No More Platitudes: Reflections on Bondi

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“Never again.” “Don’t look back in anger.” “This is not who we are.” “We must come together.” “Diversity is our strength”.

For years now, weak leaders across the West have responded to one terrorist atrocity after another —like the hideous attacks we have just witnessed in Australia—with the same ritual phrases and hollow slogans.

They are not designed to explain to the people what is really going on; they are designed to anaesthetise them —to dull the pain, to numb the shock, to distract them from the grim reality that is now rapidly emerging around them.

They are not answers; they are evasions. They allow our hapless ruling class to stage a kind of moral performance —to signal its virtue while at the same time refusing to debate and confront the actual forces that are unleashing this violence on our people.

From Australia to the United Kingdom, leaders in the West have now become masters of what the Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy” —they have become so obsessed with displaying empathy to others, including those who hate us, that they are destroying their own nations, our nations, from within.

They are destroying our nations in the name of showing compassion and tolerance to people who often do not show us these things in return —from presiding over a reckless policy of mass uncontrolled immigration to allowing porous borders, from importing countless numbers of unvetted migrants to mainstreaming a radical left progressivism that valorises minorities but pathologises the majority.

What we need right now in the West are not empty slogans and hollow platitudes —which are an insult to the growing list of victims—but to fundamentally shift the Overton Window that determines the direction of our debate, culture, and politics.

We need to move it so we can have a serious and honest debate about how we can best defend our civilisation from the one thing our leaders still struggle to mention in the aftermath of attacks like these: extremist Islamism, and how this is being enabled and protected by a radical, self-loathing woke left that indulges its grievance culture.

This toxic alliance —as I have argued before—is the primary threat to Western nations. Both movements are now feeding off one another to create something that is deeply illiberal, anti-democratic, revolutionary, and which has zero time for things that have long defined our civilisation —including women’s rights, individual liberty, free speech, the separation of church and state, and equality before the law.

And it also demonstrates a shocking capacity for violence. Islamist extremism is not operating in a vacuum; it is implicitly supported by a wider circle of tacit support —whether extremist Islamist preachers, a culture of silence within Islam, or the mainstreaming of woke left marches that call for “global intifada” and “genocide”.

It is the defining challenge of our time and yet one that our leaders refuse to speak about plainly and directly. Even worse, violence is endlessly “contextualised”. Ideology is dismissed as irrelevant. Grievances are treated as excuses. And any attempt to draw clear boundaries — cultural, legal, moral, national — are denounced as “extremist” themselves, thereby allowing the actual extremists to flourish in our midst.

Where it ends is Bondi Beach, a place that should never have entered this story. One of Australia’s most open, relaxed, and iconic public spaces should never have become the site of mass murder. Yet what happened there, like what happened only recently in Manchester, England, represents an end point.

The end point of decades of mass immigration without assimilation. The end point of elite moral cowardice. The end point of a new culture that insists violence must be explained away — so long as it comes from the “right” direction. The end point of a society that has somehow convinced itself that it is entirely acceptable for people to chant “globalise the intifada” on its own streets with no repercussions whatsoever.

Many of us saw this coming. But for years, concerns about borders were dismissed as “racist”. Warnings about Islamist extremism were “Islamophobic”. Any serious discussion of integration was treated as a moral failure. Even the word “assimilation” —the insistence that those who come into our nations must integrate into our ways of life and support our nations—was considered “extremist”.

The promise from elites was that if we refused to talk about uncomfortable truths then social cohesion would somehow take care of itself. Diversity would flourish and make us all stronger. But it did not —it has not—clearly.

Jewish communities in the West are now living under siege. Synagogues are being attacked. Marches, filled with young people and those who work in our taxpayer-funded public institutions, chant for intifada and genocide. Campuses have become hostile environments for Jews and others. Islamist preachers incite hatred while often living in taxpayer-funded social housing. Nations are being pushed into civil unrest.

And yet, still, our leaders look the other way. Throughout it all, they refuse to make the connection. And so the rest of us —the hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding majority—are expected to tolerate a culture in which chanting “globalise the intifada” is defended as political expression; in which Islamist violence is qualified; and in which anybody who objects or calls for an honest debate is smeared as “far-right”.

This is not compassion —it is surrender. This is how nations destroy themselves from within, led by a political class that now defines itself by its willingness to tolerate people who have absolutely no interest in tolerating us.

No society can survive if it refuses to defend itself. And no democracy can function if naming the problem is treated as worse than the problem itself. The only question is whether the West is still capable of telling the truth — before it is too late.

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