Well, you could knock me down with a feather! They’ve done it, they’ve actually gone and done it! The ABC have used the dreaded ‘f-word’.
No, not that one: the edgelords at the Ultimo Collective use that one with monotonous regularity. No, as far as the luvvies at the Taxpayer-Funded Marxist Propaganda Network are concerned, this was the most heinous expletive they could possibly imagine:
Far-left terror.
An arson attack on a Victorian defence manufacturer last year is being investigated as an act of far-left terror.
One can only picture how hard the ABC journo was gritting xe/xir teeth at having to write that lede.
Lovitt Industries, based in Melbourne’s north-east, was targeted in July last year, with three vehicles set alight and a building graffitied.
A video released after the attack, purporting to be from a group responsible for the attack, further threatened the manufacturer with a message to “stop arming Israel or else”.
Joint counter-terror authorities have now revealed the incident is being investigated as a terror attack, “potentially orchestrated by far-left extremists with anarchist and revolutionary ideologies”.
Funny how they won’t tell us who the group are. Probably because it would likely turn out to be behind pretty much every lefty protest in Melbourne, for every fashionable cause, from Aborigines to trannies.
It is, we are told, the first time Australian authorities have investigated a far-left terror attack of this ideological flavour.
And it must be killing them. They’ve taken over a year to even admit that it was a terror attack.
All the while they’ve been busily shrieking, ‘Look! Over there! Some chinless wonder doing a Nazi salute!’
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the Lowy Institute last year that while far-right extremism still dominated the caseload, far-left extremism was a real and growing concern.
“Events in the Middle East triggered a troubling increase in anarchist and revolutionary extremism, which is also straining cohesion,” he said in November last year.
“Since October 2023, we’ve seen more provocative protests and a notable uptick in intentionally disruptive and damaging tactics by anti-Israel activists, including multiple acts of arson, vandalism and violent protest against defence companies accused of supplying weapon components.”
Oh, and the murder of 15 Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach. You’d think that might have rated a mention.
But that telling admission raises the obvious question: If the far-left are the ones actually firebombing factories and publishing how-to guides, why does the “significant majority” of ASIO’s ideologically motivated investigations still focus on the far-right? Are resources being poured into monitoring LARPing online groypers and pub-brawl nationalists while the groups lighting the matches operate with comparative impunity?
Actual body counts tell a starker story. Islamic terrorism has delivered the real mass-casualty attacks and plots on Australian soil. Far-left violence has a longer, bloodier pedigree than polite society likes to admit: the 2016 attempted bombing of the Australian Christian Lobby headquarters being only one recent example, which, with the same jaw-dropping chutzpah, police and politicians denied it was “politically, religiously or ideologically motivated”. Despite the bombing being carried out by a gay activist who openly expressed his hatred of Christianity, and the ACL in particular, “due to their beliefs and position on sexuality”.
By comparison, the much-hyped “far-right terror threat” has produced remarkably little in the way of successful attacks. Yet the monitoring apparatus remains heavily tilted toward the latter.
Then there is the political oxygen. The Australian Greens and their activist ecosystem spent months smearing companies like Lovitt as direct enablers of Israeli ‘genocide,’ despite the government’s repeated clarification that no Australian weapons are exported to Israel and that F-35 components go to the United States. When politicians and media amplify such claims, knowing the fevered audience they reach, are they engaging in stochastic terrorism, creating the climate in which the firebombers feel licensed?
No, like all lefty neologisms, the ideological load only ever goes one way.
Case in point: Premier Ben Carroll finds the terror designation “deeply distressing”. I’d have thought any decent person would find actual antisemitic terrorism deeply distressing. This is a gutless failure to even call it what it is.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry notes, with understatement, that radicalised people who believe violence is the solution should not be operating with impunity. Yet for years the narrative has been that extremism only travels in one political direction. The ABC’s gritted-teeth admission that far-left terror exists is a small crack in that edifice. Whether the security agencies, the courts and the political class are prepared to treat it with the same seriousness they reserve for the other side remains an open, and rather urgent, question.
