Australians Being Massacred Shouldn’t Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred

Caitlin Johnstone, 16 Dec 25, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/australians-being-massacred-shouldnt?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=181738154&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say”.

Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025?

Does that day stand out in anyone’s memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder?

No?

Same here.

I honestly can’t remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake “ceasefire”, a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn’t one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn’t exactly stand out in the memory.

I have no idea who those people were. I don’t know their names. I never saw their pictures flashing across my news feed. I never saw any western officials denouncing their deaths, or media institutions giving wall-to-wall coverage to the news of their killing. So I don’t remember them.

I saw a tweet from Aaron Maté yesterday:

“15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.

“Israel’s atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the number one driver of anti-Semitism worldwide. And to show how little Israel and its apologists care about anti-Semitism, many are exploiting the Sydney massacre to justify Israel’s rejection of a Palestinian state; baselessly blame Iran; and demand more censorship of anti-genocide protests.”

Indeed, the worst people on earth are using the Bondi Beach shooting to argue for crackdowns on free speech and freedom of assembly to silence Israel’s critics online and on the streets, in Australia and throughout the western world. And when 15 Palestinians were killed by Israel on March 16, the west barely noticed.

I don’t remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.

Hell, I can’t blame it all on society; if I’m honest I made a much bigger deal about it myself. I’ve felt sick thinking about the shooting ever since it happened, partly because I know it’s going to be used to roll out authoritarian measures and stomp out free speech in my country, but also partly because I’ve felt so bad for those who died and their loved ones. Even after spending two years denouncing the way western society normalizes the murder of Arabs and places more importance on western lives than Palestinian lives, I’m still basically doing the same thing myself. I’m a damn hypocrite.

I wasn’t born this way. This was learned behavior. If I had my slate cleaned and could see the world through fresh eyes it would never occur to me that I and my society would ever see 15 people being murdered in Australia as more significant than 15 people being murdered in Palestine. I would expect them to be viewed as exactly as terrible.

And they should be. Palestinians don’t love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren’t any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did.

Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives have been directly devastated by this tragedy, thousands more indirectly, and in some ways the nation as a whole has been changed. The trauma will reverberate in the victim’s families for generations. The sorrow is palpable and ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; in the streets, at the supermarket. There is catastrophe in the air, and people around the world are feeling it.

And this is appropriate. This is what 15 deaths ought to feel like. This is what it feels like when you see mass murder inflicted upon a population whose murder hasn’t become normalized for you.

That’s all I’ve got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.

In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we’re really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world, who might not look and speak and live as they do. Maybe even extending it so far as caring about the non-human organisms who share our planet with us.

As Einstein wrote in a condolence letter toward the end of his life,

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

Humanity won’t survive into the distant future unless we grow into a conscious species, and part of that growth will necessarily include widening our circles of compassion to include our fellow beings around the world. If we can’t do that, we’re not going to make it. We’re too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it simply is not sustainable. It’ll get us all killed eventually.

We’ve got to become better. We’ve got to become more caring. More emotionally intelligent. Less susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and the pursuit of profit.

That’s the only way we’re making it out of this awkward adolescent transition stage with these large, capable brains still wound up in vestigial evolutionary fear-based conditioning. That’s the only way we achieve our true potential and build a healthy world together.

December 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Catholic bishops remind political leaders that nuclear weapons are immoral.

our new Pope Leo XIV said, “Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.”

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago. “We strongly urge both the world and the Japanese government to take this ‘sign of the times’ deeply to heart, and to take immediate steps toward the signing and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon

Bulletin, By John Wester | December 14, 2025

In August, a group of American Catholic Church leaders—including Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, DC, Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle, and me, the Archbishop of Santa Fe—traveled to Japan to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There, we joined our Japanese counterparts—Bishop Mitsuru Shirahama of Hiroshima, Archbishop Emeritus Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, and Archbishop Michiaki Nakamura of Nagasaki—in commemorating the destruction of their cities. Takami is a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor); he was in his mother’s womb on August 9, 1945, when his city of Nagasaki was bombed. His maternal aunt and grandmother were both killed in the blast.

