What do you say at a moment like this? Even to a skilled wielder of words, almost everything is inadequate, which is why well-meaning politicians tend to flail about in great cobwebs of cliches.

How much should we try to capture only the pure humanity? How much should we bring in politics? When do the two meet and overlap, and when should they be kept carefully apart?

Whoever you are, wherever you stand politically and whatever friendships and social circles you belong to, politics will creep into your conversations about the tragedy of the 14 December Bondi Beach terror attack, in which two men killed at least 15 people. One thing I’ve come to accept at times like this is that it’s okay—indeed often better—to keep certain thoughts to yourself, at least while people’s pain is so raw and the atmosphere so combustible.

Here’s one possible approach to staying below the point where your utterances reach an escape velocity that gets you into fraught places: ‘This was a horrible act of violence, aimed at Jews, that is so far beneath any right-thinking, morally grounded human being that it will remain in our memories as a demonstration that humans are truly capable of monstrosity. The victims were innocent. End of story.’

Sounds pretty reasonable. But even then, does putting a full stop there do justice to the degree of antisemitic hate that seems to have driven this massacre? Leaving the politics out entirely risks levelling this to a random act—people mindlessly hurting other people. There’s a difference between mass murder and terrorism.

It’s very difficult not to have the politics and geopolitics creep in, but, once they do, we need to know when to apply the brakes so that our chain of thinking doesn’t become disordered, jumping ahead in search of the perfect explanation which then reverse engineers our thoughts and speech and distorts their moral clarity.

Of course, many people will instinctively wonder, were these terrorists motivated to kill Jews because they were outraged by the actions of the state of Israel and just lacked the moral and intellectual ability to distinguish between the two concepts? If so, why? Were they influenced by some broader political context, whether that was a network of likeminded extremist friends, or by a background-level of political permissiveness that enabled anger to metastasise into animosity and then to hate-filled violence?

Racism has a political dimension with practical consequences. Healthy politics tries to combat and counter racism, while dangerous politics enables and exploits it. Racism is also everywhere. The extent to which we as individual citizens resist it depends on the skill and sophistication with which we apply our moral clarity to our political views. The extent to which we struggle to resist it depends on all sorts of things. Crucially, these include the influence of our communities and the tendency, ever stronger in the age of social media and fast opinion-making, to leap to half-baked beliefs that then yield to confirmation bias or other processes that make them stick.

Here are two statements that are both reasonable and yet should not be mixed together so as to cloud our thinking in the aftermath of this atrocity. One, antisemitism has plagued Jews for centuries, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, and remains a problem. Two, Israel’s actions over the past two years, directed by its current elected government, have caused disproportionate and unacceptable suffering to civilians in Gaza while actions such as settlement-building have fuelled hopelessness among Palestinians.

To repeat: the statements should not be mixed. They’re independent ideas.

Of course, Israel’s self-defence and national security policies are not unrelated to antisemitism—both historic and ongoing—because of the unique circumstances of Israel’s creation as a Jewish state after the horrors of the Holocaust.

But here’s the problem: the faster we form and articulate views, the more likely we are to foolishly and harmfully conflate the very complex and messy set of issues around geopolitics, history, racism and antisemitism. What needs to be resisted is a fraught, combustible and easily exploited argument that tangles these elements up.

It’s disingenuous to claim our minds don’t instinctively go to the politics. But the better parts of our nature think immediately about the families, the loved ones, the children, the parents, and the extreme pain that such unbridled violence causes.

First, mourn the loss of innocent life. Second, feel anger and despair that these mass murderers channelled whatever confused political motivations they had into such a monstrous act. Third, pause. Just pause.