What you compromise to keep, you’ll eventually lose. I can’t remember the first time I heard that statement or who said it. Was it my parents? In church? A client? I don’t know. I do know that it’s truth, the rolled-gold variety.
I can look back over my life and acknowledge there were things I sacrificed on the altar of compromise while clinging to something I shouldn’t have. As much as I love intermittently ripping out pieces of my own heart to share with you all, not everything is for public consumption. Some things are too tender, too private. So, just trust me when I say I know from experience that when you compromise your hopes, your integrity and what matters to you just to hold on to something, you may as well kiss it goodbye because it will slip through your fingers like chaff in the wind.
Collectively, a huge part of the West is tying itself in knots, compromising values and freedoms that entire generations were sacrificed for, and for what? To be seen as caring, or something like that.
In the same week Australia mourned the death of Tom Pritchard, the last surviving “Rat of Tobruk”, Iranian ambassador to Australia Ahmad Sadeghi used a social media post to describe Jews as a “Zionist plague” and call for their destruction and that of Israel. He even put a timeline on it: all Jews gone by 2027.
Peter Dutton called for the ambassador’s expulsion. But our government has let him stay. Who are we trying to appease with that decision? If it were your home and someone behaved like that, you’d kick them to the kerb.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said his words were repugnant. She’s right. Anthony Albanese agreed, sort of, talking about kindness, tolerance, fairies and rainbows in a baffling media doorstop that sounded weak because it was.
This kind of evil, the evil of extremism, is leaving a trail of carnage around the world right now. It doesn’t get the coverage that Gaza does. No Jews, no news.
Hindus are being slaughtered by radical Islamists in Bangladesh. Three days ago, authorities in Vienna mercifully foiled an Islamist plot to bomb Taylor Swift concerts. Christians are being hacked to death and burned alive by radicals in the plateau region of central Africa. Iran this week hanged a 34-year-old man, Reza Rasaei, for protesting during the Women Life Freedom uprising over the murder of Mahsa Amini, famously beaten to death by Iranian morality police for having uncovered hair. This was one of a reported 30-plus hangings there this week.
Iran is the driving force behind the anti-Israel proxies who are attempting to wipe Israel off the map. They are, more broadly, waging a shadow war against Western values and the culture of freedom, liberty and value for human life.
This is a generally accepted and uncontroversial view. Iran has been exposed as the funder of the anti-Semitic protests on US campuses. No proof (yet) that it was behind the nonsense here, but you don’t need to be a geopolitical expert to see a pattern.
These forces of extremism via useful idiots are attempting to bring discord to Australian streets. So far our state and federal governments have taken a light touch to the violence, attacks, vandalism, extremism and threats. Compromising what we value, to keep what exactly? It started a day or two after October 7, with flares, burning flags and hate-filled anti-Semitic chants on the Sydney Opera House steps. No one was arrested except a man carrying the Israeli flag. For his own safety or some such poppycock.
ASIO has confirmed the level of terror threat is now probable. The agency was frank in its assessment, saying there were four key indicators: “The threat of lone actors, acceleration of radicalisation, a resurgence in minors embracing terrorism and diverse drivers of extremism.” What we compromise to keep, we lose. Compromising social cohesion in the name of tolerance is a slippery slope to a nasty destination. Oh, but we just wanted to de-escalate, they say. You know what I want? A line in the sand. I don’t want to see two-tier policing in Australia the likes of which is playing out in Britain.
The Prime Minister has become braver in recent weeks in relation to his party’s problematic political housemate, the Greens, the most idiotic of the useful idiots. Albanese went on record as saying the Greens’ violent, divisive rhetoric was fuelling the terror threat in Australia. He pointed to the Greens’ enabling and encouraging of protesters who have attacked the offices of Labor MPs. Albanese is bang on the money. His words are overdue and it can’t stop there.
The Greens hate Australia and Western values more broadly. They refuse to call Hamas a terror group and champion regimes that subjugate women and oppress minorities. The party is a drain and a blight on the Australian body politic and a stain on our community.
Albanese, of course, needs the Greens in the Senate, arguably needs their preferences to form government. I’m no political operative but my observation is that the government finds itself in a pickle. It knows what is eroding and undermining social cohesion in Australia. Everyone does. But it has yet to find the ticker to do anything about it.
Start by drawing a line in the sand. If a person is here on any kind of visa and they’re involved in violent protests? Kick them out. You want people to think twice before abusing Jews in the street, before defacing statues of war heroes? Furnish them with some consequences. I’m told by those who know more than I that we have the laws already in Australia to deal with these issues. They simply need to be enforced.
In my life, I never imagined days like these. Conversations like this one. But for my sins, I remain a prisoner of hope. I believe Australians of every background want the same thing. To live our lives in peace and mutual respect. I also believe we want a line in the sand drawn that says to the world, come hell or high water, we won’t compromise who we are, what we value and how we choose to live.
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