It is now clear that the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, designed to investigate the horrific Bondi massacre, is a cruel hoax played upon the Jewish communities of Australia by a cynical, cowardly and thoroughly shameless Labor government.

Back on this page on 17 January, this magazine (preceding most other commentary by seven months) recognised that what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had announced after mounting pressure was nothing more than a ‘Claytons royal commission’, the commission you have when you are not having a commission.

In that leading article, we pointed to the key flaws in the freshly announced commission: ‘First, [the Prime Minister] named a commissioner who does not enjoy the Jewish community’s unqualified support, an appointment that is read as reassuring the government rather than those most directly affected. Second, [the PM] framed antisemitism not as a discrete ideological, religious or security problem to be fearlessly confronted but as a social friction to be managed in the interests of “national consensus”, with explicit warnings against outcomes that might “undermine social cohesion”.’

As we then pointed out: ‘In effect, the commission is invited to examine antisemitism only to the extent that it does not disturb the social arrangements that have allowed it to metastasise, or provoke a backlash from those inclined to deny or minimise it.’

And so it has come to pass. A royal commission that has put no radical Islamists, or their pernicious beliefs, under the harsh glare of a forensic spotlight; a royal commission probably unique in our history in that its probings have not seen a single soul wriggling in embarrassment or sweating nervously under cross-examination; and a royal commission that can’t even bring itself to recognise what Blind Freddy concluded on the morning of 15 December last year. Namely, that decades of reckless immigration policies have imported into Australia the sick and deadly poison of Islamism, a toxic creed that propagates bloodshed, hatred, terror and death under the guise of religious doctrine.

And it is not as if we were not warned. It was during the Fraser years, with the Lebanese civil war under way, that many Australian Lebanese Christians who had already eagerly and happily migrated to and assimilated into the Aussie way of life, warned that a new wave of radicalised migrants from war zones posed serious risks to the entire Australian community. Those warnings went unheeded by the Fraser and every successive government. For fear of being labelled ‘racist’, no doubt.

And so, in the name of the shiny, new ‘progressive’ ideology of multiculturalism, Australians have spent the better part of the past five decades happily pretending how mass immigration has no downside but simply proves how enlightened and sophisticated we are. All the while ignoring the inconvenient fact that as each day passed yet another Jewish school was forced to go about its daily business behind wire fences and protected by guards. As Chris Kenny accurately pointed out, writing in the Australian, ‘This disgraceful situation shames our nation. We know the terrorist threat exists and we have failed to stamp it out, so we quietly ensure that the likely targets of terror are protected by police patrols and traffic barriers. Imagine the outrage if Catholic schoolchildren faced a terrorist threat that warranted security guards at parish schools. It would be seen as a national crisis.’

The daily fear and, yes, terror faced by Jewish Australians is the price progressive Australians are only too happy for others to pay, so they themselves can wallow in the warm, woke waters of multiculturalism’s ‘moral’ and ‘virtuous’ fantasyland,

Sickeningly, the left side of politics has exploited, for electoral advantage, the natural tribalism and welfarism that is rife within many migrant communities. As this magazine’s David Flint frequently reminds us, one prominent Labor figure famously pondered how he could justify such-and-such a policy ‘on the steps of the Lakemba Mosque’. As in America and Europe, immigration from countries where Islamism is rife has had the obvious and entirely predictable result of fostering radical Islamist ideologies within the broader Australian community. University students, and increasingly schoolchildren, are fed a sinister diet of pro-Palestinian propaganda whose sole role is to slowly indoctrinate them into more extremist points of view.

None of which has been touched on by this joke of a royal commission.

Much as we accurately predicted the performance of the royal commission, so too we can predict its ‘findings’.

These will include an accurate and broad recital of the evils of antisemitism, as recounted over the past months by its victims. The fact that these are heartbreaking goes without saying. The commissioner will release her findings a week before Christmas, four days after the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in Australian history, No doubt, the sting of those sorrowful testimonies will swiftly be lost in the summer festive season.

But absent from her findings, we suspect, will be anything that puts the blame squarely on government policies and the actions of Labor ministers and leftist bureaucrats. And as for the toxic effects of radical Islam via excessive and ill-disciplined immigration policies, these will be whitewashed into oblivion amidst a sea of new ‘anti-hate speech’ recommendations.