Imagine Looking at Bondi and Seeing Inspiration

Most of us see a terrorist attack and think about the people. The lives cut short. The families left waiting for someone who will never come home. Then there are those who apparently look at the same horror and think: I’d like to do that.

According to a report, the FBI has foiled an alleged plot to attack Minnesota’s Mall of America. An eighteen-year-old is accused of planning a mass shooting in support of Islamic State and citing previous massacres, including the Bondi Beach attack, as events he wanted to emulate. 

“Emulating Bondi.” What a revolting ambition. Imagine having your whole life ahead of you and deciding that your great contribution to the world should be destroying somebody else’s. 

Imagine looking at grief and seeing an opportunity to make a name for yourself. There is nothing impressive about mowing down people out having a good time. Any pathetic coward can dream about it when facing a group of ordinary people.

A shopping centre is full of people doing ordinary things. Buying shoes. Meeting a friend. Working a shift. Taking the kids out because everyone needs to get out of the house for a few hours. Nobody should have to calculate whether a trip to the shops might leave their family identifying their body. Yet terrorists want precisely that fear. They want their hatred to follow the rest of us into every ordinary corner of our lives.

And I am thoroughly sick of the grand language that gets wrapped around this crap. Pledges. Causes. Glorious missions. Strip away the theatrical rubbish and consider what the proposed act actually involves: someone with a weapon attacking people who have no chance to defend themselves. All that swagger, all that supposed conviction, directed at strangers who simply happened to be there.

I don't get it. If I lived to be a thousand I don't think I'd get it.

Islamic State’s glorification of violence deserves absolute contempt. So does the mentality that turns murdered people into a score to beat. These were human beings with families, plans, private jokes and unfinished conversations. Their deaths are not material for some aspiring tosser's fantasy of importance.

If these allegations are proved, I want serious punishment that reflects the seriousness of planning mass murder. The fact that authorities intervened should be a reason to thank them, rather than a reason to shrug at what was allegedly intended. Prevention matters because the alternative is another collection of photographs, another vigil and another family trying to survive the unbearable.

For once, the headline tells us a plot was stopped. Thank God for that. Somewhere, people are getting on with their lives who might otherwise have become the subject of the next heartbreaking news report.

They deserve to remain ordinary people having an ordinary day. And anyone who dreams of taking that away deserves our contempt, a thorough investigation and, where guilt is proved, the full force of the law.