Globalise the Intifada
Mass murder, mass media, mass hysteria
Overview
On Dec 14, two Indian Muslim men carried out a mass shooting at Bondi Beach, targeting a Chabad-organised Hannukah event. They killed 15 people, including a child, and wounded 40 others, some of whom remain in a critical condition. Some of the victims were Jewish and some were not. Viral footage of the incident showed one of the men being disarmed by a 44-year-old shop owner, Ahmed al-Ahmed. The terrorist then stumbled away and his accomplice shot Ahmed twice. Another scene shows a Middle Eastern refugee rushing into a firefight between police and a terrorist, kicking the man’s gun away after he drops it. The refugee raises his hands, drops to his knees and shouts, “Don’t shoot” to police, who proceed to shoot him anyway, then later as they swarm over him, random white men kick him in the head, presumably mistaking him for the gunman. This refugee is currently facing deportation.
Before the smoke had cleared, before families had been notified, before it was even over, there was an immediate effort made by Zionists and their allies to characterise the attack as somehow the product of protests against the genocide. Though evidence swiftly emerged to indicate the gunmen were ISIS-affiliated, this baseless push to shoehorn the tragedy into an existing political agenda not only continued, it was adopted largely unchallenged across Australian media and politics, as well as internationally in Western media. It’s been almost two weeks since the attack, and we know now that one of these men has been known to authorities since 2019 as being affiliated with ISIS, and that they’ve been planning a violent event for several years; knowledge which has made approximately zero impact on the narrative push from the status quo to demonise Palestinians. There are so many troubling questions and issues bound up in this, and they all need to be examined carefully.
I’m going to go through some of them, with a particular focus on the deliberate way Western media constructed a misleading narrative with the racist intention to manufacture consent for apartheid Israel’s continuing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In many ways, the media’s reckless, thoughtless sensationalism here echoed the aftermath of the Hamas military strike, “Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7th 2023, wherein several hundred Israeli civilians were murdered and war crimes committed – a pivotal turning point in the decades-long illegal siege of Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory. Since then, apartheid Israel has engaged in a public, live-streamed genocide and mass ethnic cleansing project that has included 801 consecutive days of massacres, mass starvation, mass detention, mass torture, and the total destruction of a city of 2.2 million trapped people, leading to the deaths of an estimated 680,000 Palestinians, including more than 300,000 kids under the age of five. These massacres continue daily. For more on this, I invite you to read the following:
Amnesty International’s 300-page report concluding Israel is committing genocide
Human Rights Watch 179-page report, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians of Water”
Israeli historian Lee Mordechai’s 232-page report documenting Israel’s genocide, titled Bearing Witness with accompanying website
Forensic Architecture’s 827 page report “Cartography of Genocide”
The International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that Israel is guilty of racial segregation and apartheid
The most recent report from UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967, “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime” as well as previous reports, “Genocide as colonial erasure”, and “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”
Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead by Richard Hil and Gideon Polyer
Over the course of these two years, despite the International Criminal Court ruling that all states must cease any and all activities that support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, Western states including Australia have continued to arm and fund Israel. Under Anthony Albanese, Australia has given more than $937 million to criminal Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit, continued to send crucial jet parts to Israel which Australia is the sole manufacturer of, and just this week Declassified Australia revealed that we are trialling yet more of the murder infrastructure and technology developed and utilised by Israel in the course of maintaining their horrific daily killing field.
Bondi and Our Zionist Media
Here are the facts as we know them. Two men, Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed Akram, carried out the mass shooting in Bondi. We know that Sajid was separated from his wife and homeless for the past six months preceding the attack; we know that Naveed was a young loner, a bricklayer with seemingly no friends and no online presence to speak of; we know that Naveed was investigated by ASIO in 2019 for his links to an IS terror cell; we know that despite this, his father was able to legally obtain six guns, including rapid-fire shotguns; he applied for his gun license in 2020 and was granted it in 2023, despite his son previously being investigated by ASIO. Why this was allowed is not clear, and after the statutory 28-day-cooling off period passed, in September 2023, he purchased three Category B guns—an act which is meant to immediately trigger an investigation, per the National Firearms Agreement. It did not. Further, Independent NSW MP Phil Donato, a former police prosecutor and licensed firearms holder, raised questions about the long waiting period Sajid faced for his gun licence. “I’ve never in my experience heard of someone waiting three years for an approval to be granted by the firearms registry,” he said.
