Monis failed because we will never surrender to fear, ignorance
WORDS of realism, truth, resilience and solidarity in the aftermath of a tragic event.
WE are awake and aware. Jeremy Jones from the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council in The Jerusalem Post, yesterday:
IN our beautiful city, on a beautiful summer’s day, something very ugly took place ... Sydneysiders have become abundantly aware that any one of us, at any time, could be the victim of terrorists.
We are ready and resilient. Tony Abbott, yesterday:
THESE events do demonstrate that even a country as free, as open, as generous and as safe as ours is vulnerable to acts of politically motivated violence. But they also remind us that Australia and Australians are resilient and we are ready to respond.
We will not be divided. Bill Shorten, yesterday:
IT was a senseless act of violence — a crime designed to divide our country.
But it has failed ... It has failed because Australians will never surrender to fear, to ignorance and to intolerance. We will never reward the perpetrators of inhuman violence by abandoning our Australian values and our common humanity. We will stand united, we will face the challenges of this dark moment together, and together we will endure. Together we will prevail ... We are stronger and cleverer. We are both tenderer and tougher than the people who would try to divide our society.
We know the real victims of the siege were barrister and mother Katrina Dawson and Lindt cafe manager Tori Johnson, despite Ruby Hamad’s efforts on The Drum website yesterday:
DESPITE the copious amount of Western criminals and gunmen who have held up, shot and killed many innocent people — one of the most recent incidents of which took place in Melbourne just two weeks ago — no one would seriously suggest they represent the entirety of white society, nor do they cause widespread fear and panic. But such is the marginalisation of Muslims that they are not given the benefit of being individuals ... Muslims are often represented as a marauding horde, a grotesque collective that acts on nothing other than primitive, religious ideology.
We will not embrace pointless platitudes. James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal, Monday:
HOURS before the siege ended, the (Sydney) Morning Herald rushed out an editorial titled “Martin Place Siege Response Tests Our Humanity”. It’s a textbook example of what scholar Barbara Oakley calls pathological altruism. Much of it is inoffensive, if obvious ... But the editorialists also suspect their countrymen of bad motives: “The temptation will be to pursue vigilante justice ... The test of our humanity is to rise above the calls for exclusion and persecution.” Exhortations like this are obnoxious not because one disagrees with them — who’s in favour of vigilante justice, exclusion and persecution? — but … because one doesn’t, and the high-handed lecture seems gratuitous.
We know such talk does not help. James Delingpole, Breitbart London, Monday:
INDIVIDUAL acts of kindness ... are lovely. But when they mutate into Twitter hashtag campaigns they acquire a smug, bullying sanctimoniousness which not only demeans the original act but which, worse, skews the debate about Islamism ... One of the more notable facts about Islamist terror incidents in the West ... is how very little they have changed public attitudes to Muslims in general ... I’m sure you are lovely and caring and bloody great, all you #Illridewithyou luvvies. But you’re also — in my experience — so delighted by your own sensitivity, so certain that you hold the moral high ground that you feel it enables you to duck all responsibility for engaging with the Islamism problem seriously.
And we remember the words of the Christmas hymn. Conclusion of statement from Tori Johnson’s parents, yesterday:
LET us all pray for peace on earth.