
• 4:53
  facing the rolling waves of the South Pacific
• 4:56
  It isn't just an Australian icon
• 4:58
  As the most centrally located beach in the country's biggest city
• 5:02
  It's endlessly active a constant hive of cultural events film festivals food fairs concerts and social gatherings
• 5:10
  As well as the bronzed Aussie bodies splashing and surfing and sunning and strolling in speedos and flip flops
• 5:19
  Which we're confusingly call
• 5:20
  Fox uh don't ask Americans don't ask
• 5:23
  Bondi beach boasts a ferris wheel and an arts pavilion and a promenade and a grassy park between the road and the sand
• 5:32
  That park
• 5:33
  Tonight was a bloodbath
• 5:35
  I wrote
• 5:37
  Uh Hanukkah by the sea is a special night for Sydney's Jewish community
• 5:40
  There are petting zoos face painting food stalls
• 5:44
  Children light candles to usher in the holidays because it was the first evening of Hanukkah
• 5:49
  It's summer in Australia so the air is warm uh the beaches packed
• 5:53
  And Jewish families were gathered near the children's playground
• 5:57
  When bullets tore through their flesh
• 6:00
  As the massacre unfolded and my spouse and I safe at home desperately texted friends my eight-year-old daughter overheard us
• 6:07
  What happened in Bondi daddy? She asked
• 6:10
  She knows the area very well needless to say
• 6:14
  I said some bad guys hurt people, but they've been stopped and it's safe now
• 6:20
  And when I went to bed I found myself thinking what is it safe now
• 6:25
  Just because these shooters
• 6:28
  Are no longer there
• 6:31
  The father was killed by police in the shootout
• 6:36
  What does it mean to be safe now in this world
• 6:40
  Not just to Jewish people, but for everybody
• 6:45
  Anywhere
• 6:49
  There are going to be a lot of hot takes in these next few days
• 6:53
  especially in the Australian media
• 6:56
  There will be pro-Israeli Jews who blame
• 7:01
  critics of Israel for encouraging criticism of the Jewish state
• 7:07
  There will be anti-Israel activists who will blame Israel
• 7:12
  For putting a target on Jews backs
• 7:17
  Conservatives, I'm sure will blame the Prime Minister and the federal government for allowing
• 7:22
  anti-Jewish sentiment to flourish
• 7:26
  Lefty's will blame conservatives for suppressing legitimate criticism of a foreign state
• 7:33
  And thereby fostering a climate of antagonism
• 7:38
  Some people are already saying that we must make sure in our post-mortems that we don't scapegoat Muslims or
• 7:46
  collectively blame pro-Palestinians
• 7:49
  Others will say that the
• 7:52
  Attack proves that Israel is not to blame for anti-Semitism because it's the world's oldest hatred and
• 7:59
  This could have happened anywhere at any time
• 8:03
  Gaza war or no Gaza war
• 8:06
  Netanyahu or known Netanyahu
• 8:09
  And everyone will agree that we all just have to say no to hate
• 8:15
  Say no to extremism and hate
• 8:18
  You
• 8:22
  It is tiresome to me these conversations
• 8:28
  It feels like the chatter of a bunch of tribes
• 8:33
  Trying to reflexively reinforce their own world views
• 8:38
  And rationalize why they're not complicit in creating the culture that has led to this
• 8:46
  When we're all complicit
• 8:51
  Because we live here and it happened
• 8:56
  Multiple things can be true
• 8:59
  It can be true
• 9:02
  That Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians
• 9:06
  It's occupation of the West Bank and the construction of Israeli towns there and the blockade of Gaza and
• 9:13
  The ferocity of the Gaza war
• 9:16
  Obviously increased anti-Jewish sentiment around the world
• 9:21
  It can also be true that hating Jews has been a popular pastime
• 9:27
  Like everywhere for centuries
• 9:31
  And it didn't need the impetus of
• 9:34
  Israeli settlements in the West Bank to kick it off
• 9:38
  It can also be true that
• 9:41
  Jews who criticize Israel are doing something valuable in demonstrating that the Jewish community is not
• 9:47
  homogenous that it's diverse and quarrelsome internally
• 9:52
  And it can also be true that those arguments would never have swayed
• 9:56
  The kind of violent ideologue
• 9:59
  Who probably pulled off an attack like this
• 10:03
  It can be true that Jews who defend Israel
• 10:06
  Did not deserve
• 10:09
  To get shot at the beach
• 10:12
  For that crime
• 10:16
  Australia last year appointed a special envoy to combat anti-Semitism
• 10:21
  Julian Segal
• 10:24
  Um
• 10:25
  A very competent and well-respected woman
• 10:29
  And uh
• 10:31
  She released a report in July of this year
• 10:34
  With a bunch of recommendations about dealing with anti-Semitism
• 10:38
  Because this is not a brand new thing
• 10:42
  Uh, she released a statement today about what happened last night
• 10:48
  Which I'll quote from from she says this did not come without warning
• 10:53
  In Australia it began on the 9th of October 2023
• 10:57
  At the Sydney Opera House
• 11:00
  We then watched a march across the Sydney Harbor Bridge
• 11:02
  Waving terrorist flags and glorifying extremist leaders
• 11:07
  Now death has reached Bondi Beach
• 11:10
  These are Australian icons targeting them is deliberate
• 11:14
  She writes this isn't random
• 11:16
  It's an attack on Australia
• 11:19
  To ordinary Australians she says this moment demands clarity
• 11:23
  What once seemed distant or uncomfortable
• 11:27
  Can no longer be ignored
• 11:29
  Taunts from the Opera House steps
• 11:32
  Synagogues set a light
• 11:34
  And now massacres at a celebration
• 11:37
  Form a clear pattern
• 11:39
  This is not the Australia we know and it cannot be the Australia we accept
• 11:43
  She writes
• 11:46
  Benjamin Netanyahu
• 11:48
  Wrote to the Prime Minister overnight saying a similar thing that he has failed in keeping Jewish Australians safe
• 11:57
  I don't know
• 11:59
  I just don't know
• 12:02
  If it is true
• 12:05
  That this horrendous terrorist attack was pulled off by
• 12:12
  People who are ideologically sympathetic to ISIS
• 12:16
  Years ago
• 12:18
  Regardless of whether it's these people who you know this gentleman who's currently in custody
• 12:22
  We don't know he's innocent until proven guilty
• 12:24
  But assuming that this is the world view of whoever did it
• 12:30
  Did such a person require
• 12:34
  A march across the harbour bridge and protests being tolerated at the Opera House in order to do this
• 12:45
  Do we know that the attack would have happened in such a visible way
• 12:48
  It's such an iconic location if the broader society had not been so enthusiastic about celebrating those provocations at the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge
• 12:55
  It's possible
• 12:57
  It's possible that the climate
• 13:00
  Creative the man
• 13:06
  I'm not thoroughly
• 13:08
  convinced
• 13:14
  They interviewed this suspect's mother
• 13:18
  As police swarmed
• 13:21
  Her home
• 13:24
  In the west of Sydney
• 13:26
  And she's quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald the reporter interviewed her
• 13:31
  She said quote anyone would wish to have a son like my son. He's a good boy
• 13:35
  He goes to work. He comes home. He goes to exercise and that's it. He doesn't even go out
• 13:40
  He doesn't mix around with friends. He doesn't drink. He doesn't smoke
• 13:48
  I like that that's the the measure of her a good person
