This is the most telling part of the government’s review of the Sydney siege:
“[Man Haron] Monis’ acts of personal violence were exclusively directed towards women who he knew in one capacity or another, rather than towards the public at large. National security agencies assessed there was nothing to suggest Monis was involved in terrorist related activities.”
Monis didn’t slip below the radar of security agencies. He was on it, constantly, and particularly in the days before the siege. But they decided he wasn’t a threat.
Monis, they reasoned, had only been violent to women he knew, mostly in the privacy of his or their home. Nothing to see here, despite that violence, and despite a history of mental health problems.
Today, a desperate Tony Abbott, standing Obama-like in front of a row of flags, promised yet further strengthening of security and immigration laws, and further restrictions on free speech, and released a report calling for more money for security agencies.
What no one is addressing is the extensive evidence that agencies didn’t need more power or more money or more information to stop Monis before he walked into the Lindt cafe — they needed to see violence against women as more than just a niche issue unrelated to their job of protecting Australians.
Apparently the hypocrisy of Crikey knows no bounds. Twisting the Martin Place incident to bolster Crikey’s perennial opposition to improving Australia’s protection against the ever-increasing Terrorist threats has them rabbiting on about an issue which (as far as I can see) never worried them about such serious cover-ups as the media’s ignoring of the Muslim attacks on young women who had the misfortune to be alone in carriages on the Canterbury Bankstown line.
The hypocrisy is sickening.
Is it hypocrisy to point out the gender discrimination of our government and our security services that permitted a serial woman assaulter with mental problems to roam free in the community. Abbott has created a politically convenient scare campaign to using this man as a terrorist but totally disregarding his long history as a perpetrator of domestic violence. It’s OK to beat up women but if you wave a Muslim flag you you become important to the nation. The hypocrisy here is the behaviour of our Prime Minister.
You can’t have it both ways Marion. You can’t say our security forces should have locked up Manis because he was a woman assaulter roaming free in the community and than accuse Abbott of a politically convenient scare campaign as a response to his actions.
The hypocrisy here is yours.
Hypocrisy.
Don’t the left love that word? I think it must be the moralising judgement wrapped up in that one little word. The trouble is that by using it too much you change its meaning.
Whichever side of politics you follow and whatever you think should be done about terrorism, don’t miss the point. This is that violence is violence. The belief that private violence is not of consequence in the public arena is wrong. The belief that men who are violent to women are not steadily escalating in the extent and seriousness of the violence they perpetrate is usually wrong. The belief that domestic violence offenders are not willing to risk the death of their victims is wrong. The offense that police are most fearful of its domestic violence – for a reason. Two women a fortnight die from domestic violence with no national outrage on the terrorism scale although it is domestic terrorism. This ignorance lead to a fundamental error in assessing how dangerous Monks was to the community. If we don’t acknowledge this error and learn from it, it will happen again.