As a civilisation we have lost our way when we no longer consider every single human being as equally precious
The above sentence is, I think, the key one in a distinguished Australian intellectual’s latest essay.
Its immediately-preceding two sentences:
Australians were profoundly shocked by the murder of fifteen people at Bondi. There was not even one day before the recent ceasefire when as few as fifteen innocent people were killed in Gaza by Israeli force of arms.
Robert Manne is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at Latrobe University.
He was also, as he writes in the essay’s final paragraph, born to Jewish refugee parents three years after the conclusion of the Holocaust, the attempt to remove the Jewish people from the face of the Earth.
A great deal of what has been published in the wake of the Bondi massacre is the fruit of understandable anger and/or grief, of political opportunism or embarrassment, of hyper-partisanship, of self-righteousness…
Manne’s essay is free of the above flaws; its analysis of the rise of antisemitism in Australia (and of its connection to “the war”in Gaza) is lucid, humane, intelligent and clear-sighted, as is its assessment of the “post-Bondi” state of political play in Australia.
I wish every well-intentioned Australian would read it.
I urge you to do so; click here.