Anthony McIntyre Last week's theocratic fascist attack on Bondi Beach was simply sheer unalloyed savagery.
There is nothing that can justify it, not genocide in Gaza, not land theft in the West Bank, not anything. Fifteen people slain in Australia's Bloody Sunday when an armed father and son, reportedly driven by the hate theology of Isis, opened fire on a gathering of more than a thousand people who were celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.
Irish people, with the cultural memory of Bloody Sunday deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, will have few difficulties readily identifying with the victims of the slaughter. The two killers, the type that get recruited to the British Army's Parachute Regiment, displayed the same callousness that visited the streets of Derry in January 1972. They arrived with one purpose - massacring an unarmed civilian population.
While antisemitism is often used as a muzzle to stifle criticism of Israeli genocidal actions, Bondi Beach was an authentic antisemitic hate crime. Activists campaigning for an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza are best advised to identify only with the victims, and offer no mitigating circumstances for those who killed them. Nor should they consider assuming the same hypocrisy that All Soul's Church in Belfast has finetuned, which can offer thoughts and prayers for ten-year-old Matilda, killed at Bondi, but only silence for five-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the IDF in a 'planned execution.' As Albert Camus insisted, the role of the thinking person 'cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.'
When four Palestinian children were murdered by the IDF on a Gazan beach in July 2014 as they played soccer, and nine others were massacred a week earlier while they watched the World Cup clash between Argentina and the Netherlands in the Fun Time Beach café, campaigners for a Free Palestine were infuriated at this Bondi Beach-type slaughter. It is incumbent on the same activists to be as repulsed by the beach murder of Matilda as they were at the beach murders of those Palestinian children.
Irish people, with the cultural memory of Bloody Sunday deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, will have few difficulties readily identifying with the victims of the slaughter. The two killers, the type that get recruited to the British Army's Parachute Regiment, displayed the same callousness that visited the streets of Derry in January 1972. They arrived with one purpose - massacring an unarmed civilian population.
While antisemitism is often used as a muzzle to stifle criticism of Israeli genocidal actions, Bondi Beach was an authentic antisemitic hate crime. Activists campaigning for an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza are best advised to identify only with the victims, and offer no mitigating circumstances for those who killed them. Nor should they consider assuming the same hypocrisy that All Soul's Church in Belfast has finetuned, which can offer thoughts and prayers for ten-year-old Matilda, killed at Bondi, but only silence for five-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the IDF in a 'planned execution.' As Albert Camus insisted, the role of the thinking person 'cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.'
When four Palestinian children were murdered by the IDF on a Gazan beach in July 2014 as they played soccer, and nine others were massacred a week earlier while they watched the World Cup clash between Argentina and the Netherlands in the Fun Time Beach café, campaigners for a Free Palestine were infuriated at this Bondi Beach-type slaughter. It is incumbent on the same activists to be as repulsed by the beach murder of Matilda as they were at the beach murders of those Palestinian children.
Antisemitism is as vile as Israeli racism towards Palestinians. Both are a corrosive blight that should be rejected in equal measure. Jews have every right to be protected from the appalling effects of antisemitic hatred.
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