Establishing this timeline is important as it exposes three glaring irregularities: 1) the gun license being granted to the father of a man ASIO suspected of links to terrorists, 2) the unusual and unexplained three-year approval process, and 3) the fact that purchasing multiple guns at once did not trigger an investigation. It also establishes that this was clearly planned well before October 2023 and therefore had precisely nothing to do with anti-genocide protests, with chants at protests, or with the arbitrary and meaningless symbolic gesture that was Australia’s official recognition of the Palestinian State—all three claims that were and are still being made by the Israeli government, as well as prominent Zionists and Australian public figures. Noted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu publicly blamed Anthony Albanese personally for the terrorist attack, an insanity which has been echoed by many local Zionists and published in our national papers without pushback. These claims are being used as the basis for new legislation suppressing protests and further restricting speech that is critical of Israel’s nonstop mass murder of Palestinians. I’ll get into that more later.
Shortly after the attack concluded with Sajid killed in the process and Naveed wounded and arrested, police allege they found “homemade” ISIS flags in the pair’s vehicle. The immediate and widespread response in Western media was focused on this being an antisemitic attack targeting Jews for being Jewish, and on tying it to protests advocating for an end to the slaughter of Palestinians, or to use the media’s default framing, “anti-Israel” protests. This response was so uniform, many commented on it appearing as if a script had been given out. Here’s a brief summary from Caitlin Johnstone:
“Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like”
- Bret Stephens, The New York Times
“The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach”
- David Frum, The Atlantic
“The Intifada Comes to Australia”
- Walter Russell Mead, The Wall Street Journal
“Shooting at Bondi Beach is what a globalized intifada looks like”
- Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post
“The Intifada Comes to Australia”
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Free Press
“Welcome to the global intifada”
- David Harsanyi, Washington Examiner
“Palestinian propaganda has globalized the intifada”
- Zachary Faria, Washington Examiner
“Bondi Beach massacre is what globalizing the intifada looks like”
- Vivian Bercovici, National Post
“Chanting ‘globalise the intifada’ leads to Bondi Beach”
- Danny Cohen, The Telegraph
See her article for the full list. Australian media, too, went the same way. I don’t have the energy to trawl through the whole sewer, but here are two prominent examples:
“Three words blamed for Bondi massacre”
- Ben Graham, News.com.au
“’Globalise the Intifada’ Means Blood on Bondi Beach”
- Yoni Bashem, “The Australian”
You could be forgiven for thinking that the ubiquity of this phrase (which, prior to this, was not a leading chant anywhere, though to be clear I’m sure it’s been said and also, I have no issue with it) indicates the gunmen shouted it, or something to that affect, but this is not the case. All of these pieces make the same explicit argument, which is that allowing protests advocating for Palestine feeds antisemitism and also directly led to this attack. UK Police have pledged to arrest anyone who chants this now, and NSW Premier Chris Minns is also pledging to ban the phrase. “Blood is on your hands”, a phrase common to protests and the social justice movement broadly, is now being used by the same crowd of pro-genocide racists who have spent the past two years insisting that both pro-Israel language as well as our material support of Israel are meaningless. It’s worth noting that this rhetorical strategy has also been applied, since October 7th, to “Free Palestine from the river to the sea”, without much success. Before I get into what the Zionist status quo is trying to bluntly achieve politically with the shooting, I want to linger on the logic of the argument and of course on the terrorists because frankly, none of this makes any sense. The problem with shifting the Zionist rhetorical strategy onto the phrase “Globalise the Intifada” is that words have their own meaning and their own specific contexts which cannot be erased.
Intifada is an Arabic word that means “shake-off” - it refers to an uprising against oppressors. The First Intifada was a grassroots revolt from Palestinians against their military occupiers, sparked when an Israeli driver in Gaza killed four Palestinians in December, 1987. Gaza had been occupied for 20 years at this point. Palestinians protested, threw stones at Israeli soldiers, went on commercial strikes, refused to pay taxes to Israel – it was predominantly characterised by civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. The Israeli crackdown was vicious: then-Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin infamously ordered Israeli soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinians protesters. Israel was internationally condemned for its excessively violent response, including by the UN Security Council. Over the next five years, 1,100 Palestinians were killed, including 250 children, while more than 100,000 Palestinians were wounded. Approximately 120,000 Palestinians were imprisoned.
