Stones of stupidity show we’re too dumb to save ourselves
SO, WHAT to call these bollards Premier Dan Andrews is putting up to — hah! — stop terrorists?
How best to describe the lumps of concrete going up outside Federation Square and the Bourke St Mall to stop jihadists running us down? Immigration Monuments? After all, we wouldn’t need them if our immigration policy hadn’t brought in lots of badly assimilated young men who subscribe to a resentful faith.
Refugee Bollards? See, we wouldn’t need them if our refugee program hadn’t imported the jihadists behind Australia’s last four terrorist attacks, including the one in Melbourne last week that led Andrews to call in the concreters.
If Andrews wants bollards, at least put them where they are most needed: in front of the airport gates.
Join the dots. Japan last year took in just 28 refugees. Number of Islamist attacks there? Zero. But Australia takes 17,000 refugees a year, and added 12,000 from Syria and Iraq. Number of Islamist attacks here? Five in three years, and 11 foiled plots.
Yet no Liberal or Labor politician dares shut the gates. Instead, they give us this bollard farce.
Yes, farce. Why bollards only at one square and one mall, and at a handful of other sites to come?
Why not bollards on our bridges, too, as London now has? And outside busy railway stations? At crossings over which football fans stream to the ground? At shopping strips and country fairs? Bollards at only a few symbolic places are just to make you think you are being protected.
How long will this pretence go on? After terrorists hijacked aeroplanes in the September 11 attacks, cockpit doors were double-bolted. So the terrorists used explosives and guns. When those got harder to find, they resorted to mow-’em-down trucks.
And in last week’s London attacks they settled for just knives.
Our MPs must face facts: what’s most lethal is not what’s in the terrorists’ hands but what’s in their heads. It’s their ideology. So shut the gate until we’ve dealt with what we’ve let in.
Meanwhile, Andrews could help best by instructing his bureaucracy, including schools, to stop preaching the tribalism and black-armband history that makes us unlovable to newcomers of prouder faiths. Who’d want to join us self-haters?
No, this is war, and Andrews’s bollards — his stones of stupidity — show we’re still too dumb to save ourselves.