Hostages of War — The Price of Silence and the Currency of Moral Clarity

Democracies, through silence, betray their own values. They can self-destruct.

The Australian June 21-22, 2025

This morning I was sent a copy of the newspaper The Australian opinion articles (June 22–23, 2025). I felt I had to provide an opinion and compare the deceipt of war in the Middle East with the deceipt of the war against the people of the West within our own democracies.

The Cost of Looking Away: War, Women, and Western Hypocrisy

The rockets fall in the dead of night, while across the world, moral certainties evaporate like mist at dawn. Somewhere in southern Israel, a family huddles in a shelter, praying the Iron Dome holds. In the streets of Tehran, a young woman—headscarf slipping—glances over her shoulder, knowing that the secret police could drag her away before sunrise. And in the corridors of Western power, far from the sirens and broken bones, diplomats choose their words with surgical precision, lest a single misstep ignite headlines or fuel a diplomatic firestorm.

In June 2025, The Australian published two articles that, in different voices, cut to the heart of this fractured world. One was written with steel, the other with sorrow. But both carried the same urgent plea: see clearly, speak honestly, and do not look away.

Gemma Tognini's column was an unflinching cry for moral clarity. You don’t have to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she wrote, to understand that Israel—whatever its internal flaws—is a democracy fighting for survival. It is a nation where women vote, protest, and drive policy. It is a country where LGBTQ people serve in the military and debate rages freely in the Knesset. And it is a nation ringed by theocratic regimes and terrorist factions that would see it annihilated.

Tognini’s central point was not abstract. It was personal. “There is something grotesque,” she wrote, “about Western women who side with regimes like Iran’s—where a girl’s loose hijab can be a death sentence—while denouncing Israel for defending itself.” Her rage was not performative. It was the fury of a woman who sees the West losing its bearings, blurring the lines between imperfect democracies and brutal regimes.

In her argument lay a warning to Australia. We cannot claim to uphold liberal values at home and remain mute abroad when those very values are under siege. Tognini called out Foreign Minister Penny Wong for what she sees as equivocation, a diplomacy so restrained it risks becoming complicit. When missiles rain on Israeli schools and civilians are kidnapped by Hamas, silence is not neutrality—it is abdication.

Yet on the same page, Amanda Hodge wrote from another battlefield: the inner world of Iran. Her piece, stripped of polemic, carried the weight of grief. “If you attack us,” she quoted a dissident, “you are killing hostages.” It was a phrase that hung in the air like a funeral bell.

Iran, she reminded us, is a nation whose people are shackled not just by a regime, but by the world’s indifference. It is easy, too easy, for foreign leaders to condemn Iran’s government. Harder is the reckoning that every missile strike, every economic sanction, often lands hardest on the backs of the innocent. Hodge described the impossible calculus faced by ordinary Iranians: how do you rise up when your revolution might end not in freedoms, but in funerals?

Her prose caried the chill of truth. Young Iranians, hungry for change, are caught in a cruel paradox. If they rebel, they are crushed. If foreign powers intervene, they may be obliterated. “We must live between bullets and betrayal,” one anonymous activist told her. “Between the guards and the ghosts.”

And what of us—comfortable in the safety of parliamentary chambers, in homes with light switches and lattes and fuelling our cars from the middle east—what is our role in this tragedy? We praise the courage of Iranian women on social media, and then fund diplomatic channels that dance delicately around the regime’s atrocities. We proclaim solidarity with Israel, but when her enemies send children strapped with explosives or propaganda, we ask, “But did they provoke it?”

This chapter of global history is not just being written in the Gaza tunnels or Tehran’s prison cells. It is also written in Canberra, in Westminster, in Washington and in Brussels. It is inscribed in press briefings, in withheld statements, in the emails that never become policy.

What these two writers revealed—Tognini and Hodge—is that we are living in a time of profound moral confusion. And that confusion is deadly. It costs lives not only in war-zones but in the soul of our civilizsation.

Tognini’s argument burns with righteous anger. Hodge’s bleeds with compassion. But both demand that we stop pretending that all cultures, all regimes, all sides are morally equivalent. Some regimes brutalise their own people. Some democracies, flawed as they are, still strive to uphold liberty, even under fire; or so we are led to believe.

To stand with Israel is not to endorse every policy. It is to recognise that a flawed (flakey?) democracy is still infinitely better than a totalitarian regime that stones women and hangs gay men from cranes. To stand with the Iranian people is not to excuse the ayatollahs, but to affirm that war is not the only language we have left.

Australia must choose its stance with more than press releases. We must fund truth, speak plainly, and lift the voices of those who cannot yet shout.

If a missile falls in Tel Aviv, or a protester is shot in Shiraz, what echoes in our parliaments and media is not just policy—but conscience. This is our war, too—not of bullets, but of boundaries. Moral boundaries. The kind we abandon at our peril.

