When Dialogue Refuses the Truth

Bondi Beach, Pope Leo XIV, and why Christianity makes peace intelligible as a moral absolute

The Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, in which gunmen armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and a tactical rifle opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration, killing at least eleven innocent men, women, and children and wounding dozens more, has quickly seared itself into the conscience of the world. It was not merely a crime; it was an act of terror deliberately targeted at a people praying and singing and celebrating the Festival of Lights. One of the attackers has been arrested and another was killed at the scene; improvised explosive devices were also found and defused nearby. The authorities have rightly called it a terrorist incident, a deliberate attempt to terrorise a community during its most sacred festival.

In the next few days, commentators of every stripe will no doubt rush to interpret what this means for Western societies, for multiculturalism, for security policy, and for interfaith relations. Among these voices there are those who see in the carnage evidence of a civilisational clash, and some go further to deduce that this is simply further evidence that Islam itself, as a religious and moral system, cannot be a reliable partner in peace. This instinct is understandable on an emotional level. Violence of this nature pushes the human heart toward fear, toward suspicion, and toward the narrowing of horizons in search of safety.

To say that those who judge Islam by the violence repeatedly committed in its name are making an illegitimate leap from isolated criminal acts is, on close inspection, clearly inadequate. Our judgments about any religious or moral system are not formed in a vacuum; they are formed by the patterns of reasoning the system permits, the texts it authorises, the precedents it venerates, and the outcomes it repeatedly produces when taken seriously by committed adherents. No one assesses Marxism without reference to the regimes it inspired, nor nationalism without reference to the wars it has fuelled. To insist that Islam be treated as uniquely immune from such evaluation is not intellectual fairness but a refusal of moral scrutiny.