Noam Chomsky once said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
It’s hard not to feel like we’re living inside that quote.
As we stand on an increasingly warming planet - made worse not by your once in a year takeaway coffee cup, but by systems built on endless extraction and denial (that’s another article) - we’ve somehow landed in what feels like the final manufactured debate of the year: Palestine activism and Arabic words.
Why are these the questions we are being asked to answer?
The horrific antisemitic Bondi shooting should have prompted careful reflection, accountability and a thorough investigation. Instead, it quickly became a conversation about Palestine activism, protest rights and the Arabic word intifada. This shift did not happen. It was made to happen.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff argues that every story is structured around three roles: a hero, a victim and a villain. In the immediate aftermath, the story looked something like this:
Hero: Ahmad Al Ahmad
Victim: Jewish community
Villain: the two shooters
Clear and appropriate.
But stories don’t stay still, especially when power gets nervous.
As political pressure builds, the framing shifts. Within the conservative moral logic, the “lesser evil” can become acceptable, even virtuous, if it claims to prevent a greater one. In this case, the lesser evil is restricting civil liberties, protest rights and speech. The government, after all, can’t be seen to be doing nothing, so it does something. And that something is exactly what Chomsky warned us about: narrowing the range of acceptable opinion while encouraging a loud, emotional, very serious national meltdown over a single Arabic word.
Meanwhile, people attending a vigil in Magandjin (Brisbane) were asked to stand for the Israeli national anthem. The president of Israel was invited to Australia. Cheap political point-scoring is being thrown around to shield Israel from any form of criticism. A state actively committing genocide against a civilian population is increasingly spoken about as a victim in this confused morality play.
The story shifted once more, and so did its characters:
Hero: Ahmad Al Ahmad and the Australian government
Victim: The Jewish community and the entire state of Israel
Villain: Palestine activists
This didn’t require a formal announcement. It happened through tone and repetition.
Of course extremism exists. Of course the Bondi attack deserves a thorough, transparent investigation. What’s worth questioning is how confidently politicians and media outlets appear to have reached their conclusions before that investigation has even taken place.
I don’t believe people are inherently racist. I do believe people respond to the political and media climate they’re immersed in.
After scapegoating a convenient group - by many of the same actors who have aided and abetted a livestreamed genocide - the media then asks the public questions that simply harvest what they have already sown: Should Palestine protests be banned?
I refuse that framing.
What’s missing from this entire conversation is any serious discussion about systemic causation - a term the Zionist lobby is now using opportunistically, without interrogation, to advance their own agendas. George Lakoff has long argued that foreign policy and domestic politics are deeply intertwined. That raises a question we seem unwilling to ask: what happens when Judaism is deliberately conflated with a state actively engaged in mass slaughter, and that conflation is repeated until it feels natural?
Of course, the actions of extremists are never justifiable. That part isn’t up for debate. What I do see, though, is a lot of intellectual dishonesty that doesn’t make anyone safer, it just makes us less honest.
As a Palestinian who has been a victim of Israel before I was even born, it’s honestly a miracle that my people continue to distinguish between Judaism and the state of Israel. Despite being slaughtered, maimed, imprisoned, raped, ethnically cleansed - and then blamed for our own deaths - we still draw that line. That’s thanks to our intellectuals, people like Azmi Bishara, who worked relentlessly to make sure our rage over the injustices we are witnessing is directed where it belongs: at a racist, colonial project called Zionism, not at Jewish people.
Now, we’re being told by scholars, politicians and media institutions that making this distinction is dangerous. Which one is actually dangerous?
In late-stage capitalism, nuance doesn’t come naturally. Not when simplified frameworks are pushed onto a public too exhausted to go digging for context themselves. If the response to one massacre is to become more complicit in a genocide, we’ve failed spectacularly. Calling for “unity” by silencing legitimate criticism of a foreign state actively committing genocide isn’t just wrong - it’s morally indefensible.
In a country that decided the shooters are Muslims and Ahmad Al Ahmad is Australian, it is worth remembering that these identities are not mutually exclusive. The identities we assign say less about reality and more about what we’re willing - or unwilling - to accept.
We’re told we’re having a “national conversation.” It feels more like being handed a multiple-choice question where all the answers are written for us. While we argue over language and the right to protest, the machinery of violence keeps humming along, safely out of frame. Funny how that works.