The Wrong Speech

When it would have been better to say nothing at all

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

Yesterday party leaders in the New Zealand Parliament rose to condemn the murder of fifteen people celebrating Hanukkah in Australia. All of them condemned the violence, each bringing their own emphasis. Each made choices about what to say and what to leave unsaid.

Chlöe Swarbrick did not make the best choices.

To be clear, she did not equivocate in her condemnation of the murders themselves. She made clear her view that what happened “was an act of targeted, racist, anti-Semitic terror towards the Jewish community.” And her statement that “[m]urdering innocent people is terrorism” was clear and this should be acknowledged.

If it had ended there it would have been a good speech and a genuine act of solidarity with the victims and their families. But almost immediately after naming the attack as antisemitic terror, Swarbrick moved away from the particular horror of Jews being murdered for their faith. The speech became a meditation on interconnected humanity, universal human rights, and the idea that “our safety, like our liberation, is intertwined.”

That’s not wrong, per se. But this was in the aftermath of specifically antisemitic violence. Fifteen Jews were murdered because they were Jews. That specificity matters.

When you move quickly from that reality to a general statement about all human beings deserving freedom from oppression, you make Jewish victims into symbols in a broader political argument. You strip them of their most immediate context as specific people killed for a specific reason.

By contrast, the Prime Minister spent considerable time on the unique nature and history of antisemitism. He distinguished between legitimate political debate and “the targeting of an entire community because of their identity or faith.” He told Jewish New Zealanders directly: “You belong here, you are valued here, and we will protect you.”

The focus remained on the Jewish community’s particular vulnerability and pain.

Chris Hipkins kept his remarks brief and directed. He condemned the attack, expressed solidarity with Australia and the Jewish community, and warned against using terrorism to divide communities. Hipkins did not springboard from a very specific outrage to a verbal essay about universal human interconnection and the nature of rights.

Swarbrick chose to focus a lot on the heroics of Ahmed Al Ahmed, the Muslim man who tackled one of the shooter. And in one sense, you can see why. This is a man who acted with extraordinary courage, risking his own life to save Jews from antisemitic murderers.

But the framing matters. In Swarbrick’s speech, these heroics became a vehicle for pivoting to interfaith solidarity and shared religious values. Despite conceding a complete lack of expertise, Swarbrick went on to give the New Zealand Parliament her views on equivalences between Islamic and Jewish theology about saving lives, turning distinct religious traditions into generic talking points about shared humanity.

By now, it became clear that this speech was really about balancing concerns about antisemitism with concerns about Islamophobia. I am sure this was well-meant. But it was not appropriate.

Jewish people had just been murdered. The immediate aftermath of that was not the moment to discuss the broader climate of religious prejudice or to worry publicly about potential backlash against other communities.

Not all politicians avoided controversy yesterday. Winston Peters and David Seymour attacked “from the river to the sea” rhetoric, which Swarbrick is of course infamous for. But at least their focus remained on identifying and condemning what they saw as sources of antisemitic sentiment.

Swarbrick’s speech seemed more concerned with ensuring no one drew the wrong conclusions about Muslims than any kind of specific recognition of the problems we have with antisemitism.

As part of her soliloquy on universal human rights, Swarbrick gave the game away when she said:

Every human being deserves to live free of terror and oppression. Every human being needs water, food, shelter, and connection. Every human being deserves these human rights: those you love and those who you don’t understand, and even who you don’t like. This is what is means to be human. These rights aren’t handed out for good behaviour. We get them because we are human.

What was on Earth was this doing in a condolence speech? No one had suggested the Bondi victims forfeited their rights through bad behaviour. The comment had nothing to do with the massacre.

This kind of insertion is what makes the speech look like it was only ostensibly about Bondi. The true intent was about restating a broader worldview about interconnection, universal humanity, and the politics of rights. And thus the victims became supporting players in someone else’s speech about What Really Matters.

Of course, it would be foolish to try to pretend away the wider discourse. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, certain voices did move quickly to blame immigration policy or to suggest the attack vindicated restrictive approaches to Muslim immigration.

Nick Mowbray’s comments on The Everything App, suggesting the attack raised “legitimate questions about how Western democracies balance integration, cultural cohesion, and security” and asking whether countries should “prioritise culturally similar immigrants,” fell into the same trap. And I myself reproved of those comments given our own troubled history with terrorism from precisely that sort of person.

So there were things that needed saying. Pushback against the exploitation of Jewish deaths to advance anti-immigrant agendas was necessary and appropriate. In my view, at least.

But that is not what Swarbrick’s speech did. She did not address those specific bad responses. Instead, she delivered a general homily about her own moral universe and a teaching moment about her broader political philosophy.

A better speech would have been shorter. It would have named the attack as antisemitic terror. It would have expressed grief for the victims and solidarity with the Jewish community. It would have acknowledged Ahmed Al Ahmed’s heroism without using it as a springboard for interfaith generalisations.

And it would have ended there.

If Swarbrick wanted to address the anti-immigration narrative, she could have done so in a separate statement or interview. If she wanted to warn against anti-Muslim backlash, she could have made that case in another forum. But the her address to Parliament should have remained what it claimed to be: a focused expression of grief and solidarity with a community in shock.

Is this too high a bar? It should not seem too demanding to ask a politician to simply express condolence without adding layers of broader meaning. Yet we have become so accustomed to every political utterance serving multiple purposes that the idea of a narrow, restrained, specific response feels almost naïve.

But that is what the moment required. Fifteen Jews were murdered for being Jews. That deserved to be the centre of attention. Everything else could wait.

Sometimes restraint is the greater virtue. Sometimes, the most powerful thing you can say is the most obvious thing: that people were murdered because they were Jews and that this was an act of great evil.

Swarbrick said some of that. But she could not stop there. And that is why, in a week when all New Zealand’s political leaders spoke, her speech was the one that most missed the mark.