Eighty years have passed. But the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons is still with us—and it is growing worse every day. In 2019, Pope Francis elevated the Catholic Church beyond conditional acceptance of so-called deterrence. He declared that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Nevertheless, the nuclear powers are now spending enormous sums of money on “modernization” that will keep nuclear weapons virtually forever. Meanwhile, in the United States, taxes are being cut to benefit the rich, and economic inequality and homelessness are exploding. This situation is deeply immoral and counter to the Catholic Church’s teachings on social justice.

Today, the United States has entered a new arms race involving multiple nuclear powers, new cyber weapons, and artificial intelligence. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said the world survived the Cuban Missile Crisis only thanks to luck. This is not a sustainable survival strategy: Luck is not eternal. Even the remote possibility of “nuclear winter” makes nuclear disarmament a profound pro-life issue on an immense scale.

The word “deterrence” has been used by successive US presidents to justify nuclear weapons. But that one word is only a half-truth. The United States has always rejected minimal deterrence and, instead, preferred to include nuclear warfighting capabilities—capabilities that can end civilization overnight. Russia has followed the same course. That is why both sides still have thousands of nuclear weapons instead of only a few hundred, with China now racing to expand its own arsenal. That is why the United States plans to spend nearly $1 trillion “to operate, sustain, and modernize current nuclear forces and purchase new [nuclear weapons] forces” in the next 10 years alone.

This is contrary to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, in which the non-nuclear weapon states pledged never to acquire nuclear weapons. In return, the nuclear powers promised to enter into negotiations leading to disarmament—a promise that has never been honored. From that betrayal sprang the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which the Vatican was the first nation-state to sign and ratify. The nuclear-weapon states oppose the TPNW, arguing that it does not effectively advance disarmament and could instead fuel further proliferation. But the treaty does nothing more than ban nuclear weapons, just like previous treaties that enjoyed universal support banned biological and chemical weapons, which are also weapons of mass destruction.

A prime example of this nuclear immorality is right in my own backyard of New Mexico.

A whopping $1 billion is being added to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s annual $4 billion nuclear weapons budget, largely for the expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores. However, no future pit production is to maintain the existing stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons that will fuel the new arms race. The development of new weapon systems could prompt the United States to return to explosive nuclear testing, which would have severe proliferation consequences. Meanwhile, the lab’s science, nonproliferation, and cleanup programs are being cut, and research on renewable energies is being zeroed out.

Jobs are often cited by the New Mexico congressional delegation as justification for expanding nuclear weapons programs in New Mexico. But jobs at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories would be far better directed toward peaceful purposes. Nuclear weapon “modernization” diverts money from helping the poor and feeding the hungry—two far more important moral objectives than feeding warheads and war plans. In FY 2026, the Energy Department plans to spend $10.8 billion in New Mexico alone—the same amount as the state government’s entire operating budget. Of that federal money, 84 percent is for nuclear weapons research and production programs. Still, New Mexico remains the third poorest state in the nation and is ranked dead last in the quality of public education and the lives of our children.

People of all faiths—as well as people of no faith at all—need to know that the American Catholic Church is deeply engaged in nuclear disarmament issues. In a message addressed to Bishop Shirahama of Hiroshima on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing, our new Pope Leo XIV said, “Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.” The Vatican’s Holy See delegation to the United Nations recently called “on all nuclear-armed States to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons by engaging in good faith negotiations [and] to ratify the NPT, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, as well as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” In that same spirit, two years ago, the dioceses of Santa Fe, Seattle, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki joined together to form the Partnership for a World without Nuclear Weapons to work on nuclear disarmament. We invite other Catholic entities to join us.

On August 5, the two American Cardinals present in Japan delivered stirring words from the Hiroshima World Peace Memorial Cathedral, whose bricks contain ashes from the atomic bomb. “We pray that this award [the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to the hibakusha organization Nihon Hidankyo] may become a light of hope toward a world without nuclear weapons,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago. “We strongly urge both the world and the Japanese government to take this ‘sign of the times’ deeply to heart, and to take immediate steps toward the signing and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

“If our gathering here today is to mean anything, it must mean that in fidelity to all those whose lives were destroyed or savagely damaged on August 6, 80 years ago, we refuse to live in such a world of nuclear proliferation and risk-taking,” said Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington. “We will resist, we will organize, we will pray, we will not cease, until the world’s nuclear arsenals have been destroyed.”

December 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment