Wog Day Afternoon
Yes, I'm being rude because I'm incensed. I'm particularly hating on the identity politics being drawn out like one of those outlines they draw on corpses in old American movies. If this is allowed to become an identity politics issue, we'll see it feed in to the asylum seeker issue, and no good is ever going to come of it.
As the dust and gun smoke settles on the dramatic siege, we now understand that the culprit was a misfit with a gun and the wrong song in his heart. He wanted to have us frame his hostage-taking as a political act, but it seems it was the desperate final act of a cornered man.
I have to say the way things unfolded seemed very strange and disjointed, what with the media embargo and the self-censorship by the mainstream media. But at its heart was the burning question was "What kind of idiot walks into a cafe and turns it into a siege?"
The Lindt Cafe, was across the street from some major banking headquarters as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia. It was also in the vicinity of the consulate generals for the USA and Japan. It was a target rich environment and the man opted to take hostages in the Lindt Cafe. Clearly this wasn't an act of terror, it was a cry for help -but he waved the black flag with the arabic squiggles on it and the media all went, "oh that must be ISIL."
It's only the day after that we're learning the whole thing was ad hoc; he took the wrong flag to his own hostage taking; he wasn't really all that together to begin with; and maybe perhaps should've been behind bars and not out on bail. It's not like I have any special analysis that somebody else isn't hurling around - I'm just jotting down my own outrage at the whole media circus.
It seems incredibly pathetic to me that for the better part of the day while it was unfolding that we were led to believe that it was a political act. It was only political if you take the view that the personal is ipso facto political - the way that Carol Hanisch said it, but applying identity politics to Islam instead of gender. It's kind of stupid to take a bloated subjective sense of one self and seeing in it the universal-political. In the same sense that it's hard to buy this Man Haron Monis' own views about his own political importance, it is hard to buy into the notion that a black flag with arabic writing on it is ergo Terrorism-with-a-capital-'T'. It was more terrifying because it was so gratuitous, so ridiculous in the end-analysis and so bloody stupid. This was not 9/11.
The truth is a lot more easily understood as the random violent undertaking by the unhinged - and more's the pity that two people had to die in all the unleashed chaos. The politicians are making a field day out of this, what with flags flying at half mast and praising the NSW police for their expertise, courage and dutifulness. Look, I don't mean to be the party pooper but it was one middle-aged guy with a shotgun holding hostages in a downtown cafe. It wasn't exactly the public beheading on YouTube of the American journalist somewhere in Syria. Whatever this was, it was not that.
He was just this angry, misplaced future-shocked human being who was looking for an out - an elaborate dramatic - sensationalist even - plot for an assisted suicide. His hostage taking venture was about as stupid as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and went about as well.
What Kind Of Man Reads
Still, we must ask ourselves what kind of manner stupid we were dealing with.
Some years ago there was a dickhead writing letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers castigating them. That was this guy Man Haron Monis.
Some months ago it was reported that some sheikh was offering 'spiritual healing' but turned out he was sexually molesting his customers. That was also this guy Man Haron Monis.
Sometime last year it was reported that some religious dude had stabbed his wife to death and set the corpse on fire. That was this same guy again, Man Haron Monis.
Do you see a pattern emerging where neither the law nor media draws a line to connect these things? This guy was disturbed.
Now the same guy somehow gets bail from his 40 charges of sexual assault and being an accomplice to murder, and goes and does this shitty little thing. I think we're entitled to ask, just what the hell happened inside the system that failed us so badly? The community outrage is going to centre on this issue and the governments - both Federal and NSW - had better have some good answers. So far the indication is pretty cruddy.
Showdown In The Lindt Cafe
Turns out, ASIO knew about this guy and he wasn't on the Terror watch list.
Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday after laying flowers at a spontaneous memorial for the victims at Martin Place, Mr Abbott said Monis was well known to federal and NSW police and ASIO, but "I don't believe that he was on a terror watch list".
"If I can be candid with you, that is the question that we were asking ourselves around the national security committee of the cabinet today," Mr Abbott said.
"How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history, not be on the appropriate watch lists, and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?"
He said the federal government had acted upon hearing "terrorist chatter of acts of random violence against Australian citizens", such as upgrading security at Parliament House in Canberra and raising the terror alert.
"But … we do have to ask ourselves the question, could [the Martin Place incident] have been been prevented?"The answer is, you can't. Unless you're like the Woody Allen joke where he fails a metaphysics exam because he looked into the soul of the student next to him.
More to the point, there's every indication this guy was mentally ill, but nobody diagnosed him.
Short of that, what could they have done? Picked him up on the street and tortured him until he confessed to plot when he himself had no idea what he was going to do until 3 days before? The unknowable is the unknowable for a reason.
A Side Note On Torturing Terrorists
Look, it's not about the Martin Place siege but more about the CIA report, which has been bugging me all week and then this siege happened. We in the wider community know what's right and what's wrong. And we know it right into the heart of democracy. Then suddenly, once in power, these politicians condone the unthinkable. It's such a weird phenomenon.
I found this on YouTube which is tangential, but has something important to say about this stuff:
You tell'em Denzel because they sure didn't listen to the real people who objected after 9/11. After a near-deacde of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think by 2011 we'd descended into this kind of fiction:
We're really not in a good spot in the moral high ground stakes here.
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