In the end, it is not about Bibi, the Ayatollah, Albanese, Wong and Trump et al. It is about who we are, and who we are willing to abandon.

The price of silence and the currency of truth-a ‘miracle of science’.

I now wish to expand on the moral themes and turn to the devastating silence surrounding the harms caused by the toxic mRNA COVID injections. This silence is rooted in lived realities, public betrayal, and the urgent need for moral clarity in the face of global government deception.

They called it a miracle of science. They said it would end the pandemic, stop the spread, and save lives. And many believed them. The world, trembling under the weight of lockdowns and fear, grasped at the promise of redemption with outstretched arms. What came instead—for too many—was a silent plague of injury, illness, and death, delivered not by the virus, but by the very hand meant to protect us.

Across continents, a strange choreography took place. Governments locked in step, media voices harmonised, tech platforms censored. No debate. No doubt. No dissent. The mRNA injections—branded as vaccines—were rolled out under emergency authorisation with a fervour unmatched in medical history. Those who questioned the speed, the safety, or the science were exiled from public discourse.

In the beginning, there was fear. But soon after came certainty—engineered certainty. Pregnant women were told it was safe. Young men were assured myocarditis was mild. Healthy children—statistically impervious to COVID-19—were nudged, pressured, then mandated into receiving an experimental injection whose long-term effects no one could truthfully define. And all the while, the data began to whisper. Then to shout.

Adverse events flooded pharmacovigilance databases. Myocarditis in boys. Stroke in elderly women. Menstrual chaos in previously healthy teenagers. Sudden deaths that defied explanation—on sporting fields, in sleep, in silence. But still, the silence from officials persisted.

And then came the real betrayal.

It wasn’t just that people were injured. It wasn’t just that some died. It was that they were erased. Their symptoms denied. Their suffering dismissed. Their families gaslit. Doctors were warned. Compensation schemes were obfuscated. And all the while, regulators, ministers, and health bureaucrats insisted the benefits outweighed the risks—never pausing to ask: for whom?

Some governments knew early. In leaked documents and redacted emails, it became clear: they had the signal. They saw the spike protein distribute through the body, not stay in the deltoid. They saw immune imprinting, menstrual changes, immunosuppression, and cancer flare-ups. Yet they kept going. “Safe and effective” became a mantra chanted over the buried dead.

Those with the moral courage tried to warn us. Whistleblowers within Pfizer, regulators from Europe, frontline clinicians, and families of the bereaved—all spoke. But the price of truth was high. They lost jobs, licenses, reputations. In Australia, doctors were suspended by AHPRA for doing nothing more than advocating informed consent. In Canada, physicians faced criminal investigations. In the UK and US, once-celebrated academics were ridiculed as fringe extremists.

The silence was purchased—through fear, coercion, and a media-industrial complex tied to pharmaceutical advertising dollars and government subsidies. The truth was buried under layers of “fact-checks,” AI filters, and redefined terminology. “Vaccine injury” became “anxiety.” “Sudden adult death” became “unexplained phenomenon.” And behind every euphemism lay a grieving family, a ruined life, an irreversible tragedy.

But there is a currency more powerful than silence. That currency is moral courage—and the world is running a deficit.

Moral courage is what it took for the first few doctors to break rank. It’s what drives injured citizens, once dismissed as hypochondriacs, to testify before blank-eyed parliamentary committees. It’s what fuels researchers to publish studies the journals won’t touch. It’s what forces mothers to hold up photos of their dead children and demand that someone—anyone—answer.

And moral clarity? That’s the recognition that what happened wasn’t a mistake. It was a policy. A narrative. A coordinated effort to suppress risk, inflate benefits, and crush dissent. It was silence bought at scale. And now, the debt is due.

We live in the aftermath of decisions made behind closed doors by men and women who never faced the needle, the injury, the loss. They gambled with the health of billions. And now, as injuries mount and whispers turn to cries, they look away—again.

But we cannot.

Because the price of silence is not just the suffering of today. It is the betrayal of tomorrow.

It is the erosion of trust in medicine, in science, in democracy itself. And if we do not tell the truth now—fully, without compromise—then we surrender the future to the same forces that broke the past.

The reckoning will come. It must. And when it does, let it be said that some spoke while others stayed silent. That some chose truth over tenure, honesty over obedience. Let it be said that while governments faltered, and institutions failed, the people remembered.

These words are not merely about science gone wrong. It is about a civilisational choice: will we be ruled by cowardice and consensus—or by truth and moral clarity?

The world watched a miracle become a nightmare. And now, as the fog lifts, we must choose. Not just how we remember—but how we respond.

For the dead deserve justice. The living deserve answers. And history demands we never let it happen again.

Ian Brighthope