On Saturday's On the Town I played the late Ted Egan's classic song "We Got Some Bloody Good Drinkers in the Northern Territory" - and wondered afterwards: "Does it get any more Australian than that?"
Answer came there less than twenty-four hours later. Wherever you live in the west, "diversity" seems to be making us all the same: one big rapey-stabby blood-drenched craphole. That said, Sydney's Jew-slaughter was of sufficient scale to obscure America's two simultaneous Hannukah attacks - in Los Angeles and at Brown University, the would-be killer and actual killer still at large.
As I first wrote all those sod-bollocking decades ago, demography is destiny because everything else - corporate tax rates, mandatory vaccines - are changes that can be changed back. But, once you've changed the people, there is no changing back. The public discourse on this is still nowhere near where it needs to be, although the headline to Rowan Dean's piece in the Aussie Spectator comes close:
The Night Australia Died
Indeed. I don't suppose the killers gamed it out as such, but, if you wanted to demolish the no longer Lucky Country's self-image in a single atrocity, piling up the corpse count at Bondi Beach is hard to beat. As Andrew Christopher writes:
Bondi Beach is my backyard. Our family life is built around North Bondi Surf Club and the beach. My son was running the bar at the Surf Club yesterday when it was turned into a makeshift field hospital where many of the wounded and terrified were tended to by him and his fellow club members (the very best of our community). My youngest daughter was staffing the North Bondi RSL (Returned and Services League)...
In our mind's search for a symbol of the 'Australian way of life' – an image of the aquatic arc of Bondi framed by its ageing Art Deco unit blocks and craggy headlands springs quickly to mind. What Sydneysider or tourist has not visited the Bondi Pavilion and enjoyed a swim or an ice cream or a stroll along the promenade with their family and friends?
Yeah, but that's the Australia that's died. Or, more precisely, was insouciantly tossed on the proverbial barbie by insane public-policy choices:
Holocaust survivors and children among the 15 killed after crazed gunmen fire on Sydney Hanukkah celebration
Really? "Crazed" as compared to an entire western political class stunned to discover that Muslims are somewhat antipathetic to Jews, not to mention Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and atheist Bondi hedonists.
So Sydneysiders strolling the promenade in search of a Golden Gay Time are looking more like the survivors of the nuclear holocaust in Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, where the last Aussies gather to await the end. Mr Shute begins his tale with some lines from T S Eliot:
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river...
In the west's last meeting places, the Somalis and Afghans grope us and our politicians avoid speech on anything that matters: Down Under Pauline Hanson wearing a burqa in Parliament is a bigger media outrage than immigration policy; in the Mother Country purported anti-Semitic remarks by the schoolboy Nigel Farage half-a-century ago dominate the front pages in a way the daily migrant rapes of actual, current schoolgirls could never hope to; in the hyperpower tumid senators blame the Brown University shooting on the rhetoric of the notorious Fascist Nazi Trump.
With events such as Sunday's now a routine feature of life in the west, the details are heart-rending and particular for the bereaved, but otherwise wearily familiar. As I had cause to note just the other day, a not insignificant number of Muslims enjoy not "a swim... or a stroll along the promenade" but raping non-Muslims as a quality-time family outing. Somalis in Minnesota:
'The man pointed the gun at Minor Victim 1's head and said, "give my brother some head or I'll blow your head off."'
Just hold it there for a moment - and let me ask you as one man of the world to another: when you're at home of an evening and thinking you'd rather go out for a gang-rape than a meatball sub, do you take along your brother? or your cousin? or your uncle? Or would that make conversation round the Thanksgiving table a little icky?
Now we learn that certain Muslims practice not only gang-rape but also Jew-killing en famille:
A father and son opened fire on a Jewish festival at Sydney's Bondi Beach in a shooting spree that killed 15 people including a child, authorities said Monday as they denounced the attack as antisemitic "terrorism."
