“If a passing greengrocer has the guts to risk his life at Bondi beach then I should risk being called names for writing a few cautionary words,” says columnist HUGH SELBY.

That readers have the choice to press on or consign me to the trash is one of the benefits of living in Australia in 2025. It’s something we take for granted.

No one need fear a pre-dawn knock on the door by people authorised to censor our reading unless they are sharing plans for a terrorist attack, or intending to indulge their perverted fantasies about children.

When I put fingers to the keyboard, I do not fear that “authorities” will stop me writing, put me in prison, or arrange my early transformation from corporeal to ash.

For that I am truly grateful. As a community we allow a range of views, and a range of how those views are expressed, that is, for the most part, wonderful.

Our freedom to report events, to comment upon opinion, is, when it is fettered, said to reflect public policy constraints. Whether those constraints are too wide or too narrow is a never ending issue.

But public policy is not the only constraint upon freedom to express views about current issues. “Political correctness” describes the reality that pervasive sentiment can be so strong that to put a counter view is to invite trouble. 

Remember how popular was the “White Australia Policy”, “The white feather for cowards who wouldn’t sign up in World War I”, “All the way with LBJ” when our politicians sent young Aussies to war, “All female accusers are honest. All male deniers are liars”, and now, “If you oppose Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza you are an antisemite”. 

Which brings me to the horror at Bondi and to some dangerous political and religious-political responses.

So powerful and entrenched are some of those views and their proponents that my preferred option is to let it go through to the keeper. Silence is safe.

There are two reasons I have chosen to comment. 

First, if a passing greengrocer has the guts to risk his life at Bondi beach then I should risk being called names for writing a few cautionary words.

Second, my Jewish refugee father who was a doctor, and my grandfather who put a lot of effort into bringing World War II Jewish survivors from Europe to Australia, would be horrified to see anti-Netanyahu, anti-genocide sentiment described as antisemitic. 

Our safety, not political hyperbole is the first priority

Tragedies come in many forms: a busload of wedding guests dying because of driver error, or several hundred lives lost in a plane crash when ice interferes with equipment are tragedies. 

They are though, somehow less awful than the deliberately human-caused events such as Putin facilitating the shooting down of a commercial flight full of passengers, Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, or the brutal, planned shooting murders of our people celebrating on our beach, Bondi, on a summer’s early evening. 

How we talk about these deliberate acts of mass murder gives some insight into current perspectives.

For the moment there is one hero from the killing sands. There will be others as the full story emerges. Ahmed al Ahmed, a Sydney local who owns a fruit shop in Sutherland, disarmed one of the killers. That’s not an Anglo-Celtic-Irish name, not obviously Jewish either.

This guy showed the kind of courage, by his act of selflessness, that deserves a medal.

The same cannot be said of the disgusting statement by Netanyahu that our recent recognition of the Palestinian State caused the massacre. 

For those who have been oblivious to events these past few years, Hamas, by murdering more than a thousand innocents in Israel, gave Netanyahu his free pass to slaughter the innocents in the tens of thousands.

Netanyahu decided that a ratio of 50 to 1 by way of reprisal was a good calculus. He’s still at it, using any excuse to break every norm of humanity.

This is an annihilation pogrom against Palestinians carried out by those living in a state that was created to ensure there were no more pogroms.

The bones and ashes of the Jewish side of my family destroyed by the Nazis wish only that they could fuse with the clay into a Golem to put an end to this atrocity.

Which makes it important to call out the political grandstanding that “antisemitism” is on the rise in our country.

“Antisemitism” describes a way of prejudiced thinking that all Jews are inherently bad humans, or as Hitler made them, “beneath humans” and therefore able to be slaughtered.

There are misguided people, and always will be, who subscribe to that nonsense, just as there are anti-vaxxers, anti-fluoride in the water, and paranoid conspiracy believers. They are more a problem to themselves than they are a problem for us.

“Anti-Netanyahu genocide of humans in Gaza”, however, is a much more obvious, and understandable, reason for this week’s massacre at Bondi. Alas, it is also a reason for future violence.

Our political leaders should call it out accurately. Our safety depends upon it.

Former barrister Hugh Selby is a CityNews columnist, principally focused on legal affairs.