So, when Western media begins to insist on what the word “intifada” means, we know they are not referring to history, we know they are not referring to reality, nor to the law, which is clear that all peoples have the right to resist their occupation and subjugation—they are, in essence, leaning heavily on the fear of an Arabic word, they are leaning on centuries of Orientalism, and decades of War-on-Terror hysteria. Otherwise, if the mass shooting on Bondi really was to be considered characteristic of a shake-off, an uprising, then the assertion from the media is that every Jewish person is integral to the maintenance of the illegal apartheid occupation in Palestine, and that the killers were acting on behalf of Palestine. I say “every Jewish person” because the insistence from all these media outlets – the same outlets and same writers who have been assiduously defending Israel throughout this genocide – is that this attack was antisemitic, which is to say that it occurred because the people were Jewish, and nothing else was relevant except that the terrorists were Muslim which, to their mind, reinforces the first part. Obviously, this assertion is false on a number of levels. It’s also incredibly dangerous, and it’s why the movement for Palestinian liberation has gone to extraordinary lengths to differentiate between Jews, Israelis, and Zionists, an effort our media has resoundingly ignored.
In addition to the fixation on “globalise the intifada” we have also seen the argument being openly made in Australian and Western media that we must allow Israel to carry out its apartheid, its genocide and ethnic cleansing unopposed—that because it is the only Jewish state, to criticise it is to endorse antisemitism or else empower antisemitic individuals to carry out violent acts; therefore, all protests must be cancelled, and all dissent stifled. The logic of this argument boils down, simply, to this: preventing the potential harm of any Jewish person is more important than stopping the systematic murder, rape, torture and dispossession of millions of Palestinians by Jewish people. This is a rabbi’s speech published in the Sydney Morning Herald, and described as a “thunderous address”:
This call has been backed across the board, but not without some qualification. See this article in The Australian Financial Review, agreeing but adding “we have to be careful to ensure we can still call all the Muzzos terrorists, okay?”
ISIS and Palestine (Or, The Necessity of Muslim Villainy)
Let’s dive into all the ways this Zionist framing is wrong, and also par for the course, beginning with the terrorists. We’re told that these men were “inspired” by ISIS, if not directly involved with the group. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of ISIS would know that they are ideologically opposed to Hamas and to nationalism of any kind—they are fiercely opposed to Palestinian liberation. In 2017, they executed Palestinian refugees, and ordered the execution of anyone who raises the Palestinian flag. There are numerous reports of their fighters burning or stamping on Palestinian flags, and yet we are to believe that these two murderous fanboys of ISIS were so encouraged by all the peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrations (every single one of which prominently featured anti-Zionist Jews), the sea of Palestinian flags and kheffiyehs, that they decided to open fire on random Jews in Bondi. (Putting aside the fact that, as I established earlier, this was planned well before Oct 7th). This is the narrative being pushed by Zionists, “journalists”, and politicians across the Western world, in every major news outlet and on every channel: it is unforgivably stupid, ahistorical, and racist.
Quite simply, it doesn’t make sense. It only barely makes sense on the surface level of racist theatre, with the understanding that this group’s brand is well established as Muslim and evil, therefore it’s plausible that they would attack Jewish people for, uh, Palestinian reasons. I’m talking about this as theatre and as narrative because that is the way it has been wielded in the public sphere – divorced from reality, violently severed from the domestic and personal, from even grieving memorial – a political and rhetorical cudgel. It’s also the only way I can make sense of the furious and extraordinary efforts that Zionists went to in order to attempt to discredit or otherwise dismiss the heroics of Syrian Muslim migrant Ahmed al-Ahmed.
First, there was Netanyahu claiming the as-yet-unidentified man in the viral footage was Jewish. Then, there were thousands of comments on social media asserting that the man was Lebanese Christian, even after his family publicly identified him as both Arab and Muslim; there was a concerted effort to say that the real hero was an entirely fictional white man named Edward Crabtree, with an AI generated website dedicated entirely to this false narrative. Following these failures, Zionists then tried to smear him for refusing to murder the terrorist when he had the chance, merely disarming him instead.
Ahmed al-Ahmed, from the outset, did more than save lives with his actions – he derailed the expected narrative before it could fully get underway. These Indian IS-“inspired” terrorists were meant to anchor the anti-Muslim fury that Zionists and conservatives rely upon, and by virtue of their Muslimness, they were to be easily tied to Palestine, and to protests, at least in the abstract. For the average racist, these things are all intertwined. Never mind that Palestine is the historic birthplace of Christianity, never mind that Palestinians are the oldest community of Christians, never mind that Palestinians of every faith and no faith exist, never mind that nobody in Palestine and nobody involved in organising protests for Palestine had anything to do with these two murderous fools.
