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Baker & Winkler's argument that some humans, especially some Indigenous peoples, neither conceive of themselves as ontologically distinct from nature, nor do they organize their lives as such, is an important one. However, one needs to understand how colonialism and global capitalism have drawn Indigenous peoples and animals into new political economies. The new situation and the constrained opportunities available may have introduced a range of injustices or forms of violence that did not previously exist. This commentary proposes how a multispecies justice lens might assist in evaluating the most just arrangement for all parties, human and non-human.

As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into 'Jewish modes of thinking' as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt's vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers (Rosenzweig, Levinas, Buber, Shestov) who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises (covenants) form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt's political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth.

Since September 11, the Australian media has increasingly represented Muslim Australians as essential outsiders threatening standards and values of the modern liberal democratic polity. This article traces a similar trend in a number of Western European countries, finding a link with backlashes against multiculturalism and a call for a return to putatively universal and absolute values that are being contravened by Muslims. The article also connects both the dehumanising portrayals of Muslims, as enemies of humanity, and the concomitant depiction of Western nations as the embodiment of universal values with Carl Schmitt's theory that, under such circumstances, all constraints on how the enemy is to be treated are rendered nugatory. It argues that US policies regarding torture are consistent with Schmitt's analysis. Drawing on recent literature on the historical and sociological construction of secular forms, the article then asks whether Muslims are regarded as radical enemies because they are a threat to the West's self conception as modern and secular, or whether the conflict is of a religious nature. It concludes by looking at recent political rhetoric and educational policy in Australia to argue that despite the dominant note appearing to be one of secularism, there is a notable presence of references to Christian values, indicating that it is not simply religion per se that is seen as problematic, but Islam in particular.