Andrew Bolt: One miserable mercy in Bondi Junction horror is killer wasn’t Jewish or Muslim
At a time when it feels like we are living on a mountain of dynamite, it is a tiny consolation the Bondi Junction killer wasn’t Jewish or Muslim.
Andrew Bolt
Don't miss out on the headlines from Andrew Bolt. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A nation held its breath. Now we can thank God for a miserable mercy – the Bondi killer was a man called Joel Cauchi.
That’s right. Not Muslim. Not Jewish, either.
It feels we’re living on a mountain of dynamite, that this is actually a tiny consolation in the great grief for the six dead, stabbed on Saturday as they simply went shopping. Is this really how we must now live?
It was on only Sunday morning that police named Cauchi, a mentally ill Queenslander, but social media warriors had already declared the killer must be – in fact was – a Muslim terrorist.
That claim went viral and spread around the world, repeated even by journalists, including British Talk TV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer: “Another day. Another terror attack by another Islamist terrorist.”
But soon another fake claim was trending on Twitter. No, the killer was a Jewish terrorist.
Police had already said the killer, yet unnamed, was 40 years old, but trolls, many with Arabic names, now circulated the photo and name of a 20-year-old computing science student with the most Jewish of names – Benjamin Cohen.
All that Cohen shared in common with Cauchi was a beard, but that was enough.
In the Russian embassy in Sydney, where he’s hiding from police, pro-Putin propagandist Simeon Boikov, calling himself the Aussie Cossack, tweeted: “Unconfirmed reports identify the Bondi attacker as Benjamin Cohen.”
Maram Susli, a viciously anti-Israel YouTuber in Perth known as “Syrian Girl”, tweeted to her 381,000 followers: “Media accidentally leaked the attackers name as ‘Benjamin Cohen’.”
And, indeed, Channel 7 had been sucked in, announcing the killer was “confirmed” as Cohen in a post now deleted.
The explosives had been laid. All that was needed for the detonation was the flame of a name, from police.
A Muslim one would have set off an explosion of fear and hate, especially after so many Muslim hate preachers and extremists had exploited the Hamas war on Israel with aggressive protests. Many innocent Muslims would have suffered, and some radicalised.
But a Jewish name would have supercharged the savage anti-Semitism already boosted by pro-Palestinian activists, Israel-hating Greens and a cynical Albanese government.
Heaven help our country that things are now so tense, so dangerous, that to hear the killer was a Cauchi, driven – said police – by mental problems, was a relief. It felt we’d been saved from a disaster.
That danger is far from over. In fact, NSW Police knows it so well that it publicly declared as fast as possible, before Cauchi’s identity was confirmed, they had no evidence of terrorism. That’s code for an Islamist.
And who could blame us for privately harbouring suspicions, after all the terrorist attacks already?
But here we now are, relieved – yet still having to deal with a ghastly tragedy, made more perplexing by being mysterious. Less able to “solve” with a slogan.
Mental illness? How do we deal with that?
We’re told Cauchi was “known to police” already, but not for any crime. We’ll of course one day ask how authorities dealt with warning signs, but we know too little yet.
Then there’s Cauchi’s sick “choice” of victims. Every person he stabbed, dead and injured, was a woman, other than a security guard. But are a madman’s victims really an indictment of society’s misogyny?
Now, robbed of easy sound bites to explain and resolve, we’re down to trying to find specks of good in a sea of pain.
That means finding heroes, and there are three so far to help light the dark. One is police inspector Amy Scott, seen on video running to confront Cauchi, who came at her with a knife until she shot him dead.
There’s also “bollard man”, if anything braver for having not a gun but just a bollard which he used to threaten Cauchi to stop him coming up an escalator with his knife.
And there’s Ash Good, who pushed her baby, stabbed by Cauchi, into the arms of a stranger, asking him to help, before she herself died from Cauchi’s knife.
Yes, admire them. People who run to danger and not from it. People who save lives other than their own.
Still, I expect Australia to always provide heroes in such crises so refuse to be surprised now. I’m therefore not much consoled.
No, this was a hopeless, senseless, ghastly tragedy caused by something that we know now we’ll probably never really understand. There’s no comfort here, except to know it could have been worse.
But how much comfort is that?
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: One miserable mercy in Bondi Junction horror is killer wasn’t Jewish or Muslim
Bolt: Iran attacks on Israel prove it’s pulling the strings of terror
Iran has now shown it’s the puppet master in this war by Islamist groups against Israel, while Israel has proved its critics were wrong to demand it stop fighting and negotiate instead.
Bolt: In a war to save western values, only one man is a leader
The comments made by Anthony Albanese in the wake of Iran’s attack on Israel stand in stark contrast to those made by Peter Dutton — and they cover the Prime Minister in shame. He has exposed himself as unfit for office.