Ahmed al-Ahmed became an instant celebrity, praised around the world. While recovering in hospital, there has been a non-stop stream of photos of politicians visiting him. Finally, unable to counter his deserved popularity or demean his heroics, “The Australian” recently published an article claiming that he had become a pariah in the “Arab world” – the basis of this claim was the comment section of one article, which as we know, is definitely and verifiably where the full spectrum of the Arab world makes itself known. It’s as though they said, reluctantly, okay we can’t convince you he’s a bad guy, but he’s an Exceptional Arab Muslim, the rest are terrorists, we swear. (To say nothing of the fact that this presentation of the ‘Arab world’ as antisemitic or even anti-Israel is itself racist and has no relationship to reality, given the sickening complicity of several Arab nations in open alliance with Israel, like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia). Why are Zionists expending so much effort on this front? We can see the answer here, in leaked research commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which found that Israel is considered a genocidal apartheid state around the world, and the best way to improve how they’re perceived is to foment Islamophobia.
Chabad, Channukah, and Zionism
The next element to this fantasy narrative pushed by Zionists is that this antisemitic attack is emblematic of a global intifada, which in their mind is the call for Jews to be gunned down on the street by Arabs or Muslims or, most heinously, Arab Muslims, all in service of the evil Palestinians. Have you noticed yet the inherent contradiction? At the same time they are asserting that Jewish people everywhere are being targeted for their Jewishness, they are also saying that this is because of advocacy for Palestinian human rights (which must perforce be anti-Israel sentiment). So, which is it? And if the two are inseparably intertwined, as is claimed by Zionists, then how can it be that Israel’s racist violences are not only never to blame for antisemitism but also any criticism of Israel is antisemitic? As well, according to recent reports, in material evidence gathered by police, the terrorists apparently explicitly reference “Zionist acts” as motivation.
Before I go any further, to be clear, this was unequivocally a terrorist attack, it was heinous and wrong. And even were this the most explicitly Zionist Israeli event, I would still assert that it was heinous and wrong. I will put these sentences in bold even though I know it will be of no use. I am only pointing out the deep flaws in the mass-produced and disseminated narrative that quickly flooded the public sphere in the wake of this massacre.
In addition to the material gathered by police, in which the terrorists apparently and inexplicably reference Zionism while at the same time affirming their ISIS affiliation, the “Channukah by the Sea” event they targeted was organised by Chabad, an international Jewish organisation that actively supports Israel and prominent Zionists were in attendance. One of the key organisers of the event, Eli Schlanger, an assistant rabi at Bondi’s Chabad synagogue, was among the 15 victims. He was widely lauded in the aftermath, remembered as “a great leader” in the Guardian, as the “Rabbi who preached joy farewelled in funeral for great leaders and martyrs” in The Age, which ran a separate piece on how “his mission was love and light”. Contrast this to social media, which is awash with photos of Eli signing missiles in Israel, and posing with soldiers; he visited illegal Israeli settlements that he also fundraised money to support, and he made racist and genocidal remarks, often commenting “Amalek” on Twitter, for example, referencing the Biblical story that Netanyahu used as an explicit call justifying genocide.
Again, I do not support this man’s murder, regardless of his odious views and actions in life. What I’m interested in here is the widespread and entirely fictitious portrayal of him in mainstream media which is divorced from his obvious anti-Palestinian racism, as well as his material support for illegal settlements, genocide and apartheid. If you only had access to the mainstream media, all you would know is that a loving and joyous rabbi who promoted peace and light was murdered for the crime of being Jewish. This is self-evidently not true. It’s one thing for his family and friends to describe him that way – I’m sure to them, he was all of those things – it’s altogether another for it to be published by national media pushing a particular narrative. The reason that matters so much is because much of the government’s demand for “social cohesion” and the accompanying commentary is targeted at “hate speech” or “hate preachers” - why isn’t anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hate considered part of this?
Eli was aggressively involved in political activities, supporting violent Zionism. Given that terrorism is defined as lethal violence in service of a political or ideological agenda, and this attack has correctly been identified as such, that agenda is obviously a key motivator, and it should be reckoned with on that basis. That is, if we are going to obsessively go over the motivation—which experts tell us is exactly the wrong thing to do, that this approach is in fact the primary driver behind mass shootings—then at least tell the truth. Instead of a humane and serious approach to this violence, this Australian tragedy, it was immediately turned into an Israeli spectacle, with Israeli flags everywhere and constant input from Israelis sought alongside the ongoing, hideous attempt to defend the Zionist genocide of Palestinians.