• 13:52
  I'm not sure many
• 13:56
  ISIS fighters will big drinkers or smokers. The profit frames on it. Peace be upon him. So I
• 14:03
  I'm not sure that's a get out of jail free card when it comes to whether you're a great guy
• 14:09
  Um, it's also worth noticing for noting for context when I'm describing what Bondi is like what the Australian Jewish community is like because I don't think you can understand this psychological impact of this unless you understand that
• 14:22
  It's a small community. There aren't very many Jewish people in Australia
• 14:27
  and
• 14:29
  I only learned this earlier this year when I interviewed Charlotte Kerchak
• 14:33
  who is an American and Jewish educator very pro-Israeli
• 14:39
  And I had her on the show and she revealed to me that she had learned that
• 14:43
  Australia's Jewish community is the most heavily descended from Holocaust survivors
• 14:48
  Of any Jewish community in the world apparently
• 14:52
  Which when you think about it makes a certain amount of sense after the war there was a huge influx of refugees
• 14:57
  My father and his mother and family were you know part of that influx in the early fifties
• 15:04
  And after that
• 15:06
  once Jews could go to
• 15:08
  America and Canada and Europe
• 15:11
  They weren't exactly looking to go to the other side of the world to a place with barbecues and beaches
• 15:16
  So not not such a Jewish style really
• 15:19
  So
• 15:20
  Australia just is not
• 15:22
  You know a significant draw card for the Jews of the globe
• 15:26
  Since they were desperate in the post-war period which means the Australian Jews are
• 15:31
  uniquely descended from
• 15:35
  People who endured the Holocaust as my
• 15:38
  Grandmother did
• 15:39
  Indeed my dad having he was born in a refugee camp in 1943 in Switzerland
• 15:44
  during the war
• 15:46
  um
• 15:48
  So there's a certain rawness and sense of vulnerability that may exist amongst
• 15:53
  The Australian Jewish community that may not be present
• 15:56
  Uh elsewhere to the same degree
• 15:59
  I'm not a big believer in intergenerational trauma or the idea that you can literally experience the traumas of your forebears in your bones
• 16:09
  But it obviously matters if a very proximate relative has been hunted
• 16:16
  merely for their religion or ethnicity
• 16:20
  um
• 16:21
  and
• 16:22
  if they endured
• 16:24
  the darkest and
• 16:26
  most
• 16:27
  astonishingly threatening
• 16:29
  overtures against humans that mankind has ever concocted
• 16:34
  It probably does give you an additional sense of vulnerability and an additional sense of gratitude to be in a place like Australia
• 16:41
  Which thus far at least has been
• 16:44
  somewhat immune
• 16:47
  Let's just hear from the 2GB radio reporter Will Bottom who was on Ben Fordham's radio show this morning
• 16:57
  and he was at the scene last night um
• 17:00
  describing some of the injuries in the 40 odd people who were injured and
• 17:05
  um 16-ish people who died and uh
• 17:09
  What that looked like this as well
• 17:11
  Was initially 12 dead and 29 injured that
• 17:14
  Coming through to me that we now have 16 people dead and the number of people injured has increased to 42
• 17:21
  So I was going through some of these numbers early this morning
• 17:24
  We had a woman 62 year old woman that was shot in the upper thigh
• 17:28
  45 year old man shot in the head 21 year old man shot in the shoulder
• 17:33
  A 44 year old man shot shoulder and arm 14 year old girl shot in the back side 24 year old man
• 17:40
  Shot in the back area
• 17:42
  Approximately 60 year old man was shot in the head. I believe that he'll be one of the ones who would have added to the death toll overnight
• 17:49
  These ages right I can't run through them all but we've got people 86 39 35 22 50 72
• 17:57
  Just really really tragic. I was here probably within 15 minutes of when it happened last night
• 18:03
  And this small little patch of grass this reserve was just covered. There would have been a hundred people there
• 18:09
  And for as many people laying down there would have been six or seven people attending to each one that
• 18:16
  Was police paramedics obviously but lifeguards that had stepped in to help
• 18:20
  Uh and just members of the public that had had done their best as well and I
• 18:25
  Was speaking to someone early this morning
• 18:28
  With connections to bond our lifeguards
• 18:31
  They told me that they called for the shark alarm to be sounded when they realized that there was around 25 people that had been shot
• 18:38
  Uh, they called for the shark alarm to be sounded and the beach to be
• 18:42
  evacuated and that was certainly the case when I got here with just two
• 18:46
  Police folks out in the middle of the water and
• 18:49
  Scenes that you know normally bond our beach where all our tourists come and go and visit the busy bond our beach
• 18:54
  It was all the water and the sand just empty and and onlookers just shocked and and in tears with what they witnessed
• 19:02
  That's will bottom on two GB radio and Ben Fordham show this morning
• 19:07
  painting a picture of the scene
• 19:10
  um
• 19:10
  so
• 19:12
  How did it happen and how did we get here? There will be lots of talk about
• 19:16
  Gun law reform about the fact that supposedly the father who was killed in the attack by police
• 19:25
  had multiple firearms and had a firearm license
• 19:28
  there will be talk about
• 19:30
  immigration and
• 19:33
  What can be looked at in terms of the radicalization
• 19:36
  of people who come to Australia
• 19:39
  and
• 19:40
  I suppose before we get into those conversations
• 19:42
  It's worth going back to the special invoice plan to combat anti-Semitism because she says that the plan that she released in July
• 19:49
  Has not been activated
• 19:50
  it has been
• 19:52
  Red and equivocated on and become a political football
• 19:56
  But she actually had some
• 19:58
  specific recommendations that were not just
• 20:02
  Oh well
• 20:02
  What can we do? It's a free country stuff like this will sometimes happen
• 20:07
  One of her recommendations
• 20:09
  3.5 was about security law enforcement and coordination
• 20:14
  And she writes this uh
• 20:16
  It's intolerable and unacceptable that one segment of our community should need to wrap its schools
• 20:21
  Community centers and places of worship in multiple layers of physical security to protect itself from genuine threats
• 20:29
  So her recommendations her key actions there are that the envoy will monitor the Jewish communities increased needs post 7th of October
• 20:36
  In terms of physical security at existing and new Jewish institutions and have government continue to provide funding support
• 20:43
  For ongoing and increased operational security needs
• 20:46
  The envoy will advocate to continue to have the appropriate authorities investigate sources of overseas funding entering public institutions
• 20:53
  Including universities which might drive extreme ideologies
• 20:57
  And lastly the envoy will advocate to state and federal governments to consider a permanent standing cooperation arrangement
• 21:04
  To investigate incidents and threats as well as links to terrorist elements meaning that the states and the federal government should
• 21:11
  Uh speak to each other in a
