The Bondi Beach massacre of Jews celebrating Hannukah resulted in two nasty blame-the-victim pieces, one in the far-left The Nation (no surprise, considering the author) and one in Time magazine, desperately blaming everyone but the actual Islamic perpetrators of the murders.
Marching mobs in Australia called to “globalize the intifada” – to attack Jews everywhere, not just in Israel — even before Israel had begun its counterattack after October 7, when over a thousand civilians were murdered and over 200 kidnapped, some sexually assaulted, by Hamas invaders. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly stated that Australia had rewarded Hamas terrorism by granting recognition to a Palestinian state without any move toward reform.
The Nation’s Dave Zirin, supposed “sports editor” of the far-left rag, spends much of his column space smearing Israel as genocidal and guilty of war crimes against the Palestinians while hardly mentioning the actual terrorists, kidnappers, and rapists of Hamas. He did so again in “Don’t Listen to the Ghouls Exploiting the Tragedy of Bondi Beach.”
After flaunting his Jewish heritage as a shield (the better to bash Israel with), Zirin spouted:
And now our world’s least principled actors are telling us, without any justification, why this happened and drawing actionable conclusions about it before anyone actually knows the motivations of the killers–namely, linking the violence to support of Palestine. The dead have one use to these people: They exist to justify Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the Palestinian blood that now will surely be shed. Facts be damned.
Sure enough, in the wake of Bondi Beach, Netanyahu set a land-speed record in finding a camera to stand in front of to blame the massacre on the Australian government’s recognizing a Palestinian state….
Don’t buy their bullshit. They are exploiting our dead. They are tying this tragedy to their own nationalist project for personal gain. They are relentless in their message that standing for Palestinian existence in the face of annihilation makes you party to this atrocity, which is an obscene lie.
Zirin made no mention of the actual burning of synagogues and attacks on Jews in Australia, or the constant anti-Israel marches filled with annihilationist rhetoric that actual Jews who live in Australia have pointed to as an existential threat, in vain.
After further sliming “the David Ellison/Bari Weiss media offensive aimed nakedly at whitewashing Israel’s crimes,” he blamed “war criminals” like Netanyahu for fostering Islamic terror.
What the Bondi Beach massacre has shown is that these people and organizations have made life far more unsafe for Jews around the world by bonding our existence with theirs. If, indeed, the shooter was targeting Jewish people in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, then these same ghouls have made a fear many Jews share come true: that people will seek retribution for the actions of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu.
….
Please remember that, above all else, there are two sides. One is committed to ending our world’s addiction to hatred, violence, and needless bloodshed. The other stands with a supremacist death cult, willing to justify their own crimes in the wake of every violent tragedy—tragedies that they egg on through their commitment to ethnic cleansing.
Zirin condemned the “Zionists committed to branding our beautiful religion with the stain of genocide.”
No less disturbing in its willingness to suggest Jews (or “Zionists”) shared blame for their own murder was an essay in Time magazine, “What the Bondi Beach Attack Reveals About Antisemitism in Australia,” by editor at large Charlie Campbell, who absolved antisemitic terrorists of responsibility, with the only burden placed on Israel and its ally America.
Albanese’s press conferences and spot news appearances were dominated by the same topic: rising antisemitism following a spike in the vandalism of synagogues and harassment of Jewish people. The burning question was whether American support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and Canberra’s close alliance with the U.S., was putting Australian Jews in danger.
So America was putting Jews in danger, not the radical Islamists marching and threatening annihilation of Jews even before Israel’s counterattack after the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre?
….The exact motive has yet to be determined, but given that the victims had gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, Albanese decried the attack as “antisemitism” and “a horrific act” of “terrorism.”
Campbell refused to see the “true motivation” staring in his face.
Discerning the true motivation for the violence will take the focus of ongoing police investigations, with ASIO revealing Akram had been questioned for extremist links in 2019 but deemed “not an immediate threat.”
