In the darkness of the Bondi Beach massacre, a civilian’s heroism gives Albanese a clear path forward
The Bondi Beach attack was callous and anti-Semitic but the fallout could provide further ugliness yet. The reaction, like the actions of Ahmed al Ahmed, must be brave and unequivocal.
It is difficult to overstate the shock that will have been felt among Sydneysiders at Bondi Beach yesterday. Australians have been victims of terrorism before – there were 88 among the 202 people killed in the 2002 Bali bombings – but the country itself has almost no history or tradition of deadly sectarian violence. Recent vaguely comparable incidents – the 2014 siege at a Lindt Café in Sydney, which left three people dead, including the perpetrator; and the 2015 murder of a police accountant in Sydney’s western suburbs, after which the killer was shot dead by the victim’s colleagues – were understood more as the actions of the mentally ill rather than due to religion or politics, whatever vainglorious pledges of fealty to Islamic State were made by the lone gunmen responsible.
The two shooters at Bondi were father and son, indicating a plan involving at least that many conspirators. Of their motives, we might glean all we wish to know from their choice of target: an event celebrating the commencement of Hanukkah. At time of writing, 15 of the people who went to this day at the beach are dead (not including one of the gunmen) and at least 29 injured, some critically.
Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is now besieged by a cacophony of questions, none of which have easy or agreeable answers. Leaders of Australia’s Jewish community have long warned of the hazards of over-indulging extremist elements among the regular protests against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. There has been a steady tick of anti-Semitic vandalism, arson and threats of worse, some of which the intelligence services linked to Iran: the Islamic Republic’s ambassador was sent home from Canberra in August. Nevertheless, Israel’s government has piled in noisily and unhelpfully. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September had somehow encouraged Sunday’s atrocity – a statement which, ironically, echoes the inane “root causes” refrain much beloved of leftists who seek to excuse terrorists responsibility for their choices.
Australia’s noisy cohort of anti-immigration xenophobes will also be insisting that the Bondi massacre vindicates their paranoia. There is considerable potential for further ugliness.
But there are things that Albanese could say, and/or do. Australia recently introduced a ban on most social media for under-16s, and placed the onus on social-media platforms to enforce it. That could be elaborated upon, in that social-media platforms should be held accountable, on pain of having their plugs pulled, for everything that they permit to be published (online hate is not some natural and inextinguishable phenomenon; it simmers and roils because the platform proprietors choose to do nothing about it). He might also note that now would be a good time for Australia’s increasingly vociferous gun lobby to give it a rest. The Bondi shooters were restricted to hunting rifles and shotguns as a consequence of the country’s correctly robust response to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Rules on the ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons were drastically tightened, and more than 643,000 firearms taken out of circulation in a buyback scheme.
Much will be written, as it should be, about the hero of this miserable hour: Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old fruitseller who disarmed one of the Bondi gunmen and was wounded by the other. He is undergoing treatment for his injuries while a nation – and the world – marvels at the footage of his courageous actions. He could easily have taken cover and nobody would have blamed him. Instead, he launched himself at an armed and murderous maniac, who might also have been strapped with explosives or concealing other weapons. Ahmed would have understood that this could have been the last thing he ever did. He did it anyway and there are certainly people alive today who would otherwise have been counted among the victims of Sunday’s horror.
All of us – individuals and societies – prefer to think of ourselves as noble. None of us – individuals or societies – really have the least idea how we will react to a given circumstance until or unless we are in it. Wittingly or otherwise, a middle-aged shopkeeper from Sydney has demonstrated the attitude that Australia – and, one might hope, all nations – should take to the eternal lunacy of anti-Semitism: Nope. No you don’t. Not here.
Andrew Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio and a regular Monocle contributor. For the latest news and reaction to the Bondi Beach attack, tune in to ‘The Globalist’.