• 21:14
  More direct way about those threats about sharing information Australia is a federation much like the United States
• 21:19
  So our police are employed by the state government and then the federal police by the federal government equivalent of the FBI
• 21:24
  And communication is not always some
• 21:27
  Uh as ideal as it could be between the two
• 21:30
  um
• 21:31
  The envoy to combat anti-Semitism also writes in a section on culture arts and public broadcasting
• 21:39
  Jewish Australians have historically been highly active in Australian cultural life
• 21:44
  Unfortunately in recent times there have been many examples of the active and deliberate exclusion of Jewish artists performers and creatives
• 21:51
  Such conduct must be strongly rejected and counted
• 21:57
  And in the section on migration and citizenship
• 22:00
  She says
• 22:02
  The objective is to review immigration and citizenship policies to ensure that Australia screens applicants for extremist views
• 22:08
  Including antisemitic views and engages internationally to combat anti-Semitism
• 22:15
  Migration policies must guard against the importation of hate
• 22:19
  These are applicants should be screened for antisemitic views or affiliations
• 22:24
  Non-citizens involved in antisemitism should face visa cancellation and removal from Australia
• 22:31
  Australia should also collaborate with international partners to share intelligence and fight antisemitism across borders
• 22:37
  And the key actions there on migration and citizenship are to screen visa applicants for antisemitic views or affiliations
• 22:43
  Consistent with a risk-based approach
• 22:45
  Ensure the migration act effectively facilitates visa refusals or cancellations for antisemitic conduct and rhetoric
• 22:53
  And provide antisemitism training to staff within the Department of Home Affairs and everyone involved in processing visa applications
• 23:01
  Now obviously none of these things apply in the case of a person who was born here and then radicalized into ISIS
• 23:08
  um if that is in fact
• 23:11
  The situation of the person who actually committed this crime we don't know
• 23:16
  So this is more about the broader climate in which Jews have felt in the past couple of years in Australia
• 23:22
  like there's a
• 23:24
  selective level of outrage and exclusion towards them
• 23:28
  That other communities don't face
• 23:32
  And I've got to say
• 23:34
  whether or not
• 23:36
  The existence of a climate of broadly tolerated
• 23:40
  anti-Jewish sentiment
• 23:42
  contributes to the reality of it on the ground massacre
• 23:49
  It is in itself an undesirable state of affairs
• 23:55
  Obviously criticizing Israeli war crimes is legitimate
• 24:01
  But many Jews have felt that singling out the Jewish state for a unique level of a program
• 24:09
  that we don't apply to Yemenis or Saudis or Chinese or Iranian Australians
• 24:15
  Just smell a bit off
• 24:21
  Smelled like it could be creating a culture of permissibility around demonizing one community in a way that we
• 24:27
  Would be deeply uneasy about doing to any other
• 24:31
  Even just tiny little things like
• 24:34
  It was a panel conversation on one of the on a podcast from one of the big
• 24:39
  Center left news outlets talking about the problem of anti-Semitism in Australia
• 24:43
  And they had three people talking about it none of whom was Jewish
• 24:49
  Not a big deal
• 24:51
  But can you imagine
• 24:53
  A panel
• 24:54
  From a center left media organization discussing the problem of racism against
• 25:00
  First nations Australians without a single first nations person on the panel
• 25:04
  Can you imagine a panel about LGBT QIA plus hate crimes without a single queer person on the panel
• 25:12
  It just wouldn't happen
• 25:16
  Every day in a thousand ways
• 25:18
  Jewish Australians have felt that fundamentally Jews don't count as a group
• 25:24
  As a minority
• 25:25
  There's something suspect about them. There's something a little bit off
• 25:30
  And of course
• 25:33
  I've been wrestling with this for more than two years
• 25:37
  Many Jewish Australians will be listening to me
• 25:42
  And we'll be thinking if they would find it too impolite to say it they'll be thinking
• 25:47
  Well, you've got blood on your hands Josh you've been critical of Israel you've broken ranks
• 25:52
  You haven't had Israel's back when the Jewish community
• 25:57
  felt like you should have
• 26:01
  And all I can say to that is that
• 26:04
  Many things can be true
• 26:07
  It's blindingly obvious to me
• 26:10
  That it endangers Jews all over the world
• 26:14
  To create a perception that we are in lockstep with the Israeli defense forces
• 26:20
  Because legitimate criticisms can be made of the Israeli defense forces
• 26:24
  And of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of Palestinians and its war and Gaza
• 26:30
  And
• 26:32
  I regret the wording of the most prominent article in which I made the case for Jews around the world to distance themselves
• 26:40
  from Israel
• 26:42
  both for moral reasons and for strategic reasons
• 26:46
  I sort of ended it with a flourish that said it's time for Jews to abandon Israel
• 26:51
  Assuming that people who read the previous 1149 words of the article would understand
• 26:56
  That what I was talking about was that diaspora Jews should abandon the the instinct to defend Israel at all cost
• 27:03
  That we have to I mean I spoke at length paragraph after paragraph about the need for
• 27:07
  Jews around the world to find a vision of Jewishness that does not involve them constantly making excuses for Israeli policies
• 27:15
  But you know in whenever you're writing anything you're sort of in a struggle between
• 27:20
  Am I going to write something that is perfectly in nuanced and could not be misunderstood
• 27:24
  By adding in so many qualifiers that it becomes denuded of all of its character
• 27:28
  But is safe or am I going to go for the thing that makes people fall off their chair because it's powerful
• 27:34
  Even if it risks being misunderstood
• 27:36
  And I made a mistake in going for the latter because many people who then only read the headline thought that I was saying that
• 27:42
  Jews in Israel should like abandon the holy land and let the country should be dissolved and Palestinians should
• 27:48
  Overrun it and have more of a right to Israel and Israelis to
• 27:51
  um
• 27:53
  Not what I was saying. It wasn't an anti-Zionist case in the sense of being opposed to the existence of a state
• 28:00
  For Jews within the 1967 borders
• 28:04
  It was a plea for Jews around the world to be more creative about the way they think about their Jewishness
• 28:09
  Then in simply engaging constantly in reflexive defenses of
• 28:15
  Practices that if we were honest with ourselves we would find morally inexcusable
• 28:21
  Even before October 7th
• 28:24
  so
• 28:26
  I get that there's
• 28:27
  Pain and I get that there's hurt and I get that there are feelings of betrayal on all sides
• 28:33
  And I cop it from both sides because
• 28:35
  People who are really pro-Palestinian think that my Zionism
• 28:39
  Makes me be on the pale and
• 28:42
  People who are really pro-Israeli think that my criticism is Israel puts me beyond the pale
• 28:50
  I do think it's important to note a couple of things
