Filtered Through High Altitude Extremism
If they didn't want alternative voices, they had to censor everybody, they had to drag everybody through the courts, they had to demonetise, persecute, make deranged or begin their deranged attacks. There's something in the air, a woman down the dog park, and shivered theatrically. The stabbing in Bondi Junction. Westfields. A busy, but essentially innocuous place. Gucci. Up market stores. Pampered Eastern Sydney mums. The carpark full of BMWs.
And then a bishop stabbed in Western Sydney.
Stabbing, the most intimate, the most violent form of violence, to penetrate the flesh up close. Not just the pull of a trigger and violent consequence, but intimate, there, blood. Anger. Outrage. A people moving on into another quagmire of deceit, censorship, of outright lies, of suppression. For they knew best. No, they didn't. They held the reigns of power. Briefly.
And so the country was filled with putrid air, and violence, a kind of racialised, impersonal, ancient and new violence that flowed on slipstreams, invisible, deadly, with purpose and intent. A madness set upon the people.
The tensions were building. And yet here, on the South Coast, most of the stories were happy, or found happiness, carved happiness out of the hills and out of life, purported, loved, young families, decent folk, as the offensive saying went. Decent, calm, intelligent, pleasant, lives without drugs and alcohol and the torment of addiction, and the inner city wasteoids he had once found so fascinating, and now could not bear to be around.
Messy people, who needed them. Certainly not him. He was doing happy stories down the coast. The community garden saved from developers. A local hero rescuing a man from a roaring torrent. All of it over and passing in the slipstream they called time, out there on the rim, the border of consciousness, out there among the stars, those feeding stars, where energy and life abounded, and he was here and you are there and we are combined in one great love, an orgy of life. On the slipstream, in the ether, down here on the planet surface, in a country called Australia, in a region called the South Coast.
The old growth forests beckoned, as did the Lords of yore.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA
BBC
A 16-year-old boy has been arrested after a bishop and several churchgoers were stabbed during a sermon in Sydney.
The incident happened on Monday evening at the Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the suburb of Wakeley.
At least four people were stabbed but police said none of their injuries were life-threatening.
The incident triggered unrest as hundreds gathered outside the church, clashing with police - two of whom were injured.
Vehicles were damaged as people threw stones, bricks and bottles and, according to Reuters news agency, police fired pepper spray.
Witnesses said the people gathered were demanding for the attacker to be brought outside.
Police said they had responded in numbers to the incident and urged the public to keep away from the area.
CNN
SydneyCNN —
A bishop and a priest were stabbed in an alleged “terrorist act” at a Sydney church that sparked a riot on Monday, police said, just two days after the Australian city was rocked by a mass stabbing in a busy shopping mall.
Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was presiding over a service that was being livestreamed at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the western suburb of Wakeley, when an alleged attacker was seen charging toward him. Several parishioners immediately attempted to intervene while screams could be heard in the church.
Members of the public restrained the alleged attacker at the scene, according to New South Wales police. Police then arrived and arrested the suspect, later identified as a 16-year-old boy, who was taken to the hospital under custody and received surgery for injuries sustained during the attack. Police initially said he was 15.
NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb told reporters Tuesday that police believe the attack was premeditated.
“We will allege [the suspect] attended that church armed with a knife and stabbed the bishop and priest … We believe there are elements that are satisfied in terms of religious motivated extremism,” she said.
ABC
Here's a recap of what we have learnt today, following Monday night's stabbing attack at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley:
NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said the stabbing attack at the church had been declared a 'terrorist incident'.
The 16-year-old who allegedly stabbed the bishop was known to police, but not "well-known", Commissioner Webb said.
Director-general of ASIO Mike Burgess explained why this particular case had been determined to be a terrorist attack.
John Coyne, defence strategy expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), said the country's terrorism threat is at "possible".
Father Isaac Royel was identified as the second man that had been stabbed in the attack.
NSW Police confirmed that at least five people were injured in Wakeley during the stabbing and the subsequent clash between police and an angry mob.
NSW Premier Chris Minns told 7.30 that the alleged perpetrator of the knife attack was not suspected to have been radicalised.