Safety bollards no barrier to ugly vitriol of political Left

The Christchurch massacre has brought out the worst in public commentary and toxic debate.

Friday prayers and two minutes of silence were observed in Christchurch yesterday for victims of the twin mosque massacres.

There are synagogues and Jewish schools in my neighbourhood and after living there for a decade the initial shock of seeing armed guards patrolling their gates and driveways has worn off.

One of the most chilling responses this week to the Christchurch massacre was the matter-of-fact and wholly sensible announcement by Scott Morrison about an extra $55 million for com­munity safety grants to relig­ious schools and places of worship.

Confront the fact we live in an age when your local church, mosque, synagogue or religious school needs funding for video surveillance equipment, bollards or other security devices. The grotesque horror of Christchurch, in its way, will shift all of us closer to that terrible sense of vulnerability to which many Jewish communities have become accustomed.

This strikes at the heart of our society because everything about our history and our national project suggests we should be heading in the opposite direction. We aspire to be the multiethnic, multicultural and multi-faith nation where live-and-let-live is the daily experience. New Zealand, especially its idyllic South Island, would have been one of the last places you would have predicted a terrorist attack. But that is the modus operandi of these monsters — choosing soft targets to shock us to our core.

The aims of the white supremacist fanatics and the Islamist extremists are remarkably similar. They seek to foment a clash of civilisations so their intolerant notion of society can ultimately prevail. They want to inspire copycats and retaliation — either suits their aims — and they want to create fissures in society.

The twisted Australian who has been charged over the slaughter of 50 blameless Muslims in those two Christchurch mosques would derive sick pleasure from the amount of division his atrocity has generated. Let’s hope they are denying him access to the news because the partisan and personal pointscoring in Australia and the ugly and troubling diplomatic spat with Turkey will give him sickening satisfaction.

In the wake of 9/11, Bali, London, Paris, Martin Place, Paramatta, Bourke Street and countless other attacks, our society has handled the repercussions of terror reasonably well. Sure, the political-media class has often been in jihad denial and has averted its eyes, ears and mouths from discussing the joint responsibility of Muslim and non-Muslim communities to combat extremism. And, yes, there was the offensively misplaced priorities of the #Illridewithyou campaign, which was based on a falsehood and launched while hostages were still held at gunpoint.

But mainstream Australians, overwhelmingly, have responded with calm resolve and a visceral resort to unity and tolerance while supporting action to bolster security. While intolerant immigration policies have been promoted by minor parties, they have been contested in the public square to the extent that even Pauline Hanson’s One Nation had dropped its proposal to ban Muslim immigration.

There has been some focus on white nationalist groups and the promotion of white supremacist propaganda but obviously, in the wake of Christchurch, that threat was underestimated and now needs to be tackled more energetically. For those of us outside the intelligence and security apparatus, this will require the same strategy as that we encourage to combat Islamist extremism: open discussion of the threat, identification of the groups and messages to be called out, and vigilance in communities to report worrying activities.

All up, we had been doing reasonably well. Until that monstrous attack across the ditch.

The toxic abuse, ideological crusades and ugly blame games that have overtaken our public debate are the worst I have seen. Twitter — which is always a cesspit dominated by green-left spite but with a sprinkling of hard-right bile — has been filthy. Most disturbing is the way this reprehensible, divisive and dangerous behaviour has been spread not just by anonymous social media trolls but by prominent people and mainstream media. Surely Australia has seldom looked so puerile, intolerant or fractured.

I spent more than three hours in an endodontist’s chair for root canal work late this week and it proved a blessed relief to concentrate on something equally as painful but less disturbing than this squalid debate.

The worst transgression came early from independent senator Fraser Anning. His statement on Christchurch effectively blamed the victims for being there. “The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today,” Anning wrote, “is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”

Terrible, heartless, misleading and offensive; he stood by it. Condemned by most politicians, ­Anning will be censured by the Senate. Hanson, under whose banner he first entered parliament, says she won’t back the censure. This suggests she and others see at least some votes in this sort of prejudice. That is sobering.

But let us not forget that Anning was ostracised in our public life before this tragedy. He was an unknown One Nation candidate who entered the Senate only ­because Malcolm Roberts ran foul of the dual-citizenship provisions. Anning quickly fell out with the party and quit, then attracted widespread condemnation for an intolerant maiden speech, joined Bob Katter’s Australian Party and was sent packing because of his extreme views.

Anning is representative of very few people and destined for anonymity after the election. So, while we condemn his words, we should not shame our nation as a whole — he is an outlier.

Likewise, while all sorts of misinformation and vitriol have been directed at Sky News Australia, the one real transgression that critics can point to is when white supremacist Blair Cottrell was given an uncritical platform last year. As a result the host, indigenous former politician Adam Giles, had his show cancelled, even though Cottrell had been interviewed previously more than once on the ABC. This shows these tensions between free speech, open debate and responsible wariness of extremism were being managed sensibly before last week. It is understandable and wise that such issues are revisited, reconsidering the issues now that we have seen the culmination of white supremacist terror in our region.

But we can’t avoid the repulsive and counter-productive response from the political Left that has set Australian against Australian and our nation against others.

The so-called progressives have always been squeamish about confronting the palpable threat of Islamist terrorism but at least have always understood — or claimed to understand — the rationale behind ensuring that not all Muslims were blamed for the actions of extremists. Yet this week they have recklessly, vindictively, cruelly and dangerously sought to blame right-of-centre politicians, commentators and media organisations for the cold-blooded killing of innocent Muslims. They try to equate any discussion of issues related to Muslim extremism, any criticism of Islamic fundamentalist prac­tices, with inciting white supremacist extremism.

It is almost too manic and hateful to believe. But there it is. And it shows no sign of abating just yet.

Even before victims had been identified and mourning had begun the political activists of the Left started apportioning blame. While the right-of-centre transgressions tend to come from people such as Anning on the extreme fringes, often on the Left there are prominent voices who enjoy the benefits of institutional, political and public broadcaster support who spit the poison. Take your pick. Former independent MP Tony Windsor tweeted that Morrison’s “dog whistling” had “borne fruit” on a “softer target.” Academic and indigenous advocate Marcia Langton replied saying the Prime Minister was “complicit in mass murder” along with his cabinet and backbenchers.

ABC and Ten Network host Waleed Aly dug up old repudiated claims that Morrison had told a shadow cabinet meeting in 2010 that there might be political advantage in targeting Muslims. Labor spin doctor Dee Madigan tweeted in part: “To the politicians who thought there were votes in an anti-Muslim strategy, there are now bullets in children.”

On ABC television’s The Drum, host Ellen Fanning encouraged Sara Saleh of GetUp in a hateful rant. “We are in a system that is quite literally propped up and en­abled and aided and abetted by politicians and media shock-jocks that have made a living, a political career, out of Islamophobia and out of inciting hatred and white supremacist views against marginalised communities,” Saleh said. “And look no further than Scott Morrison. Prime Minister Morrison’s response after Bourke Street last year or Tony Abbott and his Team Australia and just his existence altogether, I would say, is off­en­sive.” Fanning did not demand justification, disagree or question the assertions. “They have blood on their hands,” Saleh continued, “they have emboldened neo-Nazis and white sup­rem­acists, they are not free of blame.”

There was more. Social media remains full of obscene and putrid claims but, sadly, prominent left-of-centre journalists such as Jonathan Green, Rafael Epstein and George Megalogenis, while using more measured tones, gave voice to the same arguments rather than calming the waters.

The divisions have never been more volatile, the unity in the face of terror so sorely missed, as the bollards go up at local schools and churches. No one is happy except the extremists, of all kinds.