The politics of selective outrage
Today, one politician offered the predictable line that “Australia’s voice should be one that supports restraint, reinforces international law, and works towards a more stable and peaceful region”, echoing statements we have heard repeatedly from others over the past few days.
Fine words. Lofty words. But empty ones.
Michael Gencher
Because in practice this type of statement is rarely directed at the regimes and movements driving instability. It is directed at the democracies confronting them. “Restraint” becomes a one-way demand. “International law” becomes a selectively applied talking point. “Peace” becomes a slogan used to avoid naming the source of the violence.
Those who follow these issues closely recognise the pattern immediately.
When Israel or the US takes action against the infrastructure of regimes that sponsor terror across the region, a certain group of politicians and activists spring into action with carefully worded condemnations. The language is always similar. The tone is always the same. They speak of escalation, legality, diplomacy and restraint.
What they almost never speak about with the same urgency is the conduct of the regimes that made such action inevitable in the first place.
That silence is telling.
Because over time, statements like these stop sounding like cautious diplomacy and begin to reveal something else entirely. They expose a deeper instinct within parts of our political culture. An instinct that is uncomfortable supporting Israel. An instinct that reflexively views the United States with suspicion. And an instinct that reaches for the language of international law to mask that discomfort.
In other words, these statements are rarely as neutral as they pretend to be.
They are often little more than veiled expressions of anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, wrapped in the respectable language of legal concern and diplomatic balance.
If the concern were genuinely about international law, we would hear the same voices applying their standards consistently, not selectively. Instead, their scrutiny is directed almost exclusively at the democracies responding to threats, not at the actors who create them.
That is not legal consistency. It is selective outrage.
And it raises a serious question about competence.
Foreign policy requires more than slogans. It requires an understanding of strategy, power and deterrence. Reducing a deeply complex regional struggle to a simplistic call for “restraint” may sound responsible in a press release, but it betrays a shallow grasp of the strategic realities at play.
More troubling still is the moral inversion embedded in these arguments.
Democratic nations acting against terror networks are treated as the primary problem. The forces that arm, finance and direct those networks are treated as background noise. Responsibility is shifted away from those initiating violence and placed on those responding to it.
That is not a serious moral framework. It is a distortion.
And when that distortion is repeated often enough, the veil begins to slip. What is presented as principled concern for international law starts to look increasingly like what it often is: a reluctance to support Israel under almost any circumstances and an eagerness to criticise the United States whenever it acts with resolve.
At that point, the language of restraint becomes something else entirely. It becomes an admission.
An admission that for some in our political class the problem is not tyranny, terrorism or regional destabilisation. The problem is that Israel and the United States are the ones confronting it.
Australians should recognise that for what it is.
A serious commitment to international law demands equal scrutiny of all actors. A genuine commitment to peace starts by identifying the forces that undermine it. A credible foreign policy debate does not hide behind abstractions when clarity is required.
What we are hearing instead is something far easier.
Carefully crafted statements that sound responsible while avoiding uncomfortable truths. Moral posturing that places impossible expectations on democracies while quietly excusing those who thrive on intimidation and violence.
Eventually, the language gives the game away.
Because when politicians repeatedly find reasons to condemn Israel and the United States while reserving their restraint for the region’s most destructive actors, they are not simply expressing caution.
They are revealing themselves. And not once.
They reveal themselves every time a democratic country acts to disrupt terror networks, and they respond with legalistic hand-wringing while offering little more than silence or equivocation when the same networks target civilians.
They reveal themselves every time “international law” becomes a slogan aimed in one direction only, used to police the actions of democracies while granting practical impunity to those who flout every norm as doctrine.
They reveal themselves every time they demand impossibly pure behaviour from Israel and the United States yet set no meaningful standard at all for the forces that incite, arm, threaten and initiate violence.
Over and over again, the pattern repeats. And with each repetition, the mask slips further.
At some point, Australians should stop taking these statements at face value. They are not neutral. They are not balanced. They are not serious.
They are the politics of selective outrage, dressed up as virtue.
By Michael Gencher, Executive Director, StandWithUs Australia
