When Justice Becomes Complicity

It is one of the peculiar features of our age that the language of “peace” is now most often deployed to baptise movements of hatred.

Consider Justice Belinda Riggs, who sanctioned the “Free Palestine” march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Her justification?

“The march at this location is motivated by the belief that the horror and urgency of the situation in Gaza demands an urgent and extraordinary response from the people of the world… The evidence indicates there is significant support for the march.”

Pause there. “Belief” and “support” elevated above law and security. By that logic, mobs rather than statutes dictate Australian justice. By that logic, chants matter more than facts, and “beliefs” however marinated in Hamas propaganda acquire a legitimacy higher than truth. That is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The police warned of risk. The Premier warned of division. The march could have happened anywhere else. Yet the court enthroned the mob on Australia’s most sacred civic stage. And so Sydney awoke to what was triumphantly branded a “peaceful” protest.

Peaceful? Placards shrieked “Zionists are terrorists.” Israel’s Prime Minister was caricatured as Hitler. Hamas flags fluttered freely. Iran’s theocrat was praised. ISIS flags waved without shame.

This was not peace. It was the glorification of terror, projected across the Sydney skyline.

Israel’s reality is already painfully clear: every concession brings not peace but rockets, massacres, and vows of annihilation. The fantasy of a “two‑state solution” is not peace‑making but wilful blindness. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the very lessons of history.

And here in Australia, the question presses harder still. What use are anti‑racism laws if Jews alone are never shielded by them? What meaning has “social cohesion” if Jewish Australians must watch terrorist banners paraded across national landmarks in triumph? Ours is a culture that congratulates itself daily on its opposition to racism, yet uniquely finds its Jewish minority expendable.

This is not justice. It is surrender. A precedent has been set that imported hatreds, if loud enough, can commandeer our most precious symbols.

The condition has a name. It is the same weakness that has long plagued the West: a tendency to praise the very ideologies that despise us, mistaking cowardice for tolerance. It is also the madness of crowds, when noise replaces reason, hysteria masquerades as moral urgency, and leaders mistake intimidation for moral clarity.

The Bridge was not a stage for “peace” but a trophy. A captured landmark. Proof that if one shouts loudly enough, the courts and politicians will yield.

The shame is not only on a judge but on every leader who still mouths platitudes about unity while acquiescing to division. Because the issue here is not Palestine. Nor Israel. It is whether Australia’s institutions belong to principle or to the mob.

And on that test, they failed.