Miguel de Cervantes argues that he who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he who loses his courage loses all.

Courage is an essential accompaniment of true success.

With a level of common sense almost extinct  among Western leaders, it was courage that led Donald Trump to victory.

Courage was crucial in maintaining Cardinal George Pell’s faith during his cruel persecution.

Along with his steadfastness and his loyalty, courage will stand by Alan Jones.

Courage requires resistance .

To use the mock-Latin line devised by wartime British Army Intelligence, ‘Illegitimi non carborundum’. (Don’t let the bastards grind you down.)

This is important when we remember that, despite Australia being an old democracy, there is a distinct increase these days in the politicisation of the police. This is despite our British  heritage which led to an early realisation that Sir Robert Peel’s great principles of policing should apply here.

Among these is the need to constantly demonstrate ‘absolute impartial service’ to the law.

The retreat from this today is not at the constabulary level but from on high, just as it has been  in the US in the open ‘lawfare’ still being used against Donald Trump.

Used against Cardinal Pell, the Victorian police’s ‘Operation Tethering’ was a notorious example of the politisation of policing here.

Although exposed by a handful of courageous authors, including Keith Windscuttle, Gerard Henderson and Fr. Frank Brennan, and, by a unanimous High Court, the concocted case against Cardinal Pell still stands as a model for use against anyone perceived as a class enemy who must be silenced by some far-left political and media cabal.

Unanimity excepted, that High Court decision was predicted by this column, aided by a viewing of the Cathedral which, in my view, demonstrated the offence as alleged could not have occurred .

But for the subject of this essay being politicisation, it would be irrelevant to note that three of the High Court judges were appointed under Labor and four under the Liberal National coalition.

Returning to the model used against the Cardinal, it typically begins with defamatory attacks in the media , especially about sexual assaults which ‘demand’ police action.

The process may also be embellished by senior police by, for example, praising complainants improperly described as ‘victims’ despite this being in breach of the Peelian principle ‘never (to) appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary’.

The accused is publicly demeaned where possible to indicate guilt.

Thus, Cardinal Pell was forced to daily pass through a baying mob as if he were in a  tumbril on the way to the guillotine.

The fundamental problem the model addresses is that the politicised police bosses will typically begin with no viable complaints, normally an essential prerequisite to action.

Ignoring any police shortage and consequent public dissatisfaction, the model requires substantial manpower, resources and time just to scrape up complainants.

This is, as Gerard Henderson brilliantly puts it, a criminal investigation ‘in search of a crime’ .

This ominously recalls Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria‘s promise from Hell: ‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.’

It took a year before Operation Tethering had just one complaint. This turned out to be from a man discharged from a psychiatric hospital the day before.

It took more than  two whole years before they had the only one witness who they were actually able to bring to trial, but whose evidence , according to seven High Court judges ‘did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof’.

Until political operations like Operation Tethering are outlawed under the criminal law, they are still available as political tools to far-left political and media cabals.

Apart from its use to destroy political enemies, as it was with Cardinal Pell, the police power is also being diverted, with gross impropriety, to appease the evil of anti-Semitism. This used the test formulated by a Labor grandee to divert prime minister Julia Gillard’s determination to follow established   bipartisan policy and vote against granting self-styled Palestinian delegates observer status at the UN.

This is: ‘How will I defend this policy from the steps of the Lakemba mosque?’

First applied to foreign policy, this has been extended to weaken or even block police action against anti-Semitic crime.

Present for about two decades, this  increased significantly after Tehran-funded Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on 7 October 2023, murdering, with extreme savagery, 1,200 Jewish men, women, children and babies, and kidnapping 240 hostages.

On 9 October, before Israel had responded militarily, the New South Wales police escorted a protest march to Sydney’s Opera House, where, in deep sympathy for her losses, Israel’s flag was being projected onto the sails.

This turned into a violent riot with inflammatory calls, including among other cruel chants, ‘Gas the Jews’. Apart from a man carrying an Israeli flag, no one was arrested. The sole action by the police was a long-delayed, pointless examination by an acoustic expert who concluded that the mob were not chanting ‘Gas the Jews’. Against the evidence of all witnesses, he concluded the mob were chanting the ungrammatical,  unidiomatic and improbable ‘Where’s the Jews?’

The  relatively recent law to deal with this was effectively declared not fit for purpose, and no prosecutions were launched. Instead, the police were to authorise and escort (unlike some other events, free of charge)  regular pro-Hamas demonstrations across Sydney and Melbourne, interfering with the rights of the majority.

As Peter Jennings, director of Strategic Analysis Australia warned on ADH TV and other media, in tolerating this, the politicians were risking violence and breaking our social fabric. After decades of working in national security, he could think of no other time a government had so determinedly looked the other way ‘while a terror threat openly grows’.

We are now reaping the consequences of appeasement with the open anti-Semitism being displayed in the recent serious overnight rampage though Sydney.

Because of restraints on the rank-and-file police, this is unlikely to be the last.