• 28:54
  It would be incredibly unfair to blame
• 29:00
  pro-Palestinian activists on Instagram for
• 29:04
  For
• 29:04
  fomenting a climate of
• 29:08
  Jew hatred by relentlessly pumping out
• 29:11
  anti-Zionist rhetoric and one-sided depictions of the crimes of Israel against
• 29:18
  Garsams without the context of the half billion odd people surrounding Israel
• 29:25
  who were
• 29:27
  Quite okay with the possibility of
• 29:29
  Erasing all of the Jews out of the Middle East on the numerous occasions that they invaded them
• 29:35
  Um and without criticizing
• 29:38
  Palestinian leadership and the gullibility of international institutions for
• 29:43
  Being on board with the claim that
• 29:47
  What Palestinians really deserve is a state all the way from the river to the sea
• 29:53
  Because what that means to Jews is
• 29:56
  No more state
• 29:59
  No more homeland
• 30:01
  No more safe haven
• 30:04
  It might sound weird to outsiders to think that
• 30:08
  Israelis would cling so much to such a shitty and hostile part of the world
• 30:14
  The onion at once had a
• 30:16
  A headline from a pretend article from like 1948 saying that the founding Israeli Prime Minister announced at last our people will
• 30:25
  Have freedom and peace as we set up our state between Jordan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt
• 30:35
  Darkly funny
• 30:37
  And I'd always thought that actually there's not really a problem with Jews being just a diaspora people that don't necessarily have to have a state
• 30:47
  Well if October 7 hadn't changed my feeling about that or rather the international
• 30:52
  Reaction to October 7th the disproportionate
• 30:55
  Focus on the illegitimacy of the founding of the Israeli state
• 31:01
  Versus all other states that were also founded in bloodshed
• 31:04
  Then last night
• 31:06
  Certainly made me feel that this is a
• 31:11
  Funny little tiny group of people who definitely need to be running their own affairs somewhere
• 31:19
  And to not put their existence in the generous good graces of the people who allowed
• 31:28
  Yesterday's atrocities to take place
• 31:35
  Criticizing Israeli war crimes is legitimate
• 31:41
  And I can imagine that a lot of people who
• 31:44
  Have been on the anti-Israel side of things over the past couple of years will feel
• 31:52
  Singled out and unfairly blamed for the actions of what is probably a couple of fanatical
• 32:02
  Psychopaths whether or not it's the people who are the person who is in custody
• 32:07
  Again, he deserves a trial on the presumption of innocence
• 32:11
  But
• 32:15
  It's a bit of a dodge
• 32:18
  It's a bit of a dodge to say
• 32:21
  We have nothing to do with that level of extremism
• 32:24
  Therefore the world view that we've spent the past couple of years promulgating
• 32:29
  And moving into the mainstream
• 32:32
  Has not been corrosive
• 32:34
  You're not just criticizing Israel when you dress up like
• 32:44
  Hamas
• 32:46
  Which some protesters have done
• 32:49
  That's not criticism of Israel
• 32:52
  To dress up like a
• 32:54
  Theocratic, jihadist, death cultist
• 32:59
  It's not criticism of Israel to chant from the rivet of the sea
• 33:05
  From the rivet of the sea
• 33:07
  Means to Jews that all of the people all of the Arabs
• 33:12
  Who lived in what Israel
• 33:15
  Now is within the 1967 borders the legitimate nation state of Israel
• 33:20
  That they should all live there
• 33:24
  Well
• 33:26
  They would then outnumber Jews if not already then very quickly because they have more kids
• 33:33
  So then there is no Jewish state
• 33:37
  What happens to the subways what happens to the infrastructure what happens to the companies
• 33:44
  When there is no longer the state that we've had since the 40s and is now a new Arab state
• 33:50
  How great how well run how uncorrupt is this Arab government going to be is it going to be like the
• 33:56
  Government of Lebanon or more like the government of Yemen which Arab country do we think is the model for what
• 34:03
  A really great Palestine should look like if it were run from the rivet of the sea how protected
• 34:09
  Will Jews be
• 34:11
  When you look at the way that Jews are treated in
• 34:15
  Arab and Muslim countries
• 34:18
  What is the Arab Muslim country that the pro-Palestinian who chants from the rivet of the sea
• 34:23
  wants to model the treatment of Jews off
• 34:26
  Can you understand how to a Jewish person from the rivet of the sea
• 34:31
  Means we want to get rid of the state that is currently your safe harbor
• 34:37
  And create a state yet another state yet another Arab Muslim state of the many many many Arab Muslim states in that region
• 34:46
  Yet another one and you will have to submit
• 34:49
  Your security and your children's future to trusting in the political processes
• 34:58
  Of that newly formed Arab state
• 35:01
  If you're not literally driven
• 35:05
  Away slaughtered
• 35:08
  Put on trains or planes or whatever
• 35:11
  The way that most people in the Arab world including in Palestine want you to be
• 35:17
  Best case scenario they take it over allow you to stay and then treat you how exactly
• 35:25
  Whereas the bastion of liberalism
• 35:28
  Of pro gay sentiment pro Jewish sentiment
• 35:32
  Pro feminist sentiment in the Arab Muslim world
• 35:35
  That you envisage in this state that runs from the river to the sea across all of Israel
• 35:41
  So
• 35:44
  When you say
• 35:46
  We're allowed to have legitimate criticisms of a foreign country and it doesn't mean that we have blood on our hands
• 35:52
  It's true you don't
• 35:55
  But you're creating a climate in which one particular ethnic group here in Australia
• 36:02
  Is effectively being collectively blamed
• 36:05
  For the actions of a foreign country that they may or may not support
• 36:10
  And the reason they're being collectively blamed
• 36:14
  Is because your rhetoric is not
• 36:17
  Targeted at the misdeeds of that country
• 36:20
  It's targeted at the existence of that country and it advocates for the annihilation of its people who are explicitly
• 36:28
  The same people as the community that feels besieged right here
• 36:35
  Chanting from the river to the sea is not anti-Israel
• 36:40
  It is not a criticism of Israel
• 36:43
  It lands as genocidal
• 36:47
  Graffiti and globalized the interfarter
• 36:50
  Is not a criticism of the Israeli state of Israel's policies
• 36:56
  protesting outside places of worship
• 37:00
  Is not a criticism of Israeli policies
• 37:03
  It is a direct attempt to make one community feel unsafe
• 37:10
  Over the past two years
• 37:12
  Jewish school children in Australia
• 37:16
  Have had to take off their Yarmulkers
• 37:20
  Hide their school uniforms
• 37:22
  All over this is not an isolated thing. This is a frequent occurrence
• 37:26
  Talk to any Jewish family about how they feel
• 37:31
  How unsafe they feel when they're out and about if they're visibly Jewish
• 37:36
  And after yesterday I can honestly say I belong to the only ethnicity in this country which can no longer
• 37:43
  Visibly congregate in public
• 37:48
  That has never happened in my lifetime to any community
• 37:55
  So yes if you've relentlessly been focused
• 38:00
  On the crimes of one state
• 38:02
  While you ignore the crimes of all the others
