At Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday, a father and son armed with rifles fired on a thousand people who’d gathered to celebrate the festival of Hanukkah.
Those two men undoubtedly wanted to kill Jews. A 10-year-old girl, a London-born rabbi who preached peace, and a Holocaust survivor who used his body to shield his wife were among them. 42 people were hospitalised, including four children.
A heroic bystander risked his life to disarm one of the attackers. Footage shows Ahmed al-Ahmed, a 43-year-old father of two wrestling a gun away from the shooter. Ahmed was taken to hospital to be treated for bullet wounds in his arm and hand.
The attack could have been even worse. So far, six guns and three improvised pipe bombs have been recovered from the scene, though there’s as yet no suggestion anyone else was involved. That two men could have stockpiled such an armoury has brought Australia’s once-tight gun laws, eroded in recent years by a growing gun lobby, into question.
While some have tried to connect the shooters’ motivations to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Australian officials have linked the younger man, Naveed Akram, to an Isis cell in Sydney. He was first brought to the security services’ attention in 2019, and senior officials investigating the massacre have told Australia’s ABC that police had recovered an IS flag in a car linked to the two men.
Those interested in stirring up hatred are already exploiting the attack in an attempt to divide communities. In a Sydney suburb, pig heads were thrown onto Muslim graves even as the city’s Islamic leaders said they’d refuse to perform funeral rites on the body of the older gunman killed by police. The younger is in custody.
In the wake of the massacre, Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has joined with Sydney’s community leaders to call for unity. That’s a very different message from the one sent by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has blamed Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state for the attack. This perverse attempt to exploit the violence is unlikely to make anyone safer.
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