Perth’s Invasion Day bomb didn’t shock the nation

A white supremacist brought a nail bomb to Invasion Day, but the nation’s reaction wasn’t outrage. Tom Tanuki reports.

It took just under two weeks for WA Police to charge the man who tried to detonate a bomb at Perth’s Invasion Day rally with an act of terrorism.

This wait confused many of us who thought we knew exactly what motivated the bombing attempt. To be fair, it was said that to meet the threshold of being classified as an act of terrorism, the action had to have been carried out with a political purpose in mind. (Again, we all suspected we knew exactly what the imagined political goal was.)

More importantly, many people were frustrated by the lack of attention felt by the same public, press and political circles who mourned Bondi’s horrific attack loudly and in unison – rightfully so, of course.

Was the line between national outrage and the comparative indifference we see here merely a faulty fuse in a homemade nail bomb?

Was that the only difference, even as our nation’s leaders stepped up a series of draconian new laws and surveillance powers designed to protect the public from further violence like the one we saw at Bondi?

Celeste Liddlewrites for cricket, he asked:

What if the bomb had actually exploded? Would politicians make headlines with headlines full of sadness and emotion and fill parliamentary speech lists with statements of condolence? Would members of the public flock to Forrest Chase to hold vigils and leave floral offerings?

Will we finally be able to recognize the “Day of Mourning”, which was officially declared after 88 years? Or would they be happy that Lang Hancock’s feelings from years ago had finally been acted upon?

Yes, there was condemnation from both parties in Parliament, and as the situation developed there was quite a bit of media coverage and some discussion outside of the expected Indigenous and activist circles. But beyond that, I wondered: Is this where the attitude of ordinary Channel Seven viewers has come, who have for years marginalized not just Indigenous people, but especially Indigenous activists (and other activists who stood alongside them on Invasion Day and in public protests elsewhere, for that matter)?

I wonder if they think:

They are at a rally. They are the rabble. They were probably blocking the ambulance. They were probably burning flags. They were probably blocking morning traffic. They’re probably somehow responsible for this.

But we are now certain that the man to blame is a white supremacist. Are we going to take this situation seriously anymore?

More specifically, WA’s Police Commissioner Col Blanch said he was “self-radicalised” by “pro-white material online”.

I liked seeing the term “pro-white” used here because I thought it was appropriate. Seeing the term used here will disappoint some white supremacists who hope to use terms like “pro-white” as a rehabilitation for the more violent implications and histories behind “white supremacy” as we know it.

But “pro-white” conspiratorial propaganda directs its targets into the same channel, encouraging them to take harsh and violent action against those accused of committing an imagined genocide against whites.

If that bomb had gone off, not only would it not have been the first “pro-white” bombing in Perth. The first of these was carried out in the 1990s when two Chinese restaurants were firebombed by “pro-white” neo-Nazi Jack Van Tongeren.

Former NSN member Gabe Seymour shared a screenshot on his Telegram page in the days before Invasion Day to encourage someone to drive their vehicle into one of the rallies.

In this context, it doesn’t matter whether I believe any honest “pro-white” “advocacy” should exist. (Ha!) The bottom line is this: I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to be invented by the same political scene that gave us Brenton Tarrant and now the nail bomb.

At a joint AFP and WA Police press conference, police asked family members to ask if they were concerned their loved ones were being dragged into the same kind of “self-radicalisation” pipeline that caught the alleged Perth bomber. But for what purpose?

Former NSN members told me about their efforts to avoid extreme radicalization by the state. They report that anonymous psychologists have little rapport with young men and often give the impression that they are curious rather than seeking therapy.

I mentioned some of these in my last article. In this piece, published just before Invasion Day, I warned of the threat of allowing many “lone actors” self-radicalized online by white supremacist ideology to walk away without any peer support or funding for community-led de-radicalization initiatives to help their desperate families.

No, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m just warning people once again that Van Tongeren, Tarrant and that nail bomb in Perth are expressions of the violent conspiratorial ideology that we’ve been feeding and inciting recently with all these laws and prohibitions. It’s not going away and we haven’t had a real reckoning with it yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUTZErLYdvA

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, author, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on Australia’s political wing are published on: YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.

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