• 38:05
  And if you've conflated those crimes with the illegitimacy of that country in its very founding
• 38:12
  Used them to say not what I said which is that
• 38:16
  Israel's behavior over the past couple of decades has become so extreme that diaspora Jews should stop defending it
• 38:23
  But something very different
• 38:25
  Which is that the founding of Israel was because it was based on dispossession
• 38:32
  illegitimate
• 38:35
  Name me a country whose founding did not involve bloodshed and dispossession
• 38:42
  all of them
• 38:44
  So Jews feel that if you've been spending the past couple of years pumping out Instagram videos about
• 38:50
  From the river to the sea and globalize the intifada
• 38:53
  And how Zionists just love the blood of Palestinian babies and its illegitimate and fuck Israel
• 39:02
  It's a bit fishy
• 39:04
  It's a bit selective
• 39:07
  Every country has done shitty things
• 39:10
  It's totally legitimate to criticize what Israel has become under Benjamin Netanyahu
• 39:17
  But it is anti-Semitic to question whether or not one group
• 39:22
  gets the right to to found a country in
• 39:28
  the flames
• 39:31
  Revolution dispossession and maybe even genocide
• 39:35
  And that that's the only ethnic group in the world
• 39:38
  That doesn't get to do so
• 39:41
  That's what anti-Zionism is
• 39:44
  So when Jewish Australians
• 39:49
  Feel afraid every time their kids go and wait at a bus stop
• 39:53
  In case they get moaned down by a drive-by shooter
• 39:56
  When I go to my father's funeral at a synagogue
• 40:01
  And have to wait in a security line
• 40:04
  Behind ballads
• 40:06
  So that some maniac can't drive a truck bomb or bring it in a gun
• 40:14
  To shoot up
• 40:15
  Innocence
• 40:20
  Just sit with the fact that that's the reality that we've regarded as being okay
• 40:26
  As the special envoy's plan to combat anti-Semitism said
• 40:32
  It is intolerable and unacceptable
• 40:36
  The one segment of our community should need to wrap its schools,
• 40:40
  community centers and places of worship in multiple layers of physical security to protect itself from genuine threats
• 40:50
  It's a totally one-sided situation
• 40:53
  If you're not Jewish, I don't blame you for not seeing it
• 40:59
  But understand how conflicted it is to be in a position
• 41:03
  Where you disagree strongly with the policies of a foreign state that claims to act on your behalf
• 41:10
  But so much criticism of that foreign state is coming from
• 41:17
  Algorithms that only want a shock
• 41:20
  The social media strategies and tactics of jihadists who have gotten pretty good at
• 41:26
  Selectively identifying which clips are going to go most viral
• 41:32
  They learned it well during the whole ISIS uprising
• 41:36
  I mean you remember the American pilots being dressed in orange jumpsuits locked in cages in the desert and set on fire
• 41:45
  Do you remember Daniel Pearl the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded
• 41:50
  Live on video
• 41:54
  They got good at this
• 41:57
  And I'm not being sloppy by using a generic they to mean like oh all Muslims or all Arabs or something
• 42:03
  I'm talking specifically about the organizations that are affiliated with Khamas
• 42:08
  The Iranian Revolution regard
• 42:10
  The Qataris
• 42:12
  And left over members of ISIS and al-Qaeda
• 42:16
  These are not dummies. They know how to play the game of global sympathy
• 42:23
  They know how to launder themselves through international institutions
• 42:28
  Many ran bribe South Africa
• 42:32
  To I was gonna say or itself out that might be somewhat impolite
• 42:37
  But to spend
• 42:39
  It's apartheid credibility by being the country that would bring Israel to the international court of justice on charges of
• 42:46
  apartheid genocide
• 42:49
  That was Iran that persuaded South Africa to do that
• 42:52
  They didn't just wake up one day and decide that they were going to do it
• 42:57
  China owns TikTok
• 42:59
  It's in their interests to have Western civilization as divided as possible on contentious issues like Israel
• 43:08
  I'm not saying that that means that they
• 43:11
  Boost anti-Israel content even when it would be more profitable not to do so
• 43:16
  I'm saying a lot they may
• 43:18
  I'm saying that what is certain is that there's no incentive in the Chinese Communist Party
• 43:23
  To address the problem of inflaming
• 43:27
  Jew hatred on the platform
• 43:31
  Everyone in Gaza who's able to get videos out of Gaza
• 43:36
  Has obviously been at risk of
• 43:40
  Being dragged through the streets behind a pickup truck or
• 43:44
  Shot in the head if the videos that they were disseminating out of Gaza displeased Hamas
• 43:51
  So I'm not saying that videos out of Hamas and images out of Hamas are
• 43:56
  Fabricated I'm sure they're not they may lack a little context
• 44:00
  They may generally skew towards
• 44:04
  Hamas's view of things and
• 44:08
  Not Israel's
• 44:13
  When Jewish people abroad are attacked
• 44:18
  By Arabs or Muslims
• 44:22
  Arabs or Muslims in Australia do not generally feel threatened by Jewish Australians
• 44:30
  Jewish Australians generally do not respond
• 44:36
  By
• 44:37
  Intimidating
• 44:40
  Arab Australians
• 44:41
  Intimidating Muslim Australians
• 44:47
  How many mosques have the kind of security
• 44:52
  That Australia's synagogues do
• 44:56
  How many Muslim school students are afraid of being moaned down by a
• 45:00
  fanatical Zionist in a drive-by shooting
• 45:11
  At a
• 45:15
  Synagogue event that I went to shortly after my father's burial earlier this year
• 45:22
  The rabbi was practicing a loving loving kindness kind of prayer
• 45:28
  And he encouraged everybody to
• 45:31
  Think about increasing concentric circles of care and well-wishers. It was where you send out positive prayers to the world
• 45:38
  And he started with
• 45:40
  The Jewish community and then Australians and then
• 45:44
  People all over the world and then he specifically called out
• 45:51
  Garsams and Palestinians
• 45:55
  And he said to the congregation of gathered
• 45:59
  Jewish Australians
• 46:02
  If it's too soon for you to go there, I get it
• 46:07
  But I encourage each and every one of you to get there
• 46:12
  To a place where you're sending your love
• 46:15
  Your warmth
• 46:17
  Your well-wishers
• 46:19
  Your faith
• 46:21
  Your peace
• 46:24
  To everyone in Gaza
• 46:28
  To Arabs and Muslims and
• 46:31
  Palestinians who are hurting
• 46:36
  And I found it touching and mature
• 46:40
  And as I left the synagogue I couldn't help wondering
• 46:45
  How many mosques in Australia have imams
• 46:52
  Who encouraged their congregants
• 46:55
  To send out love and peace
• 46:59
  To Jews
• 47:04
  It's an honest question because I don't know the answer to it. It might be lots of them
• 47:12
  My point is simply that there's an asymmetry here in the experience of the Jewish community
• 47:19
  And yesterday feels like a kind of
• 47:21
  devastating capstone to it
• 47:25
  That
• 47:27
  Everyday Jews and prominent Jews have been shouting from the rooftops for some time
• 47:33
  As evidenced by the special envoy to combat anti-Semitism's report
• 47:37
  That there is more that can be done in very practical ways to address
• 47:41
