the fact that the shooters were father and son really, really matters.
This is not random, nor should it be addressed as an afterthought. We need to have an honest conversation about the manner in which teachers, religious leaders, and even parents are passing antisemitism as education. We actually need to talk about the way that religious institutions are actively brainwashing millions of children into believing that the murder of Jews is or can be construed as a righteous or holy cause.
The abusive indoctrination of children in the Palestinian Territories and what just happened in Australia are not two separate phenomenons.
When imams, whether in Australia or Gaza, preach to murder Jews...well, what else do you expect?
“praying for Bondi?” “Praying for Sydney?” Aren’t you kind of forgetting someone?
I’m not going to lie: though well-intentioned, I suppose, these posts are sending me through the roof. Never mind that prayers are utterly useless in the face of inaction; the slaughter that took place in Bondi did not happen to Bondi; it happened to the Jewish community, specifically, the Sydney Jewish community.
This wasn’t a random slaughter of random beachgoers. This was an antisemitic massacre, intentionally targeting Jews. Why won’t you name it as such? Bondi is the heart of the Jewish community in Sydney, but the perpetrators did not intend to attack Bondi. They intended to attack Jews.
The truth is this: like Jews elsewhere in the Diaspora, Jews in Australia have long been shouting that they’ve been abandoned by their friends, neighbors, and government in the face of rising Jew-hatred and the normalization of antisemitic incitement.
Whitewashing this as a crime against all Australians is an insult to their voices.
I keep thinking about why Chabad members and events are so often the target…
…and the answer I have come to makes me sad.
For many decades, Jews in the Diaspora have lived behind walls and barbed wire. During the Holocaust and for many centuries beforehand, our community was forced into ghettos and mellahs; today, we do it to ourselves, out of our own accord, for our safety. Since October 7, the walls have only grown taller and the barbed wire sharper.
Chabad is different. As a movement emphasizing kiruv, or Jewish outreach, Chabad seeks to be accessible to Jews from many walks of life, just about anywhere in the world. And though there is a beauty and goodness in that, it’s unfortunately this goodness and accessibility that is exploited to harm us, time and time again.
I vastly prefer the committed antisemite to the spineless one.
The usual suspects are predictably scrambling and breaking their necks to explain why the incitement of the pro-Palestine movement to “globalize the intifada” and the Bondi massacre have no relation whatsoever. Never mind that the perpetrators themselves were motivated by ISIS ideology, or that ISIS itself published pamphlets after October 7 claiming that the Hamas massacre should serve as inspiration for all Muslims worldwide to murder Jews.
Frankly, I’ll take the committed antisemites over the spineless hypocrites any day. Those who say that, actually, the massacre in Bondi was a mere matter of justifiable “blowback” against Israel, or that the massacre is good because Chabad is allegedly “genocidal.” At least these antisemites have the conviction to stand behind the weight of their hateful rhetoric.
like clockwork: the non-Jewish hero becomes the story.
There is no question about it: Ahmed Al-Ahmed is a hero. He is reportedly Muslim and is a true testament to the fact that coexistence and a more tolerant world is indeed possible.
But the fixation on Ahmed and particularly on his Muslim identity reads as disingenuous when these very same people refuse to condemn Islamic fundamentalism by its name for fear of causing offense (Jews, for some reason, are never extended this same “courtesy”).
Somehow, Ahmed Al-Ahmed became the left’s feel good story. The GoFundMe for his recovery far surpassed that of any of the Jewish victims’. For some reason, the public seems to forget that Ahmed wouldn’t have had to save anyone if Jews hadn’t been targeted in the first place.
I am reminded of the portrayal of the Holocaust in the media: nearly every Holocaust film — from classics like Schindler’s List to revisionist movies like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas — center a non-Jewish protagonist, a white savior, rather than actual Holocaust victims and survivors themselves.
In Bondi, too, there were Jewish heroes: mothers who shielded their children’s bodies, husbands who protected their wives, children who saved even younger children. Why are their stories not the story? And what does that say about the way in which the non-Jewish public consumes Jewish trauma?
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