Locally sourced ranting is a problem. This is where a particular subject – say the current US President – leads a friend or family member to engage in an unhinged rant which leaves spittle on your face if you do not step back.

It is a limited problem as it only ruins Christmas festivities and breaks up friendships.

What we have seen for the last two years is something else entirely. Savage words were used on October 9, 2023, outside the Sydney Opera House. These slogans were so far outside our polarised politics that the effect was to immobilise polite opinion.

The polite multicultural etiquette practised by our nice liberalism must now be abandoned.

We have had a surfeit of equating antisemitism with attacks on any other religion, and a surfeit of people afforded too much latitude.

Now it is clear who the real victims are.

The police have been a punching bag trying to politely restrain demonstrations while our leaders equivocated.

The general community has put up with threatening and divisive demonstrations for too long.

Government Ministers spent a lot of time making extremely fine distinctions, which observed the political requirement of condemnation of violence and then went on to cast the final stone against the only democracy in what is a violent and terrifying area of the world.

The sort of area which you visit with a hardhat and a team of soldiers.

Many Australians do not recognise the specifics of terrorist flags which have occasionally made their appearance in our staid, clean, and well-run cities. To recognise them requires skill in the particular language and politics of a foreign hotspot.

Those who do understand these flags are struck dumb. They have seen black flags on the TV news and mentioned in stories about the most grotesque violence imaginable, including slavery. Violence and hatred are obviously involved, and they are of a very real kind.

Complicating the situation, ‘Critical Race Theory’ has allied itself with the primal violence of foreign hotspots for too long. Why did this happen and what does it mean? I will let the ‘critical theorists’ speak for themselves:

‘The binary of the “pen” and “paper” functions as a patriarchal technology, inscribing the white, cis-male subjectivity as the norm, thereby silencing the inherent fluidity of the marginalised graphite. The “white paper” itself is not a neutral void but a colonial imposition, a blank slate demanding legible inscription, thereby erasing the pre-textual narrative of indigenous dirt. Thus, the very act of “writing” reinforces capitalist commodification, turning subjective experience into quantifiable “text”, a prison for authentic being.’ (AI satire.)

There are two further complications.

First, modern technology means that people can live in our suburbs while their minds simultaneously live in foreign hotspots, particularly if they do not speak English and are constrained by their family or community.

All over the cities and towns of the West you can find communities from foreign wars living side-by-side. Their geographic location does not mean they fully ‘live’ in the West, as the Wall Street Journal commented.

The Presbyterian church may be a complete unknown to them, but other social codes are a terrifying reality, particularly for young daughters who wish to live according to the liberal norms of the host society and have a Western boyfriend, and wear makeup or a short skirt.

Honour killings and forced marriages occur all over the West. Authorities are occasionally scared to investigate these atrocities in case they are accused of discrimination.

In just one example, a young woman with a local boyfriend was repeatedly stabbed with a kitchen knife by her father. Her life was saved. Her father was recorded as saying that ‘she deserved it’.

The Australian Federal Police received 90 reports of forced marriage in 2022-23, with similar figures in the past five years. This is under-reported.

It is unwise to mention ethnic crime groups in Melbourne or Sydney, particularly Melbourne, where an election was fought and lost on the issue. Victoria now sees youths with machetes suddenly attack each other in shopping centres while families are shopping. These are not domestic Australian behaviours. They have been learned overseas.

Ideology is a powerful force for violence. Joseph Stalin famously pursued ‘social praxis’ in the 1930s, locking up criminals before a crime was committed. It saved time and prevented crime, he thought.

Today, the problem is often religiously based violence, although political violence still exists. An acquaintance attempted to persuade me that the extensive violence across foreign hotspots was tribal, not religiously based.

What does seem clear is that violent language such as ‘from the river to the sea’, and ‘globalise the intifada’ should be banned.

Finally, real citizenship should be a requirement of all. Not the indulgent liberalism of recent decades, where anything goes.

Our citizenship training of young people must be recovered. Young people and migrants must understand the democracy and prosperity we achieved, how we achieved it, and how easily we could have failed as so many nations do.

Training should include compulsory units in the separation of church and state.

It should not be the case that young men grow up with no knowledge about Edmund Burke and our history of parliamentary democracy. It is unacceptable if extreme religious ideas turn out to be quite common, rather than the often hoped for rare and unusual.

Secondly, citizenship should be given force in immigration decisions. No one wishes to import tribal hatred. A range of new ideas are currently under discussion and a consensus on them should be sought. Jewish people should be specifically consulted.

Many will be working hard through Christmas.

The Hon. Reg Hamilton, Adjunct Professor, School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University