This is not a time to mince words. Moral clarity is our sole duty on this dark day. What happened in Bondi in Sydney was an act of fascist barbarism. It was a pogrom on a beach. It was a massacre of Jews that brought to mind the horrors of the mid-20th century. If this pitiless atrocity doesn’t prise open the eyes of the West, nothing will.
It is undeniable now that the unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people
The details are beyond grim. At least eleven people mercilessly slain in an attack targeted at Sydney’s Jewish community. More than a thousand Jews had gathered near a playground at Bondi to mark the first day of Hanukkah. Then two men opened fire. They marked the innocents for death. It was an act of savage racial hatred.
Australian officials have confirmed that rancid Jewphobia was the fuel of this crime against humanity. This ‘evil attack’ was ‘designed to target Sydney’s Jewish community’, says New South Wales premier Chris Minns. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it ‘an act of evil anti-Semitism’. It is almost beyond belief that a Nazi-style slaughter of Jews could occur at this famously chilled beach. Is nowhere safe from the pox of Jew hate?
The chilling thing is that this barbarous act feels both shocking but also not surprising. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Australia – like Britain, Europe, the US – has been beset by the delirium of anti-Semitism in the two years since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Synagogues have been set on fire. Jewish schools have been daubed with racist graffiti. ‘Murder your local Zionist’ has been scrawled on walls.
I was honoured to give talks about anti-Semitism at synagogues in Sydney and Melbourne last year. And every Jew I spoke to – every one of them – said the same thing: ‘Why aren’t people taking anti-Jewish sentiment more seriously?’
These good Aussies were crying out for the attention of polite society. They were begging politicians to take a firmer stand on Jew hatred. They were in pieces over the liberal media’s frothing obsession with Israel and Zionism. ‘When they spread hate about Zionists, they’re spreading hate about me’, a lady in Sydney told me.
And they were ignored. Worse, they were written off as ‘Zios’ who were ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’ to ‘silence public debate’. They could see what was coming. They know from their people’s painful history that it never ends with bigoted words. They know violence always bubbles up from the cesspit of Jewphobia. And yet, shamefully, their cries were disregarded, their warnings unheeded.
This is the hard question we must ask ourselves today: who wrote the mood music for the barbarism in Bondi? Who laid the rotten soil in which such brutish hatred festers and fattens and eventually bursts forth? I’m tired of tiptoeing around this: if you had any part in defaming the Jewish nation as the most evil nation, and those who support it as ‘scum’, then I don’t want to hear a word from you about Bondi. For some of us believe, deeply, that you have aided and abetted this new fascism.
For more than two years, Jews have asked you not to chant ‘globalise the intifada’. They told you it feels like incitement to violence. They pleaded with you not to call Zionists ‘Nazis’. They asked you not to entwine the Star of David with the swastika, fearing that this marks out all Jews as wicked people. They said: ‘Talk about anti-Jewish racism, please.’
And you just looked the other way. The self-styled virtuous of polite society pulled their keffiyehs over their ears and drowned out the Jews’ noise. People chanted ‘Globalise the intifada!’ on the streets of London just hours after the Yom Kippur murders in Manchester. It is a testament to the crisis of our civilisation that I can imagine mobs somewhere in the West chanting it today with not a second thought for the souls slain in Sydney.
It is undeniable now that the unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people. In Colorado six months ago an elderly Jewish lady was burnt to death by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. In Washington, DC in May, a young man and woman were killed outside the Capital Jewish Museum, also by a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’. In Manchester in October, two Jews were killed. And now this unspeakable atrocity. Under the Palestinian colours, the world’s oldest racial hatred has found a new and lethal lease of life.
Anyone who has ever been to Bondi will know what a gloriously free space it is. Surfers doing their thing, young lovers sunbathing, blokes breaking the rules by sipping beers. And Jews gathering for special occasions, grateful to live in what they thought of as a tolerant nation. That is all shattered now. It has never felt more pressing to take a stand against the forces of misanthropy and Jew hatred that have crept into our societies – and against the elites that let them in.
