Killing Jews on Bondi Beach
Moment of Courage: Bystander Intervenes Against Gunman
It is worth noting how many of the worst recent terror attacks on Jews have been on Jewish religious holidays. October 7th was on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday that celebrates and marks the conclusion of the annual cycle of public Torah readings, and the beginning of a new cycle. The recent attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, near Manchester, was on Yom Kippur. And now the killings on Bondi Beach in Sydney, with at least 15 dead and 40 wounded, were on the first day of Chanukah, the festival of lights.
They have not been on significant anniversaries connected with the history of Israel. The founding of the state of Israel, for example. The anniversary of the 6-Day War or even the beginning of the attack on Gaza by the IDF. Instead, they are about Judaism, religious faith.
And then there are the mass expulsions of Jews from ancient homelands in North Africa or the Middle East, which had nothing to do with the state of Israel or Palestine either.
At the time of writing, only one of the gunmen from Bondi Beach has been named, though we know that they were father and son. They were not Palestinian or even from the Middle East. Naveed Akram, 24, and his father were from Lahore in Pakistan, before they came to Australia. Who could have guessed? Perhaps this is what is meant by “the globalisation of the Intifada”, a chant regularly heard at antisemitic hate marches from New York and London to Sydney. In other words, Jew-hatred has spread far and wide, from Gaza to Australia.
There is something else which is peculiarly striking about the shootings on Bondi Beach. Australian politicians and police officers have described the mass shootings as if they had done everything in their power to prevent them. Australian Jews, leading Israeli politicians – President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s Foreign Secretary, and Jewish commentators and journalists, by contrast, have all said there was a tragic inevitability about these killings. The Australian Jewish community, Jake Walter Simons said, has felt “besieged and beleaguered” for years. He spoke of “a grim inevitability about these attacks”. Ever since October 7th, antisemitism has been on the increase in Australia. It has risen fivefold in two years according to one expert. These people are unanimous that the Australian government received repeated warnings from the Jewish community and from Mossad that there would be an attack on Australia’s Jews, probably funded by Iran.
And yet the hate marches continued with their language of “globalising the Intifada”, “from the river to the sea” and other inflammatory slogans. They were not banned. There was no increase in security outside Jewish institutions. Even on the first night of Chanukah, with an event widely promoted with leaflets, the policing was slight.
How do we explain this? And the obvious comparisons with what has happened in Britain since October 7th? Here too hate marches have been allowed to proceed in our major cities. The head of the Met, Sir Mark Rowley, and London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, have been reluctant to properly police these marches. Instead, they have spoken of freedom of speech rather than hate speech. They have even refused to call them hate marches.
Our TV News channels (especially the BBC and Sky News) have consistently attacked Israel, pouring out biased and emotive accounts of “genocide” and “famine” in Gaza, refusing even to call Hamas “a terrorist organisation”, for fear of sounding biased. Constantly, they have interrupted Israeli spokesmen and women, but never UN or NGO spokesmen and women. They have rigged the number of speakers on panels. They have blamed Israel for attacks on Palestinian hospitals when it turned out that the most famous of these was caused by a Hamas missile which misfired.
One other thing Britain and Australia have in common is that in both countries there are many parliamentary seats with a narrow government majority and a large Muslim population. In Australia, the Muslim population is expected to reach one million in 2025. The Jewish population is one-tenth of this, approximately 117,000. In Britain, the Muslim population is between 4-4.5 million. The Jewish population here is about 1/13th of this, approximately 312,000. Because the Muslim population is concentrated in particular towns in the North of England, the Midlands and certain parts of London, all traditionally pro-Labour, their political influence is even greater. Both Starmer and Albanese have been reluctant to speak out against Muslim antisemitism, even against imams guilty of hate speech. In both countries, Muslim community leaders have played the Islamophobia card rather than acknowledging the realities of rape gangs and hate marches. In both, politicians on the Left have hesitated to call for clampdowns on or investigations of either.
I am not anti-Muslim. I am very fond of a grandfather from Afghanistan and a young women from Bangladesh, both Muslim immigrants. They are both very smart and very interesting and both speak excellent English. Jake Walter Simons, a passionate Jewish supporter of Israel and Anglo-Jewry, said on Sunday this is “not a battle between Islam and the West.” Instead, he argued, “there’s a battle within the Muslim world between Jihadism and mainstream Muslims”. He pointed to one of the heroes of Bondi Beach, Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim shopkeeper in his mid-40s, who bravely disarmed one of the terrorists and was shot twice.
Another interesting feature of the Bondi Beach massacre was how even handed the British TV coverage was. Some were outstanding: Michael Portillo on GB News and Matt Barbet on Sky News, for example. Jewish victims of terrorism, it seems, whether in Heaton Park or on Bondi Beach, get more sympathy than Israel. As the American writer, Dara Horn, famously wrote, “People Love Dead Jews”.
But they don’t, it seems, love synagogues in Sydney which get firebombed or Jewish nursery schools which get attacked. And they certainly don’t love Israel, when it is vilified by hate-filled young Muslims and students. Western politicians like Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese, who have spoken movingly about the Jews killed on Bondi Beach, have also spoken eloquently about the need for a Palestinian state and attacked Israel for war crimes and genocide. It’s a curious paradox. And we will see it rear its ugly head again when the next massacre of Jews takes place, whether in Paris — once home of Jo Goldenburg in the Marais, blown to smithereens by Muslim terrorists — Heaton Park or Bondi Beach.
And next time it happens, again our TV news channels will look away and pretend that nothing has happened and that our leaders and broadcasters have right on their side. The only exception will, again, be Jewish community spokesmen and women, like Dave Rich from the Community Security Trust, Jake Walter Simons from The Daily Telegraph and Natasha Hausdorff from UK Lawyers for Israel, who will remind us that this latest attack was sadly inevitable.
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