We have dropped the ball on our civic responsibility

This week the rot of anti-Semitism, the failed management of multiculturalism, the decline of institutional cohesion and collapse of civic responsibility have been laid bare.

Demented threats against Israeli patients by hospital nurses in uniform are a wake-up call but not the full picture.

So, too, is the decision by Creative Australia to select work glorifying the image and memory of dead Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the 9/11 twin towers terrorist attack as reflective of “the diversity and plurality of Australia’s rich culture”.

The immediate sacking of the two nurses and withdrawal of artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s artistic representative to the Venice Biennale were the only justifiable responses. It demonstrates that our leaders are still aware of what most Australians expect as opposed to what they too often get.

Since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, a failure to deliver on community cohesion has been the true state of affairs from many of our politicians, our police, our judicial officers, our university leaders, our union representatives, and on the list goes.

But cultural decay does not happen overnight. It has been allowed to fester because of indifference as well as the willing encouragement of cultural Marxists who have taken root in our institutions and resent what we have achieved as a nation.

This is writ large in an open letter signed by more than 300 angry academics complaining of “political repression” over the Australian Research Council’s long-overdue review of an $870,000 grant to Macquarie University staff member Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has boasted of ignoring the conditions under which the grant was made and grandstanding on her repugnant anti-Semitic points of view.

Despite warnings, our political leaders were too slow to stamp down on the rise in anti-Semitic acts in the wake of the October 7 terror attacks.

Left unchecked, and even encouraged on our university campuses, the anti-Semitic beast has been allowed to grow stronger.

Inflammatory chants were allowed to escalate to graffiti, then arson and potentially the threat of terrorist bombings against places of Jewish worship.

All along the way political leaders have been responsive rather than in control.

Police have been unwilling to stamp down or instructed not to intervene. Even our most senior politicians have been unable to resist the false lure of moral equivalence in which they must always denounce the threat of Islamophobia alongside the actual acts of violence being perpetrated against the Jewish community.

The rise in civil disobedience and spread of ill-informed and racist views have drawn attention to a community-wide failure to properly educate our children and new citizens to understand and appreciate what was once unquestionably a common understanding of our nation’s egalitarian and tolerant nature.

As Chris Merritt has written, stronger laws will never be a complete answer. The goal should not merely be to punish but to defeat an alien mindset that has taken root in our midst. To do so we must institute a far more robust approach to civics and citizenship education that stresses our collective responsibility to racial cohesion.

Peter Dutton is right to raise the question of whether our current approach to immigration and citizenship is best serving the nation. We cannot turn our back on the world but neither can we afford to tolerate new citizens who profess race-based hatreds and murderous intent.

Leaving cultural enmities and conflict behind is a reasonable expectation to be placed on those who want to call Australia home. Community leaders must act decisively before it is too late.