Two columns today from supposedly fair and reasonable media outlets confirm MGH’s worse fears: that Australia’s unofficial federal opposition – Australia’s mainstream mediocre – have decided last weekend’s Bondi Beach mass murders is their chance to damage federal Labor and lift the Liberal Party out of its current death spiral.

The two columns? A lengthy ABC piece about religious discrimination from Jessica Longbottom and commentary in today’s The Sydney Morning Herald from Rob Harris.

Let’s do over Harris first.

Above is Robbi Harrisstein …, sorry! Rob Harris – in today’s SMH with a very favourable view of Josh Frydenberg’s speech at Bondi Beach.

As the heading of his piece clearly attests, Harris asserts that the speech was a moral accusation and its power “was that it did not sound like anything produced by the Australian political system in a long time.”

“After many years of offering caution, it was the most important moment of his public life because it stripped everything else away.

Really, Robbi Harrisstein? Sorry, Rob Harris.

While the MGH crew and what they believe a large majority of Australians would have seen and heard was an ex-pollie perhaps auditioning for a return to Canberra but more importantly joining in the far-right chorus accusing Anthony Albanese of fostering anti-Semitic and doing nothing to prevent the Bondi tragedy. And widespread anger that the Opposition and online RWNJs were using Bondi for political gain and to further divide the Australian community, whipping up more hatred and division instead of supporting the government in whatever action it takes to prevent such attacks from ever taking place again.

Harris saw only “anger, grief and a refusal to sanitise reality”. He wrote that the former Treasurer ”spoke not in abstractions but from lived experience”.

The Jewish family had been abandoned and left alone. Frydenberg: “Our Prime Minister, our government, has allowed Australia to be radicalised on his watch”.

And Robbi Harrisstein’s final paragraph: Some say Frydenberg spoke too harshly. But history is rarely kind to leaders who confuse restraint with virtue when the foundations are under attack.

We’re not sure but we think these words, as the Herald moves further to the right, are Harris’s current way of getting across the Newscorpse message vomitously repeated over the past seven days that Albanese allowed anti-semitism to flourish, his disgraceful decision to support a Palestinian state had much to do with that, and ipso facto, he has blood on his hand as if he had taken part in the shootings and should resign immediately in disgrace!

And then we have Jessica Longbottom’s piece on the ABC online today (Saturday).

Let’s call a spade a spade. It was a very lengthy piece – we lost count after 80 paragraphs – of the experience of a Melbourne Jewish man and his family but its central theme was clear as the ABC promo above shows: the anti-semitism flung at him and his family was due to the Hamas’ murderous attack on southern Israel on October 7 and last Sunday’s killings at Bondi Beach.

Not anything that happened in between. Longbottom to her credit does mention the Palestinian death toll in Gaza over the past 27 months but does bugger-all to disabuse her subject of the notion that supposed Muslim atrocities that bookended the period of history covered were the cause of escalating anti-semitism in Australia.

Longbottom doesn’t question the statement that Hamas was totally responsible for the 1200 Israelis murdered that October day and she remains silent when her Jewish subject said something very interesting in the final paragraphs of the article.

Gaby says he understands people have strong opinions about the war in Gaza and the calls for a Palestinian state.

He holds strong views as well. But he wants people to engage in dialogue, not a screaming match.

“To take a conflict that is occurring in Israel and use that as a justification to [abuse] or hurt or kill Jews in Australia is a twisted and utterly abominable mindset,” Gaby says.

“It doesn’t gel with what this country represents and what it stands for.”

Longbottom really should have asked this victim of rising anti-semitism in his and his family’s daily lives what his strong views were on what’s happened in Gaza these past two-and-a-bit years.

As one of our MGH compilers put it bluntly: “It would have let us know is this chap is a good Jew or one of those not-so-nice Jews who truly believe the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and The West Bank is a price worth paying to make Greater Israel a reality.”

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