Joe Hildebrand: We must not let old hatreds rip apart the fabric of this beautiful country
Sydney has always been a city of tribes - it hasn’t always been peaceful, but it has become the great heaving metropolis we love. There will always be evildoers — how we respond to them defines whether we are a community or merely a bunch of warring tribes.
Opinion
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From its very beginnings, Sydney has always been a city of tribes: Gadigal and Wangal, blackfellas and whitefellas, convicts and cops, Catholics and Protestants.
It hasn’t always been peaceful and has never been still but over the years it has become the great heaving metropolis we know today. Somehow we got sick of the sticks and stones and learned to live together.
But in recent months there has been a disturbing new wave of tribalism rearing its head and its ugliness came to a zenith in the stabbing attack on an Orthodox Christian priest as he was conducting mass.
For anyone of faith it is impossible to overstate the grotesqueness of this violation. Churches and other holy places are supposed to be the final refuge from violence. If there is no mercy there then there is no mercy anywhere.
We do not yet know the exact motivations of the teenage attacker except that they were religious and that the assault has been classed as a terrorist incident. We also know that we do not want anyone harbouring such hatred in Australia.
Yet in many cases, as with the horror of the Bondi attacker just 48 hours earlier, these incidents are acts of madness. A lone wolf deranged by mental illness or extremist ideology.
Whatever it is, the tragic truth is there will always be broken people and cruel evildoers among us. Every society has and has always had them since the beginnings of the human race.
That much, sadly, we cannot change. It is how we respond to these vicious outliers that define whether we are truly a community — truly one city, one country — or merely a bunch of warring tribes trapped together on an island.
And that is what makes the scenes that followed the attack so disturbing — perhaps even more so.
The attacker, self-evidently, is a violent rogue but the thousands of Sydneysiders who descended on the church demanding blood are surely not. They are otherwise no doubt fine upstanding citizens.
Indeed, we know this because if they always behaved as they did on Monday night Sydney would be in a constant state of civil war.
And that is the sort of threat we are dealing with here — a threat that has become perilously close to being realised.
Long before this attack we had mobs roaming the streets chanting “Where are the Jews?” — which now sounds even more sinister than the previous reports of “Gas the Jews” — and celebrating the October 7 attacks.
And we all know the threats and intimidation and abuse that has flooded social media. If such historic or foreign tribal enmities are allowed to find a foothold here — and if they are given any legitimacy by activists or elites — then we may very quickly discover that violence in our streets and places of worship is no longer the shocking aberration it still is today.
Moreover if people are determined to prioritise their religious or racial obsessions over their basic civic responsibilities — and frankly their basic humanity — then we need to question what it means to be a citizen at all.
Australia is a great and strong multicultural nation but there are many who would like to see that fail, and mobs like we saw this week and in the aftermath of October 7 are the most powerful argument that anti-immigrant voices have.
Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address that the US Civil War was a test of whether a democratic nation could survive.
Those waging civil war on our streets are doing their best to demonstrate a multicultural nation cannot. It is up to all of us to prove them wrong.
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