Last week, in Sydney, on a Friday afternoon, a well liked and widely respected family man named Curtis Cheng left his place of work, just as he had, day after day, for around seventeen years, walking through the front sliding doors and out onto the concourse in front of the police station in which he worked, not as a police officer, but a public servant. As the whole of Australia now knows, a teenage boy walked up behind him and, in one of the most despicable and cowardly of all acts, shot the quiet family man in the back of the head. Curtis Cheng died instantly. His teenage assailant was gunned down too, but only after marching up and down the street brandishing a gun and shouting “Allah Akhbar.”
Many social and political commentators, especially those of the delusional left, pretended to be clueless as to what could have possibly motivated the teenage gunman, and by evening on Friday the website of the national broadcaster (the disgracefully partisan ABC) was telling its few viewers that it understood the killing was not related to terrorism. It’s quite normal, then, is it, for young men (teenagers), to proceed directly from a mosque, dressed in black robes, to commit hate crimes on the street whilst shouting phrases in Arabic? No clues whatsoever in these details then?
By Saturday morning, however, it was clear that the pretense that this crime had nothing to do with Islam could no longer be sustained, and that continuing to lie to the Australian public was not the best strategy. When the po-faced politicians and high ranking police officers appeared, they had an anguished and heartfelt plea. To offer support for the victim and his family, you would expect? To condemn the crime and denounce it’s motivation, you could be forgiven for thinking? But no. The politicians and the police were pleading, not for the victim, but for the Islamic community – which must not be condemned for this or vilified in any way, not that there was any evidence at all of any such condemnation or vilification. The nation’s Opposition Leader and would be leader, a man not renowned for his sparkling turn of phrase nor for intelligible speech, made one of his more stupid of statements in a pantheon of stupid statements, by saying solemnly that his thoughts were very much with the family of the alleged killer. Excuse me for turning aside and puking and please pray this man is never let anywhere near real and actual power.
One wonders what the family of Curtis Cheng were thinking about all of this. Perhaps they were asking themselves, with the rest of Australia, just how it was that the cold blooded shooting of their loved one became, in the hands of the politicians and authorities, a pretext for imploring tolerance of the Muslim community, rather than an outpouring of grief for them. Once again, by their cowardly rhetoric and willful blindness, our political leaders and authorities have shifted the label of victim onto the Muslim community and effectively absolved it of accountability. Forgive me for being politically incorrect, and shout me down as a bigot if you will – but I have only contempt, scorn and disgust for a religion, a community, a mosque, and a family, capable of producing a teenage coward who shoots an innocent man in the back of the head and then proclaims his God to be great.
My thoughts are with the actual victim. His name is Curtis Cheng. My sympathy is with his family. My prayers are for my nation, Australia.
