The Defence of Murder: A Moral Collapse We Dare Not Ignore

There was a time when the idea of a nurse taking pleasure in the suffering of a patient, of a doctor allowing their own hatred to dictate who lives and who dies, was the stuff of dystopian nightmares. A time when the very suggestion that medical professionals might wield their power with such cruelty would have been dismissed as paranoia, a grim relic of history’s darkest chapters.

Yet, here we are.

In Australia, fifty Muslim organisations have taken it upon themselves to defend a group of nurses who, on social media, openly boasted about harming, perhaps even killing, Israeli patients. There was no ambiguity in their words, no unfortunate misinterpretation, no moment of poor judgement later walked back in regret. They grinned as they said it. They proclaimed it with pride. And when the inevitable storm followed, when the public, in an entirely reasonable act of collective decency, recoiled in disgust, these organisations did not distance themselves. They did not condemn. They did not reaffirm the fundamental principle that a hospital is a place of healing, not an arena for political vengeance. No, instead, they chose to defend the indefensible.

And so the narrative was inverted. No longer was the story about nurses betraying the sacred trust of their profession, but about a supposed witch hunt against them. No longer was the crime to be found in the words of those who revelled in the suffering of their patients, but in the reactions of those who dared to be horrified. Those who had celebrated murder, or at the very least the prospect of it, were now the victims. Those who had condemned them were now the aggressors. It was not the voices of cruelty and hatred that were the problem, but the chorus of outrage that had followed. And thus, as so often happens in these times of moral acrobatics, the guilty became the wronged, the real victims were forgotten, and the conversation shifted away from what mattered most.

This is not simply a matter of a few rogue nurses with despicable views. It is not a scandal that can be neatly contained, dealt with, and moved past. It is part of something larger, something far more insidious. The moment we allow even a flicker of justification for such sentiments, the moment we permit the idea that medical care can be conditional, that a patient’s right to life can be weighed against their nationality, their religion, or their politics, we open the floodgates. What starts as a whispered excuse becomes a spoken defence, and before long, it is no longer an anomaly but an accepted truth.

History offers us no shortage of lessons on how quickly a society can slip from civilised pretence into sanctioned barbarism. The path is always the same. It begins with the toleration of the intolerable. A little indulgence here, a minor accommodation there. First, the words are spoken in jest. Then, they are uttered in anger. Soon, they are policy. The moment a nurse can claim that certain patients do not deserve to live, and the reaction is not one of universal condemnation but of deflection and grievance, we must ask ourselves: what comes next? If this can be defended, what else can be justified? If this is permitted, what limits remain?

The tragedy is not just that these nurses spoke these words. The tragedy is not just that their actions were met with excuses rather than consequences. The real tragedy is that we have seen this pattern before and still refuse to learn from it. The deliberate reversal of victim and perpetrator, the transformation of condemnation into bigotry, the insistence that the real crime is not the act itself but the outrage it provokes—this is how societies lose their way. This is how we create a world where justice is dictated by convenience, where those who hate most freely are those most shielded from accountability, where we become afraid to speak the simple truth that some things are beyond the pale.

It ought to have been a straightforward matter. Nurses who take pleasure in the suffering of their patients must never be allowed near a hospital again. The defence of such behaviour should be unthinkable. Yet here we are, in a world where the celebration of cruelty is excused as political expression, where the expectation of basic decency is branded as prejudice, where the most grotesque sentiments are met not with outrage but with indulgence.

Fifty organisations chose to take a stand, but not against hatred. They could have affirmed that the life of a patient, regardless of nationality, is sacrosanct. They could have recognised that there is no justification, ever, for rejoicing in the pain of another human being. They could have drawn a clear line between activism and outright barbarism. Instead, they chose to muddy the waters, to turn an act of moral clarity into a political dispute, to defend those who should be indefensible.

What we permit, we encourage. What we excuse, we legitimise. And what we defend today will become the precedent for tomorrow. If we do not draw the line here, now, we will one day find ourselves wondering why we ever thought there was a line at all.