  The soup in which we're all swimming which is tolerating a latent level of if not Jew hatred certainly Jew distaste
• 47:48
  Now again, what the hell does that have to do with
• 47:57
  Maniacs who may or may not be total religious basket cases
• 48:03
  Mowing down families
• 48:09
  It's unclear
• 48:12
  But we can't be certain that it has nothing to do with it
• 48:19
  David from who has been a guest on this podcast more than once
• 48:26
  Um former George W. Bush speech writer
• 48:30
  Uh now at the Atlantic a good journalist and thinker considerably more conservative than myself
• 48:36
  An anti-Trump old school conservative
• 48:40
  writes in the Atlantic a piece overnight about the Sydney attack
• 48:44
  He says after the mass killing in Sydney
• 48:48
  Facing reality is not merely urgent. It's inescapable
• 48:52
  symbolic violence
• 48:54
  He says is a rehearsal for actual violence many in the western world have interpreted post
• 48:59
  October 7th anti-Israel actions within the framework of free speech
• 49:04
  10 days after the terror attacks the foundation for individual rights in education posted a statement
• 49:09
  This is a libertarian free speech uh organization in the states which does great work
• 49:16
  But from quotes them critically
• 49:20
  They wrote let every participant in the debate over the Israeli Palestinian conflict show their cards
• 49:25
  Even those with the most extreme views and let others
• 49:28
  Marshal arguments and evidence to refute or discredit those views
• 49:34
  You may note that that's pretty similar to something you hear me say on this podcast a lot
• 49:38
  I do tend to be on the free speech end of the spectrum
• 49:42
  After October 7th when people were being
• 49:45
  cancelled for being too
• 49:47
  insensitive about their comments better their pro-Palestinian comments
• 49:52
  I
• 49:53
  actively argued vocally argued in defensive peoples
• 49:57
  right
• 49:58
  To walk right up to the line of Jew hatred
• 50:02
  Even some of the worst figures on Instagram I grudgingly
• 50:05
  Exorted the traumatized Jewish community not to cancel those people not to try to work behind the scenes to
• 50:14
  Get their publishers to sever relationships with them to get their podcast networks to stop to hosting their podcasts to get their managers and agents to
• 50:22
  Fire them as clients. I'd never thought that was the right way of doing things
• 50:27
  I removed myself from a WhatsApp group of Jewish creatives which was subsequently docked anyway
• 50:34
  Um
• 50:36
  Precisely because the conversation had gotten too hysterical about how can we prevent this person from saying these things
• 50:42
  I always felt like arguing with the ideas was better than punishing the human being
• 50:50
  But am I naive
• 50:53
  Is this just not the way the world works anymore
• 50:57
  David from goes on to write in the Atlantic
• 51:01
  But what if the extreme view in question he says is that Jews should be made to fear death
• 51:11
  He quotes a prominent anti-Israel academic
• 51:14
  Steve Salita who wrote an essay in 2021
• 51:20
  This is the anti-Israel side right
• 51:23
  And Steve wrote speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties
• 51:28
  And then oh he was rejecting people who speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties
• 51:32
  And then superimpose those categories onto Palestine
• 51:36
  Steve writing in defensive Palestine said it doesn't occur to them that Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation
• 51:46
  So David from says okay, why it's helpful to possess a lexicon of what's typically intended by these vocabularies
• 51:53
  That this pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli academic
• 51:57
  wants to insert into
• 52:00
  The American slash Western conversation
• 52:04
  David from rights armed struggle means shooting people or blowing them up with bombs
• 52:10
  By any means necessary
• 52:12
  Which is a line that you hear from pro-Palestinian activists or anti-Zionist activists from the river to the sea
• 52:18
  Palestine will be free by any means necessary
• 52:21
  From rights by any means necessary means targeting the most defenseless children the elderly other civilians
• 52:28
  Globalize the interfarter
• 52:31
  Means shooting or bombing people in Sydney, London, Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles and New York City as well as in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem
• 52:39
  From the river to the sea he writes
• 52:42
  Means the annihilation of a sovereign democratic state
• 52:45
  And the mass murder, expulsion and enslavement of much of its population
• 52:49
  Now many of you will dispute that and so that's not what people mean when they say from the river to the sea
• 52:55
  To which I would say
• 52:57
  One of the great lessons that the social justice reckoning of the past decade
• 53:02
  taught us
• 53:04
  Was that it's not really cool
• 53:06
  For the person who is being demeaning and offensive from a position of power
• 53:12
  to
• 53:14
  Deny the impact that their words and descriptions are having
• 53:18
  On the person who claims that they are insulting or bigoted
• 53:26
  We sort of ruled that out in every other case
• 53:30
  You're not allowed to say oh, no, I wasn't being racist. You're just taking it. You're being a hypersensitive
• 53:35
  no
• 53:36
  basically
• 53:37
  If many reasonable people of color are telling you that you're being racist as a white person
• 53:43
  Shut up and listen to him
• 53:45
  You don't get to go into the office and slap a woman on the ass and call her to it and say I wasn't being sexist
• 53:50
  Then you're just taking it the wrong way
• 53:53
  No
• 53:54
  If women decide that that's sexist you go all right. Well, we can't do that anymore
• 53:58
  Isn't this like a catechism of the left isn't this social justice 101
• 54:06
  Listen to the impact that your words and behavior
• 54:09
  Have on the people who claim that it's inappropriate
• 54:16
  That's the rule for everyone else
• 54:20
  But again
• 54:21
  Jews don't count
• 54:23
  They don't count in that metric
• 54:26
  When Jews say from the river to the sea
• 54:30
  Sounds like you want us either to die or leave or suffer under an Arab regime
• 54:39
  All the other of which are incredibly hostile to Jews
• 54:44
  The people who say from the river to the sea get to say no no stopping so sensitive you being silly
• 54:50
  They would never say it to another minority
• 54:55
  That's what anti-semitism looks like in the 21st century
• 54:59
  Everyone knows that it has become too to boo to say the quiet part out loud to say that there is something fishy
• 55:06
  About the Jewish people
• 55:08
  Only Nick Fuentes says it and when Tucker Carlson platforms him the whole
• 55:13
  World goes batch it crazy
• 55:16
  That taboo is probably breaking down but among polite society. It's still very much exists
• 55:22
  So of course anti-semitism doesn't come out
• 55:24
  In the form of there's something suspect about the Jews. I never trusted them and they probably have it coming anyway
• 55:32
  Similarly, I'm sympathetic to critics of Israel
• 55:36
  who feel that
• 55:39
  Jewish or Israeli people who want to defend
• 55:42
  Every bad thing that Israel does can use the anti-semitism card
• 55:47
  To
• 55:48
