With hot takes seemingly ready to go, commentators across the world have claimed that the villain here isn’t guns or religious fanaticism, but rather that the attacks were directly connected to the radical protests against Israeli militarism in Gaza.
At the UK-based Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard sought to blame “chants such as ‘globalise the intifada’ – globalise the slaughter of Jews, in other words”, because they feed “the hate”.
Pollard wrote that “Every single weekend Piccadilly Circus is taken over by Jew haters” and neither the police nor the mayor has “not once in two years expressed even a mild hint of a criticism of any of the hate marches and their antisemitic chant”.
“The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach” was one headline at The Atlantic by the neoconservative Canadian journalist David Frum.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens admitted though the public will “probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers” it is still “reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was ‘globalizing the intifada,’” adding that the shooters “were taking to heart slogans like ‘resistance is justified’, and ‘by any means necessary’, which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over”.
At the right-wing Free Press, now having been purchased by the major broadcasting network CBS following its takeover by the right-wing Ellison family, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a piece called “The Intifada Comes to Australia.”
At the Jerusalem Post, of course, the intifada meme is a worldwide contagion: “Terrorists calmly firing into a crowd at a Hanukkah celebration. Screams. Panic. Parents fleeing with hysterical children. Victims lying dead on the sand. That is the ‘globalized intifada’ that tens of thousands of people around the world have been chanting for since the October 7 massacre – on the streets of Sydney, San Francisco, London, New York, and elsewhere – including by political figures who either embraced the phrase or refused to condemn it.”
And the Murdoch-owned New York Post said that “New York City’s outgoing Mayor Eric Adams called the devastating terror attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach an ‘actual application of the globalization of the intifada.’”
This last bit is a particular swipe at incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was attacked during his campaign for his criticism of Israel and his decision not to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada”.
The group JewBelong posted on Facebook, “If you screamed Free Palestine, don’t be surprised about Bondi.”
This has been a longstanding strategy on the right to equate all of Judaism with Israel. Zionism is Judaism and vice versa.
There is no difference between Jewish families quietly celebrating Hanukkah far away in the Diaspora and an IDF raid killing civilians in Gaza City. It doesn’t matter whether we believe the perpetrators think this way, and never mind that Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Syrian-born hero who intervened to stop the Bondi Beach killing by disarming the attacker, was also a Muslim Arab.
There is no difference between the college student who yells “free Palestine” and the madman who kills innocent people at a party. Disagree with this? Well, then you might be a Jew-hater yourself, the mainstream media has declared. If only they were experts on racism and didn’t repeat each other’s copy so much. That’s copy-and-paste moralism for you. The only thing that matters is incitement.
While mass shootings in Australia are rare occurrences, they are seemingly daily in the United States, to the point of being routine. At the same time as the Bondi Beach shooting, two people were killed in a shooting at Brown University, where one of the student victims was a Muslim Uzbek. So much for Antisemitism.
As I pointed out in 2018, the worst Antisemitic attack on US soil took place in Pittsburgh, committed by a rabid right-winger whose talking points about how Jews were facilitating non-white and Muslim immigration were major themes in the right-wing press.
Those themes have only grown in prominence now that Donald Trump is serving his second presidential term. Yet nowhere in the mainstream media is there a call to reduce the volume on right-wing speech against immigration, diversity, and “wokeness”, even if that incites violence.
Just as the killing of US right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk served as a catalyst for punishing his critics, the Bondi shooting could similarly be used to impose further restrictions on criticism of Israel and, worse, to create a chilling effect on speech that is critical of Israel in general.
“Since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, many European countries have built on this by hastily constructing a web of laws, policies, resolutions and restrictions that serve to legitimise Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other grave violations while curtailing efforts to hold the country accountable,” wrote Erika Guevara-Rosas, an Amnesty International advocacy director, earlier this year.
Germany, in particular, has been cracking down on anti-Israel speech and actions, shutting down pro-Palestine conferences, deporting non-German Europeans for taking part in anti-Gaza war protests, and branding Jewish critics of the conflict as “extremists” and “Antisemites,” such as Jüdische Stimme, whose chairman, Wieland Hoban, is a long-standing contributor to The Battleground.
In a report published on 9 December, civil society organisation Civicus Monitor downgraded Germany’s civic space from “Narrow” to “Obstructed”, citing 9000 criminal charges filed by the Berlin police linked to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and NGOs critical of Israel subject to raids, surveillance and funding cuts.
It is tragic but not entirely surprising that the Bondi Beach massacre has not prompted the mainstream media to reflect humbly, but instead to reinforce their protection of Israel’s far-right government, which should be separate from the daily lives of innocent Diaspora Jews and any form of protest.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
