I was working on the night of the Bondi Massacre, and these are my contemporaneous notes…
Two hours ago, a couple of ‘males of African appearance’ started shooting people at Bondi. They were clearly aiming to unalive as many as possible by the weapons they selected, the sheer quantity of ammo they carried, and by the way they were moving and firing.
We’re told ten are dead (later revised to 16, including one of the shooters).
Reports also suggest it was an attack against revelers celebrating the Rabbinic Jewish festival of Hanukkah. While police ended one, the other’s alive and in custody so we may yet confirm the motive.
Who would be surprised if it’s related to Gaza?
Despite the proclamations of the US President, the war there has not ended, with the IDF killing Palestinians every day and calls for Bibi to be tried as a war criminal. Nobody should be surprised that the rock-throwing has made it to our distant shore.
We’re rock-throwers ourselves.
I predict our PM will be publicly stoned for the ‘Bondi Massacre’, with the rabid rightwing politicizing the tragedy but silent on the conservative PMs who oversaw similar tragedies in the past:
PM Howard — Port Arthur — 1996
PM Abbott — Lindt Cafe — 2014
PM Morrison — Christchurch — 2019
That’s where I ended it on the night, glumly predicting the inevitable pile-on the PM would face.
I wasn’t wrong. After vacillating overlong on demands for a Royal Commission, he has finally caved. Insisting, of course, that he hasn’t caved at all, not yielded to pressure, but rather wanted to do things right.
Wait until the heat dissipated.
Consider all options.
And of course weigh the political cost/benefit ratios.
I don’t even need to check to see if PM Albo grabbed opportunities in 1996, 2014 and 2019 to blast the incumbent PM’s for “failing to lead the nation at a time of crisis”.
I guarantee he did, because politicians are opportunistic scumbags after all.
But that was then and this is now. I was stirred to revive this post by the heated reaction to a political cartoon yesterday:
The reaction alone proves (to me) that Cathy Wilcox hit a nerve.
The fact some deranged terrorists tried to even the score on the beach that evening doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the holocaust that was — and is — Gaza.