  Domine their critics and imply that you're not allowed to make legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel because if you do
• 55:54
  Then you're being an anti-semit. That's also a bullshit move
• 55:59
  But within the context of
• 56:02
  Understanding how a community is dealing
• 56:06
  With a crisis in which they're torn in several different directions and feel besieged and alienated by their
• 56:12
  fellow countrymen
• 56:14
  Who don't belong to their ethnicity
• 56:18
  It's bloody important to listen to how they talk
• 56:23
  About an issue about how they receive what you're saying
• 56:26
  About the long-standing coded ways of talking about Jews that you are accidentally
• 56:34
  rearticulating
• 56:36
  Which get heard
• 56:39
  Talk about Jews being bloodthirsty sorry Zionists you can you again it's too taboo to talk about Jews
• 56:46
  So you talk about Zionists even when you're not talking about Zionists
• 56:50
  You're saying that the people who are
• 56:53
  Stripping Palestinians of their dignity and their national self-determination
• 56:58
  Love the blood of Arab babies
• 57:03
  That is an ancient slur
• 57:06
  Many centuries old
• 57:08
  It keeps coming up again. I don't think you know why you're saying it
• 57:12
  I don't know where you get it from but it's something that's in the ether
• 57:16
  It has been in the ether
• 57:18
  Of the distaste for Jews
• 57:20
  Along with the claim that they are powerful puppet masters
• 57:24
  This is why it's
• 57:26
  so
• 57:27
  Self-defeating
• 57:29
  When pro-Israeli groups do behave as powerful puppet masters and try to get people fired from media organizations or shamed or something behind the scenes by pulling strings
• 57:39
  It's terrible because when it comes out it just reconfirms the most
• 57:43
  Tordry and predictable cliche that anti-Semites pedal
• 57:47
  Which is that the world is secretly controlled by a cabal of Jews who arrange things
• 57:52
  According to their desires
• 57:54
  Who never have a true allegiance to their home country because their allegiance is always suspect
• 57:58
  This is another point that Nick Fuentes makes. I mean it's so old
• 58:02
  It's like even boring to recount but the idea that a Jews affinity will always be to the fellow Jews and
• 58:10
  Also to the state of Israel
• 58:12
  It will never be to the home country so there are kind of an alien force a parasitic force that exists inside societies
• 58:20
  These are ideas that float around that are very very deeply widespread and ingrained especially in the Arab and Muslim world
• 58:26
  And they find their ways into our algorithms
• 58:28
  They find their ways into our conversations
• 58:29
  They find their ways into our framing of things they find their ways into the ways that international institutions like the United Nations look at
• 58:36
  the Israel Palestinian conflict
• 58:39
  With
• 58:40
  Never a second glance at Palestinian intransigence at Palestinian
• 58:43
  Maximallism at the constant desires to have a state that runs all the way from the river to the sea
• 58:49
  It constant rebuffs of Israeli overtures for the peace at constant blowing up of buses and interfereders and so on
• 58:55
  And always lays
• 58:58
  Not 50% of the blame but 90% of the blame or 100% of the blame at the feet of the Jewish state
• 59:04
  These inconsistencies Jewish people notice
• 59:08
  And they see them as the most recent
• 59:12
  rearticulations of old stories about the Jews
• 59:19
  One reason why I've felt that it's important for me as a reasonably prominent Australian Jewish person
• 59:25
  To criticize Israel
• 59:27
  publicly
• 59:29
  Is precisely to undermine
• 59:31
  One of the big pillars that anti-Semites
• 59:34
  Rest their case against the Jews on which is that our allegiance will always be to a foreign country not to Australia
• 59:41
  My allegiance is to Australia my allegiance system morality my allegiance is to the truth and my allegiance is to the Jewish people as well
• 59:48
  who I think would be better served
• 59:50
  by following my example
• 59:53
  And being a more complicated ranbunctious
• 59:56
  dissonant
• 59:58
  quarrelsome
• 59:59
  difficult to pin down difficult to define harder to
• 1:00:03
  Hate inside a single box minority
• 1:00:07
  That clearly is not marching in lockstep with a foreign power
• 1:00:13
  But there's a deeper thing going on in all this
• 1:00:18
  Which worries me much more than the ambient climate of
• 1:00:24
  Jew hatred
• 1:00:27
  And that is
• 1:00:29
  The tendency of all of us in culture at the moment
• 1:00:34
  To think that it's a bit passe
• 1:00:37
  To embrace the universalist
• 1:00:40
  colorblind vision of a future
• 1:00:44
  That Martin Luther King articulated
• 1:00:47
  That Gandhi articulated that Nelson Mandela articulated
• 1:00:51
  That probably most recently Barack Obama
• 1:00:54
  articulated
• 1:00:56
  That is now regarded as naive this idea that
• 1:00:59
  We should judge individuals on the basis of the content of their character not the color of their skin
• 1:01:04
  Oh, we will always have racism and we'll always have dysfunction in particular communities and we'll always have
• 1:01:12
  Problems and
• 1:01:14
  Society is really a tale of quarrelsome communities vying for power
• 1:01:20
  Identitarianism is the common thread
• 1:01:27
  Through Islamophobia
• 1:01:29
  Anti-Semitism
• 1:01:31
  White supremacy
• 1:01:33
  And also
• 1:01:36
  Black Lives Matter
• 1:01:38
  And the most extreme versions of First Nations pride
• 1:01:42
  Multiculturalism is a tricky thing
• 1:01:48
  To get right and to sustain
• 1:01:51
  Australia is one of the best countries in the world at it
• 1:01:53
  More than half the population of Australia has arrived since the Second World War
• 1:01:58
  We're extremely diverse
• 1:02:02
  And we luckily do not suffer two things that multicultural European countries
• 1:02:10
  seem to the first
• 1:02:12
  It's a certain level of insularity and dysfunction amongst migrant communities that face intractable economic challenges
• 1:02:18
  And become increasingly rather than decreasingly radicalised over time
• 1:02:23
  Think of the
• 1:02:25
  Outskirts of Paris big suburbs or also in northern England where you've got entire towns that have
• 1:02:33
  essentially have no
• 1:02:35
  Native-born people in them
• 1:02:37
  And
• 1:02:38
  Suffer from feeling like they're forgotten like there's no opportunity
• 1:02:42
  They express their frustrations in dysfunctional ways
• 1:02:45
  Often local police forces have to take a hands-off
• 1:02:48
  Approach and basically leave law enforcement up to local community leaders
• 1:02:54
  Sometimes you'll have sort of essentially local
• 1:02:57
  Pakistani mafia elders enforcing
• 1:03:02
  The behavior of
• 1:03:04
  14-year-old Pakistani British or
• 1:03:07
  Arabian French
• 1:03:10
  People in these areas we don't have that in Australia
• 1:03:14
  We've done a decent job at integration not a simulation
• 1:03:19
  But integration getting everyone on the same page
• 1:03:24
  And the second feather in Australia's cap is that we have so far seen less of the white nationalist backlash
• 1:03:31
  Than European countries have
• 1:03:33
  We don't have an alternative for Deutschland. We don't have a front national
• 1:03:37
  We don't have a marine loop and we don't have a Nigel Farash
• 1:03:43
  Can we sustain that?
