The Splendour in the Grass arts and music festival is an annual festival held in the North Byron Parklands. This year’s event, the twenty-first, was on July 21-23. The venue is hardly two kilometres away, and we can see and hear the fireworks in the evenings from our street. Thousands of young people attend.

I kept thinking of the unimaginable horrors and the unfathomable depravity involved in the massacre of more than 260 party-goers killed when the Supernova music festival in southern Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7. My mind keeps imagining similar scenes unfolding in our small community during Splendour in the Grass.

I once received a phone call once from a person in India. He wanted to enlist my help in identifying Indo-Australian community leaders who could be approached to support and organise a tour to highlight a genocide underway against Hindus. It took me some time to realise he was serious. When I said I knew something about genocides and mass atrocities and his claims were laugh-aloud fantasy, I got a 20-minute history lecture. I ended the call by saying I would fight against any effort to import India’s sectarian conflicts and hatreds into Australia.

Yet here we are, with flares in the streets of Sydney celebrating mass murder in the greatest loss of lives for the Jews since the Holocaust, confirmed reports of babies burnt and beheaded, and women and elderly Jews kidnapped and taken to Gaza as hostages. Chants of ‘F**k the Jews!’ and ‘Gas the Jews!’ on the steps of Australia’s most iconic landmark were seen and heard around the world as the most shocking explosions of Jew hatred in a Western democracy. This in an age when people claim to be traumatised at being misgendered with the wrong pronoun.

A local Iman in a state of exultation led followers in chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he expressed his happiness, elation, and pride at the Hamas attacks. New South Wales Police escorted the crowd from the Town Hall to the Opera House that had been lit up in a mark of tribute to the murdered Israeli victims, by now over 1,500. And the Jews were told to stay away? And the only person arrested was a lone Jew with the temerity to wave an Israeli flag?

WTF doesn’t cover it.

The minister and the senior police officer who made the bungled call on handling the protestors are yet to resign. The Premier hasn’t the courage to sack them. Meanwhile, the leader of the Australian Capital Territory government Andrew Barr, reliant on Greens support, says Australians should not be taking sides. Such silence and equivocation diminishes them and shames all Australians.

This is beyond perverse – a black comedy that defies belief and comprehension. Yet, why are we so surprised? It is but a mirror to the loss of moral compass and self-belief by too many Westerners – people, communities, and countries; an embrace of moral relativism and false equivalence on issues that demand clarity of conviction and action; and a refusal to acknowledge the dangers to our own social cohesion when we allow identity politics, diaspora hatreds, and ancient conflicts to be imported and instilled in our own country.

How many times before have peaceful speeches been banned, or organisers and not the potentially violent actors been billed for the extra security, because of the threats of violence from ideological opponents who scream hate speech, far right Nazi, racist, TERF, and the like? The argument that we cannot export democracy backed by our arms to other countries with inhospitable political cultures is accepted wisdom. Yet we seem ready to dismiss the equivalent argument about mass immigration of people with political values and belief systems hostile to our liberal way of life. We are not allowed to call for restricted numbers of those who don’t share our values but instead abhor our lifestyles as morally corrupt.

Meanwhile, terrorism is problematised, contextualised, excused, defended, and celebrated as legitimate acts of resistance in the great cause of decolonisation that divides the world into settlers and oppressed. We are censored and deplatformed for expressing lockdown, mask, and vaccine scepticism, but our ideological enemies are permitted megaphones and flares. We surrendered our core values some time ago and now we are reaping the whirlwind.

Worse, as diaspora groups with their acculturated hatreds and sympathy for extremist violence change the demographic balance of electoral constituencies, they will spawn diaspora-courting politicians who will tone down robust condemnation of terrorist rhetoric at home and of actions in the home regions of these communities. No moral compromise is too great for thirty extra votes. Western Sydney federal Labor MPs Tony Burke and Chris Bowen have been too timid to condemn pro-Hamas protestors.

Recalling the ‘celebratory’ chants that prevented Sydney’s Jews from acknowledging Hamas’s murdered victims, would you quibble with Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar’s statement that freedom of speech does not extend to ‘incitement to violence’? Derek Burney, with a 30-year career in Canada’s foreign service and a former ambassador to the US, no less, wrote in the National Post recently that when Canada’s security agencies had inserted a reference to ‘Sikh extremists’, Trudeau bowed to pressure from the ethnic community and removed the reference. Burney’s policy advice in the context of Canada’s slide into irrelevance as an international actor is: ‘If Sikh or other extremists are violating our laws, they should be prosecuted and if convicted, deported.’ We could and should do the same with the perpetrators of the Sydney shame. Given their love for Hamas, let them join the resistance in Gaza. Israel can deal with them better than NSW cops.

When Mumbai was under terrorist attack in 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh failed the test of leadership by not going to parts of the city under siege for TV visuals to comfort and reassure the shocked and distressed nation. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed the same test by not going to the Sydney Opera House to join the Jewish community and lead the tribute to the slaughtered Jews of southern Israel. In both cases, advice to the contrary from the always risk-averse security services be damned.

Sky News Australia host Peta Credlin drew a telling contrast between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s powerful speech from the heart in a synagogue in London as ‘real leadership’, and Albanese’s kumbaya waffle about love and holding hands in a photo-op to spruik his beloved but doomed Voice that has been comprehensively defeated. Remember, in Australian, a constitutional referendum requires majority support nationally and in at least four of the six states. The Voice went down 60-40 nationally and in every single state. We can now look forward to a fresh start to Aboriginal policy free of the politics of victimhood and grievance.

India has suffered enormously from terrorist acts (47,000 total fatalities in this century thus far, including 7,500 security personnel and 14,300 civilians). Westerners have repeatedly urged India to exercise restraint, address root causes, negotiate over the grievances, avoid disproportionate force, and so on. Which was the last war won without using disproportionate force? When will we learn not to differentiate between ‘our’ terrorists and theirs?

There is a second important point of empathy. Hindus are not the targets of genocide nor at risk of being wiped out anytime soon. But despite their sizeable population and the substantial natural advantages of defence between the oceans to the south and the mighty Himalayas to the north, for centuries Hindus were ruled by Muslim and then British conquerors. Indian history thus is a potent reminder of the truism that those who fail to look after their arms fall victim to the arms of invaders.

All this might explain why, as Australia edges towards joining other Western democracies in being soft on diaspora support for terrorism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has broken free from India’s own past lopsided support for Palestinians and also from the Global South (Brazil, China, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa). He stated promptly, unequivocally and strongly India’s condemnation of the terrorist attacks on ‘innocent victims and their families’ and expressed solidarity with Israel and its people.

History has memorialised the existential threat to Jews and geography poses an existential threat to Israel as their state. Yet, the Jewish nation has seen off many threats to its people through the ages. This too shall pass.

Meanwhile, the anti-Israeli demonstrations in many Western cities, and nowhere more pregnant with historical resonance than in Berlin, should serve as a wake-up call to the poison that is taking deep root. With big migrant communities, Europe, UK, US, Canada, and Australia no longer have the luxury of ignoring the potential of importing abhorrent diaspora hatreds. All who vented their racist fury at Jews in Sydney (with more isolated incidents reported also in Melbourne) must be identified and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And, where legally possible, sent packing.