For Australian Jews, the Bondi Beach massacre was no random event. It had an air of grim predictability following two years of relentless incitement and hatred directed towards the country’s Jewish community. After endless marches featuring calls to kill the Jews, including one at Sydney Opera House on 9th October, 2023, some people took it upon themselves to do exactly that. 15 innocent Jews lie dead, at least in part, because a society normalised calls for their murder and because a government was too lethargic in protecting them.
A community that experienced intimidation, abuse, arson attacks, synagogue desecration and vandalism warned that an atrocity was coming. From all accounts, they were ignored. So, for most Jews in Australia, the empty words, the vacuous promises, the demand for unity to overcome darkness, all mean nothing. Australian Jews feel anger and contempt as much as sorrow, and so should we all.
Perhaps the main reason is that the western leaders who mouth these empty platitudes cannot bring themselves to name the true evil in their midst. It is not just antisemitism but obsessive Jew hatred wrapped in the clothes of radical Islam. Two Muslim perpetrators, Naveed Akram, 24, and his father Sajid Akram, 50, carried out the mass slaughter of 15 people at Bondi, including a ten year old child. Australian intelligence has pinpointed a likely allegiance to Islamic State.
These evil men must take the primary responsibility for the foul deeds they committed. If, as looks increasingly likely, this was an Islamist attack, then they were imbued with an ideology that depicts Jews as unbelievers, a heretical enemy of their faith whose allotted role in history is to be enslaved to Muslim overlords in a future caliphate.
But while the massacre had two perpetrators, it had many more enablers. The murderous attack did not come in a vacuum and was not a ‘random’ and ‘inexplicable’ form of hatred. It happened in a society that had begun to normalise and tolerate the grotesque hatred and abuse of a minority.
For two years, Australia, like the rest of the west, has seen a steady drumbeat of incendiary rhetoric, malevolent lies and abusive actions threatening the Jewish community. Israel has been depicted as a nation of evil baby killers, as a pariah state engaged in genocide and a nation of Nazis that has no right to exist. Its army is purportedly so evil that the only response is ‘death, death to the IDF’.
We are told that there is only ‘one solution: ‘intifada, revolution’. For many of the left wing ‘luvvies’ who vilify Israel, this is nothing more than an exhortation to justice and liberation. But for radicalised Muslims, including those with Islamic State allegiances, it is more a call to arms and an incitement to hunt down their enemies. For the barbarians who carried out the Bondi beach massacre, this meant eliminating Jews who were ‘polluting’ their world.
People forget that this intifada (literally ‘shaking off’) is not just directed at Israel, where Hamas carried out its appalling pogrom on October 7. This intifada has to be ‘global’. What can it mean in this context? Listen to the anti-Zionists of the Free Palestine movement and they will tell you that our politicians have been ‘bought’ by Zionists who are pulling the strings of the world media and banking system for their own evil purposes. The only way to cleanse our affairs and rejuvenate society is to ‘shake off’ that nefarious influence.
For most of the ‘pro-Palestine’ brigade, that does not mandate murderous attacks against Jews outside Israel. It means identifying (doxing) Zionists, excluding them from the worlds of arts and culture, boycotting them from sporting events and isolating them from the rest of society.
Australian Jews experienced every iteration of this antisemitism, and much worse.
But all such actions have a dehumanising effect. They conceive of the Jewish community as a poisonous fifth column that is wrecking society, rather than as a collection of ordinary people. For the most malign anti-Zionists, the logical step is not just to isolate Jews but to remove them totally. It means a continuation of Hamas’s pogrom.
The last two years has shown that the entire ideology of the West’s ‘Free Palestine’ movement has fused with the medieval demands of Islamism to create a potent force for violence against Jews. It is the Islamists who pull the trigger, but the ‘progressive’ forces of ‘pro-Palestinian’ liberation who create the spark.
It is they who serve up the libels, calumnies and lies against Zionists and the Jewish state, knowing that this demonisation will rally support around the world.
So enough of the hand-wringing and the vacuous promises to eradicate antisemitism. Enough of the statements that antisemitism has no place in society, when we know that it finds far too many places to manifest its ugliness.
If world leaders are serious about protecting not only Jews but their own societies, they should call out the Free Palestine movement for what it truly is: a grotesque enabler of hatred, terror and prejudice. They need to curtail its demonstrations, proscribe incendiary chanting, arrest radical clerics and deport students who promote jihad. They must take radical Islam as seriously as any other existential threat to their countries.
That will mean proscribing foreign organisations like the IRGC and the Muslim Brotherhood.
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