• 1:03:48
  I believe it requires a renewed national
• 1:03:52
  Maybe global commitment to universalism and a rejection of identitarianism
• 1:03:57
  Multiculturalism is hard pluralism is hard cosmopolitanism is hard
• 1:04:04
  liberalism more broadly
• 1:04:07
  Is a difficult balancing act that's under a lot of strain from algorithms
• 1:04:12
  From illiberalism from bigotry from fear
• 1:04:19
  And we can't save
• 1:04:21
  pluralism and cosmopolitanism
• 1:04:24
  liberalism
• 1:04:27
  Just by spouting worthy cliches about how we deplore all kinds of extremism and hate
• 1:04:35
  As long as we talk about society primarily as a collection of
• 1:04:39
  Communities vying for power and trying to get along
• 1:04:44
  Rather than as a collection of human beings who all deserve the benefit of the doubt
• 1:04:52
  It's tricky to understand how you progress
• 1:04:57
  Because our current way of thinking about power struggles
• 1:05:02
  enmity ancient hatreds
• 1:05:06
  Is based on a way of looking at society that privileges the group
• 1:05:11
  And that subsumes the individual to their group
• 1:05:17
  If most of the activists on instagram
• 1:05:20
  Valorize the idea that some groups are collectively responsible
• 1:05:28
  For this all that abomination which needs to be rectified or avenged
• 1:05:35
  Then how can we say that last night's shooting was a one off
• 1:05:44
  And that because the assailants are apparently no longer free
• 1:05:50
  We're now safe
• 1:05:53
  We're only as safe
• 1:05:56
  As the group who wants to avenge a wrong and sees our group as being guilty of it
• 1:06:04
  allows us to be
• 1:06:09
  How safe
• 1:06:11
  Are any of us in a world of righteous warring tribes
• 1:06:20
  I don't really like this conclusion because it's a lot more complicated and messy than
• 1:06:26
  Saying that we should just get more serious about
• 1:06:30
  Not allowing pro-Palestinian protesters to march across the harbour bridge
• 1:06:36
  It's about reinvigorating what we care about in living in a liberal society in the first place
• 1:06:45
  And maybe it does need immigration reform as part of it
• 1:06:50
  Maybe you do need to be more discerning
• 1:06:54
  About bringing in people who don't harbour ancient hatreds
• 1:07:00
  Australia has been spectacularly good at selling the idea that when you come to this country
• 1:07:05
  You come in order to join in with this country
• 1:07:10
  We have not been as ashamed I don't think as a country like the United Kingdom has been
• 1:07:16
  In saying you come here and you leave your shit behind
• 1:07:21
  You don't bring that here
• 1:07:27
  And now a bunch of people were just trying to have a picnic
• 1:07:32
  And it came here
• 1:07:42
  Is there a way of
• 1:07:45
  Asking a question in such a way that you actually will weed out people
• 1:07:52
  Who are prone to radicalisation?
• 1:07:55
  I don't know
• 1:08:01
  The piece that I wrote which I read out oh there's one last bit from David from that I wanted to share with you
• 1:08:09
  He writes among Western liberals there's a strong impulse to show respect to people from other cultures or who hold other beliefs
• 1:08:16
  By interpreting their words and actions in the most benign way
• 1:08:21
  But sometimes the way to show the deepest respect David writes is by taking people seriously
• 1:08:29
  Believing their words as they're spoken
• 1:08:32
  Heeding their own accounts of their intentions
• 1:08:35
  The massacre on Bondai Beach
• 1:08:39
  Here I'd say it's an ultimate consequence of this well-meaning condescension
• 1:08:44
  But there were a lot of stops along the way and more ahead
• 1:08:54
  As I say it's terribly sad and Sydney and it'll take some time for
• 1:08:58
  Australians especially Jewish Australians too
• 1:09:01
  Look I mean anything I say is going to be right
• 1:09:08
  What I actually feel is a more prosaic
• 1:09:13
  grief than the poetry of where I was going with that
• 1:09:18
  Sentence what I actually feel is
• 1:09:22
  Selfishly sad that the unruffled carefree nature of
• 1:09:27
  Bondai Beach
• 1:09:29
  Is tarnished
• 1:09:32
  That it will henceforth forever be a place of great tragedy
• 1:09:37
  As well as levity
• 1:09:40
  That it's sort of symbolic role as the apotheosis of Australian hedonism
• 1:09:49
  And beachy freedom
• 1:09:52
  We'll always have this dark cloud over it
• 1:09:55
  Yes, this country is carefree and fun and it's a place where you can go to art fairs
• 1:09:59
  And you can go on the Ferris wheel and you can get your
• 1:10:02
  Fairy floss. That's what we call cotton candy for American listeners and you can
• 1:10:07
  Roll a blade around and you can sunbathe
• 1:10:12
  But you're still part of the fucking world
• 1:10:17
  That's the little asterisk that yesterday adds
• 1:10:21
  To the future of Bondai Beach
• 1:10:25
  Don't get any illusions Australia. It says
• 1:10:30
  You might think you're safe
• 1:10:38
  So I ended my
• 1:10:40
  Piece that I was writing which I read from initially at the beginning here when I was talking about the
• 1:10:45
  role that Bondai Beach plays in the national imagination or certainly the imagination of my city
• 1:10:50
  And I ended it
• 1:10:57
  By saying
• 1:10:59
  The deep nauseating knot in my chest as I tucked my daughter into bed last night and kissed her on the forehead
• 1:11:08
  Concerned what it might mean
• 1:11:11
  If this atrocity has an ethnic religious
• 1:11:14
  Political or other identitarian rationale
• 1:11:18
  It is
• 1:11:20
  And it of course subsequently it seems that it has
• 1:11:24
  It is fundamental to the Australian identity that we are a hodgepodge of friendly foreigners
• 1:11:30
  Who leave our tribal enmities at the door
• 1:11:34
  We come to this country
• 1:11:36
  To have a swim and a Barbie
• 1:11:39
  Together
• 1:11:41
  Which is exactly what the attendees at
• 1:11:44
  Chanukah by the sea were doing
• 1:11:48
  If the terrorists shared the increasingly popular belief
• 1:11:54
  That Jews are collectively to blame for some awful stuff
• 1:11:59
  And that fighting back is more virtuous than being civil
• 1:12:05
  Then how can I promise my daughter that tonight's atrocity was an aberration
• 1:12:11
  If the wider culture emphasizes that some groups
• 1:12:15
  are collectively responsible for this or that abomination which must be avenged
• 1:12:19
  How can I say any of us is safe
• 1:12:26
  I had a wish
• 1:12:29
  As I turned off my daughter's light and headed to bed myself last night
• 1:12:38
  My wish
• 1:12:40
  My hope
• 1:12:42
  My hopeless hope
• 1:12:46
  Was that I might wake up this morning
• 1:12:49
  To learn that the gunmen
• 1:12:51
  Turned out to be mere random psychopaths
• 1:12:57
  If we could chalk this up to arbitrary bloodlust
• 1:13:03
  Then maybe we can retain
• 1:13:07
  Australians' faith that we're safe here
• 1:13:10
  All of us
• 1:13:12
  Amongst each other
• 1:13:16
  Maybe we'd be able to heal and unify
• 1:13:20
  And recover
• 1:13:21
  Side by side
• 1:13:24
  To splash and swim and stroll
• 1:13:26
  And sunbathe again together
• 1:13:29
  Carefree
• 1:13:31
  On Bondi's shimmering golden sand
• 1:13:42
  I hope you're well and safe wherever in the world you are
• 1:13:47
  To the Jews out there, happy Thanaka
• 1:13:50
  To everyone else
• 1:13:53
  All my love