When Robert A Heinlein called the doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ “historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral”, he wasn’t at all endorsing the idea of employing violence as a first resort. What he was criticising was the sort of passive pacifism that saw the Moriori wiped out because they refused to resist at all.
There is a world of difference between principled, strategic deployment of violence in response to unprovoked aggression, and mere savagery. The war against Nazism was principled resistance: October 7 was naked savagery.
Bondi was savagery, too. Australia must resist the temptation to respond with like savagery. We must resist the savagery of jihadism and anti-Semitism, absolutely – but resorting to savagery of our own would not just be grossly immoral, but a stupid, neanderthal regression.
Social media posts threatening Arab and Muslim people in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack have sparked a warning from police against anyone planning ‘retribution’.
NSW Police on Monday night confirmed the force was aware of a planned ‘bashing day’ on Cronulla Beach, south Sydney, on December 27.
A flyer advertising the event has been widely shared across social media.
‘WE RIOT. WOG/MIDDLE EASTERN BASHING DAY. SATURDAY 27TH DECEMBER 2025,’ it states.
‘SPREAD THE WORD AUSTRALIA! STAND THE F*** UP.’
This is violence as the first resort of not just the incompetent, but the ugly and exploitative. Of course Australians are angry and infuriated, even, at the horror visited on our Jewish community. Of course we have been gaslit for too long to tolerate the violently intolerant.
This is not the way.
Just as jihadists have exploited high-temperature feelings about Israel’s just war on Hamas, this is the ugly underbelly of the genuinely far-right attempting to exploit high-temperature feelings about Islam’s war on the West. In the same way that these knuckle-dragging goons exploited high-temperature feelings at the original Cronulla, egging drunken, angry yobs on to violence that the media-political class exploited to the hilt.
Most commenters under the posts condemned the apparent call to action.
‘This is the most un-Australian response to what has happened,’ one wrote.
‘This is not the answer. This is only creating more hate and violence. Think of something that brings people together and creates peace,’ another said.
While the last veers close to the same dangerous passivity, they’re right at least that this is not the answer.
Worse, it will give the media and the authorities exactly the excuse they need to distract from their own culpability in allowing anti-Semitic hate to fester. The instant anything untoward happens at Cronulla, the ABC, the government and the police will be all over it like flies on the proverbial.
NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon had urged Australians to resist violence in their response to the shootings […]
‘This is a time to allow the police to do their duty.’
Well, that would be a first, which is why we can almost smell the police praying for something to happen, so they can immediately jump on their soapboxes and bury the Bondi victims for a second time.
The media are already gearing up for it.
However, that call could be easily ignored when even a former prime minister appears to have narrowed the blame to one minority.
In his book Australia: A History, Tony Abbott wrote of a ‘notable presence of recent migrants from the Middle East in the pro-Hamas demonstrations that erupted in Sydney and Melbourne’ following the Hamas incursion on Israel on October 7, 2023.
On Monday, Abbott claimed that same unchecked anti-Semitism had led to the ‘abomination’ in Bondi.
‘One leads to the other, in the sense that when you have these unchecked expressions of hatred, sooner or later those expressions of hatred turn into acts of hatred,’ he told the Daily Telegraph.
He’s not wrong, though, is he?
Not that that will matter at all to the media-political class, if they once get an excuse to distract the glare of blame from themselves and point fingers at a convenient far-right scapegoat.
This is, after all, exactly what they did with the first Cronulla riots. The fact that the vast majority of the violence took place over the following nights at the hands of Lebanese Muslims is never reported. Nor the far more deadly Muslim terror attacks which were thwarted.
This all reeks a little too much of what Mark Steyn dubbed, ‘Muslims fear backlash to next week’s terror attack’. It would be all too convenient for the status quo forces which got us here in the first place, as well as just plain morally wrong.
Sure, Australians cannot just sit back and let them keep getting away with this. But, whatever the answer is, it will require measured thought, not blindly swinging fists.
