The lie didn’t survive Bondi. The consequences did. And the wrong people paid for both. Right, so the Bondi attack has done something very awkward for a very familiar lie. It blew it up. And the people now stuck with the fallout are not the ones who pushed it, but the ones who paid for it. That’s the bit being carefully stepped around. Because this was never just about a violent act in a shopping centre. It was about how quickly that act was pressed into service to suggest a wider threat that simply wasn’t there, how that framing collapsed on contact with facts, and how the damage still travelled anyway. The narrative failed upward. The consequences landed downward. You can already see the pattern, because we’ve seen it before. An event happens, implication rushes in ahead of evidence, Muslims become the background suspect, and then reality inter ...