After Bondi, don’t hunt for an ‘enemy within’ – honour the hero who stood up

The murderous attacks on Jewish people on Bondi Beach represent antisemitism in its purest form. As far as can be gathered, the two terrorists could probably be fairly called “Islamist”, as they targeted innocent Jews because they were Jews.

It has been reported that the younger man, named as Naveed Akram, had links to Islamic State and had been identified as a potential threat by the Australian authorities in 2019. Whether they failed to act cannot yet be determined – but there is no room for complacency so far as Islamist terror is concerned.

There will now be months of security service review, journalistic investigation, maybe an official inquiry or two, and certainly grotesque mutterings about Muslims being an “enemy within”. But the essential facts about the Bondi attacks, which have left 15 dead, are already clear. It was antisemitism pure and simple, and it fed off the oldest trope in the antisemitic world, the notion of a global conspiracy in which every Jew – no matter how irreligious or pro-Palestinian, no matter how observant or how secular, no matter how much of their heritage or upbringing could in some way be characterised as Jewish – is held accountable for decisions taken around Benjamin Netanyhu’s cabinet table.

People who happen to be Jewish are right to bitterly resent being treated like they are in the Israel Defense Forces, committing a war crime. And, by the same token, the worst way to react to such an outrage would be to try to blame all Muslims for the lives taken on a beach many thousands of miles away, by people they do not know.

Indeed, the heroic actions taken by Ahmed al-Ahmed, the 43-year-old Syrian-born father-of-two who was badly injured wrestling a gun from one of the Bondi attackers, suggest that, rather than an enemy within, it would be more apt to speak up about the heroes within.

Rightly, Ahmed has been hailed by his family as a “hero of Australia”. It is only right that others should do the same. Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott tweeted “Thank God one bystander heroically intervened showing the good side of our country” – but he then used what can only be derived as a “soft” interview on the BBC Today programme to try and link the atrocity that happened in his homeland with peaceful anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian marches around the world, as if they were part of a global movement seeking to wipe Jews off the face of the earth.

As it happens, I have no doubt that, for some of those protesters, slogans such as “From the river to the sea” and “Globalise the intifada” do represent a genocidal intent. But taking away their right to protest would not suddenly purge them of such evil thoughts.

Banning the Muslim Brotherhood, another call that has gone up post-Bondi, is probably neither as simple nor as effective as it sounds, and, as far as we know, the terrorists in Australia were not members of it. It is a good idea to ban militant Islamist groups, and an even better one to find and prosecute the terrorists that belong to such organisations – but not to demonise all Muslim people by association with people of violence who they despise.

The Jews have been despised and demonised for millennia. As I understand it – I don’t pretend to speak for them – the festival of Hanukkah is partly one of defiance in the face of such blind, ignorant hostility and hate. Every generation has to face the ancient evil of antisemitism as it evolves and mutates into different forms, through different groups and via different media. As the world changes, so too does the fantasy that the Jews control it. Today, Jew hatred survives in some violent Islamist terrorist circles, just as it does in the neo-Nazi ones.

That the suffering of Jewish people is being exploited for such hateful ends is one of the most distressing and disturbing aspects of the Bondi Beach killings. It is precisely what we saw in the aftermath of the attack on the Manchester synagogue.

There are, therefore, two channels to pursue in all of this. The first is to properly fund the police and security services so that they can track and intercept race-haters before they can shoot up a Jewish festival or bomb a mosque. The second is to try to rebuild a political culture where groups of people who simply want to get on with their lives are not pitted against one another by cynical politicians and agitators who never have their best interests in mind.

We have a multicultural society in which we can all follow our own customs and religions as much as we wish, because that is the only practical way to organise our affairs. If we start to think rituals or dress associated with Judaism or Islam are sinister and threatening, eventually there will be consequences. If we blame Muslim and Jewish people for acts of inhumanity committed by others that they have nothing to do with, then we are indeed doomed.

As someone who recalls being personally taunted in the playground by the IRA’s campaigns of violence, because I had the wrong kind of name and background, I can say I have some small inkling into the much more vicious racism that others experience. In 1974, the National Front, a white supremacist movement, wanted the Irish rounded up and deported, too.

Few nations have ever been truly monocultural, and we have more shared values than we think. Western leaders would do well to remember Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered by a far-right nationalist shouting “Britain first!”, and who hated the multi-racial society that she stood for, said: “We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”