The duo fired into crowds packing the beach for the start of Hanukkah on Sunday evening, sending people fleeing in panic across the tourist hotspot.
That would be "Sydney man Naveed Akram", now in custody, and his dad Sajid, shot dead at the scene. Since the last mass shooting three decades ago, Australia has had near total "gun control" - much admired by American lefties. Yet Sajid Akram was nevertheless the lawful owner of at least six "licensed firearms".
At the same time, ASIO, the domestic security service, the Aussie version of MI5, had had the gun owner's kid - that's Sydneysider Naveed - in their files for over six years because of his ties to an ISIS cell of other "Sydney men". So just the usual "known wolf".
Ah, but relax:
Bondi gunman assessed as 'no threat of violence'
That's good to hear. As ASIO director-general Mike Burgess, put it:
Like the NSW Police, one of these individuals was known to us, but not in an immediate-threat perspective.
Phew, thank heaven for that. So the federal security honcho and the state police had both determined that Sydneysider Naveed was not "an immediate threat". So you were like waiting till the dad of the ISIS known wolf had lawfully purchased maybe a dozen more "licensed firearms"? Both father and son are reportedly known by counter-terrorism police to have "pledged allegiance" to ISIS - whatever that means: apparently very little for the purpose of licensing firearms.
By the way, who actually licenses firearms in New South Wales?
Why, that would be the New South Wales Police - the same constabulary that had Naveed Akram on a watch-list of non-immediate ISIS aficionados. In order to procure a "licensed firearm", one is supposed to have a "genuine reason" for needing one, most of which are of a somewhat rustic nature - "rural occupation", "recreational hunting", the latter of which Mr Akram was allegedly eligible for. The family lived in the Sydney suburb of Bonnyrigg, which despite sharing its name with a Scottish village is very much the New Australia: five per cent Assyrian non-Aramaic, thirty per cent Buddhist, sixty per cent born abroad. There are not a lot of sheep stations in Bonnyrigg.
Is it common for someone in a suburban house to be "licensed" that much firepower? Or is that an indulgence extended only to those who have "pledged allegiance" to ISIS? Or are we at South Yorkshire Police HQ, and officialdom's principal concern is that denying a rocket launcher to the Rotherham Isis cell might be perceived as racist? In fact, judging from the inaction of His Majesty's Constabulary, who stood idly by for fifteen minutes as Akram père et fils fired on their "recreational hunting" targets without let or hindrance, even acting to reduce the body count might be perceived as racist.
Nevertheless, Aussie pollies are now calling for new gun restrictions; in Britain the "conservative" bleepwit Chris Philip is calling for new speech restrictions. No one who matters is calling for new Islam restrictions. Which is the only thing that, ultimately, will make any difference. Bondi Beach is soaked in blood only because Australia's political class made a conscious decision to admit to their country Sajid Akram and his fellow Sydneysiders - as in practitioners of Sydneycide.
I am in favour of mass deportation - of deIslamising North America, Western Europe and the Antipodes. If you're not, you're part of the problem, and you're enabling the next ten-year-old Matilda. For Andrew Christopher above: Matilda also used to be part of "the Australian way of life".
But she's dead.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the health of the state. On Saturday the latest edition of Mark's weekend music show celebrated a singer who died far too young and one who lived to an impressive age, while Rick McGinnis's movie date opted for the unbeatable Jean Arthur. On Sunday we offered Part Fifteen of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone - plus a seasonal Song of the Week taking in the charms of Maryland and of revolutionary Marxism. Our marquee presentation was the third of this year's Christmas Tales for Our Time - Anthony Trollope's Christmas at Thompson Hall. Click for Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
If you were too busy this weekend denouncing what Nigel Farage said in the Dulwich College Remove in 1953, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, feel free to comment away below. If you're not a member but you'd like to be, you can sign up for a full year, or, lest you suspect a dubious scam by a fly-by-night shyster, merely a quarter. And don't forget our gift membership for a friend or loved one. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, please see here.
