The Bondi Killer and Caring About What is True.

You've Done It Again, Haven't You?

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

Today, a man entered Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre in Sydney with a knife, stabbing at least 14 people killing six and injuring another eight including a nine-month-old baby before being shot dead by a police officer. Police have said they think they know who the perpetrator was but formal identification has yet to take place and, if they are correct, it is a 40-year-old man slightly known to them for reasons which indicate that the attack was not ideologically motivated. They said it was too early to know the motive and that it is unhelpful to speculate. As usual, social media users are determined to be unhelpful and, as usual, speculations are deeply unpleasant, paranoid and partisan.

On this occasion the war raging over the identity of the attacker centres around competing claims that he was Muslim or that he was Jewish and tying this into the Israel/Hamas war. There is vast amounts of projection going on as people who want the mass murderer to have been one of these accusing others of wanting him to be the other one for reasons of racial and/or religious hatred and political bias. Much of the speculation is centred around the appearance of the attacker, with those who want him to be Muslim using images of him in shadow making it possible that he is of Middle Eastern descent, although his colouring is also found all over Europe but particularly in the Mediterranean and others have used images from more well-lit areas to show that the murderer is white. Accusations that he ‘looks Jewish’ seem to be founded on the fact that he has a somewhat aquiline nose which is also found commonly in many genetic populations and is also often referred to as a ‘Roman nose.”

The claims that this is an Islamist terror attack seems to be based mostly on “Well, that’s what they do and also, he has a beard” reasoning while claims that it is a Jewish terror attack is based on Australian Senator, Penny Wong, having called for a ceasefire in the Israel/Hamas war. A young musician named “Ben Cohen” was identified as the perpetrator by a Twitter user seemingly on no evidence at all except that he is in the right general location and has a similar colouring and facial features. He certainly does not look as though he is forty and other commentators have pointed out that his hairline and ears are different. He also has particularly bushy eyebrows while the perpetrators are thin. One might almost suspect that somebody chose a particularly common Jewish name and then searched LinkedIn to find someone with a vaguely similar physiology. An account identifying itself as Mr. Cohen’s father has now appealed to the police to reveal the identity of the perpetrator.

As I have been writing this piece, news has now come in that the attacker is a “Joel Cauchi,” a name which seems to originate in Italy or France, although this individual is originally from Brisbane. It seems he was known to the police due to mental health issues and those were the “elements” they referred to as indicating that this was not a terror attack. It is to be hoped that this will be accepted as it is common for a certain subset of social commentators to claim this as an excuse made when a mass murderer is white. Investigations will now need to take place into whether the behaviour that made the police aware of his mental illness should have been sufficient to confine him to a psychiatric hospital for the safety of others.

There was never any evidence that this was an ideologically motivated attack. The footage shows Cauchi walking or jogging in a leisurely fashion around the shopping centre and lunging at people but turning his attention elsewhere if they were able to run away. He did not speak or respond to anybody who spoke to him and the only indication he gave of allegiance to anything was his Australian Rugby strip. The reason that five of his six fatal stabbings were women seems quite likely to be that, of the people who were unable to move out of his way quickly enough, more were female. He did not appear to be targeting members of any demographic in particular.

Even if the attacker had turned out to be Muslim or Jewish (and he still might as having a name of Italian or French origin does not tell us anything definitive about this), this would not have indicated that religious or ethnic identity had anything to do with his murderous actions. Muslims and Jews do things that have nothing to do with being Muslim or Jewish all the time and can also suffer from mental illness. We saw this in the case of Nicholas Salvador who beheaded an elderly woman, Mrs Silva. Because he was understood to be Muslim, social media was full of people claiming that this was a terrorist attack despite it having been reported that he was shouting about cats having stolen from him and had killed two cats before attacking Mrs Silva. He was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity because he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and believed himself to be surrounded by demons who had taken on feline or human form.

If Mr. Cauchi were acting under a similar delusion and was unaware that he was killing human beings, some might consider it a blessing that he will never have his psychosis successfully treated and come to the realisation that he killed six people. I think I would rather that outcome, although, ethically, his life should have been saved if at all possible and his level of culpability determined. It was not possible and the police officer who acted quickly and decisively to save lives is to be commended. It is to be hoped that she will suffer no lasting psychological harm from the action she was forced to take. These horrific murders should never have been used to enable people to air anti-immigration or anti-Muslim sentiment or some of the most appalling antisemitism I have ever seen. Nor should the deaths of six people, including the mother who could not flee because she was protecting her baby with her own body have been used in this way. We can only hope that young Mr. Cohen will not be harmed by having been selected to fuel the desire to have a Jewish terrorist to point at in a particularly nasty partisan culture war we have no reason to think he was part of.

Social media is now full of people saying they hope that those involved in spreading such biased speculation and downright malicious lies are now ashamed of themselves. Of course, the malicious liars will have no such shame, but we can hope that some of those who have allowed themselves to be swept up in a ideological narrative will have shocked themselves into placing greater value on waiting to learn the truth of any situation. It is simply not virtuous to use the deaths of six people, the injuries of eight more, a mentally ill killer, a brave police officer and an innocent saxophonist to signal one’s allegiance to a political cause, no matter how strongly one feels about it. People are not pawns to be used in partisan narratives and no just cause can ever be served either by the demonisation of groups or disregard for what is true. History has shown us this time and time again. Please learn from it.