Why is it impossible for our media and political establishment to tell the truth whenever Israel is concerned? Is it so hard to say that you can disagree with someone, that you can oppose them even, and that carrying out a massacre is still very obviously extremely wrong, illegal, dumb, and bad? These monstrous fucks gunned down a child, they gunned down the elderly, they fired indiscriminately on the public – they behaved, in short, like Israel. Nobody sane supports this, nobody sane wants it, and nobody sane called for it. I genuinely feel demented having to write this out, because instead of responsible journalism, we’ve had this spurious flurry of bullshit that has attempted not just to conflate all Jewish people with Zionism and with Israel, but to conflate Palestine with Islam, ISIS with Hamas, and anti-genocide protestors with terrorists.
We’ve seen this happen over and over and over again, not just these past two years but decades: the impetus for violence is always ascribed to Jewishness, it’s always instigated by Palestinians without any cause except antisemitism, and so forever-innocent are the Zionists, so immortally the victim, that no politics can be ascribed to them, no agency rendered, no time or history prior, unless it’s the Holocaust. Anyone who has protested over the past two years has gotten a taste of what it’s like to be Palestinian, bringing to life truly the chant in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians: because at no point can we be genuinely motivated by ethics, by a demand for the daily massacres of civilians to stop, the mass starvation to stop, the ethnic cleansing to stop, the apartheid to stop, no, as far as the media and political elite are concerned, we can only be motivated by antisemitism. What’s more, antisemitism can be the only result from our actions. It’s an antisemitic ouroboros.
We need to have a serious conversation about Zionism and the warp effect that media is playing which is categorically worsening the situation for everyone. For perhaps the ten billionth time, it bears repeating that Zionists are not only Jewish – a significant portion of that group are Christian Evangelicals who see in the Zionist dream of Israel their own religious fantasies fulfilled. Joe Biden famously declared himself a Zionist, Justin Trudeau the same – it’s only a matter of time before Anthony Albanese does as well. Zionism is the political movement for the establishment and maintenance of the Jewish State in occupied Palestine. They always leave those last three words out, funnily enough, so as to enable them to facetiously say things like “we have a right to self-determination” as if that is what is being opposed, or as if that phrase encompasses genocide and ethnic cleansing. I mean, it can, but at that point what you’ve determined for yourself is an illegal abomination that can and should be opposed.
The problem is that Zionism drapes itself in Judaism in the most depraved manner possible. You might say, But Channukah is neither political nor Israeli, that’s what makes this an antisemitic attack. Except, we’ve seen over the years multiple examples of Jewish Israeli soldiers using Jewish symbols and language in horrific and explicitly political ways – erecting giant menorahs all over Gaza as signs of conquest:
Or as recently as this month, creating a menorah out of spent artillery casings:
Or razing the star of David into what once was a park in Gaza, or plastering them all over Palestinian homes and businesses, or the many reports of Israeli soldiers carving or branding the star into Palestinian bodies, including even the belly of a pregnant woman.
I wrote about this here, in Dec 2023:
“Israeli-Jewish soldiers razed the Star of David into Gaza, erected giant menorahs, bombed and desecrated mosques, playing Hebrew prayers through mosque loudspeakers, in short doing everything possible to announce their Jewishness, to utilise identifiable Jewish symbols. They go to great lengths to remind us that this is the one and only Jewish State, and also to never talk about it as Jewish, because to do so is anti-Semitic.
In one way at least, we ought to be grateful to them for these crude, crass, ugly desecrations of Judaism, these blatant shows that demonstrate the emptiness in their spirits, their craven hearts. Nobody serious can mistake these people for having any faith whatsoever. These are the sad, pathetic actions of serial killers that bear resemblance only to other sadistic serial killers like Daesh, wielding the cloth and aesthetic of a culture and faith they have warped into a monstrous mirror that shows only themselves. And still, this tactic is disturbingly effective, such that Zionists can get away with saying things like “they hate us because we’re Jews” without being challenged by our media.”
This is why anti-Zionist Jews have been at the forefront of the protests. This, in fact, is what we have all been warning about when we say stop erasing anti-Zionist Jews, stop pretending they don’t exist, stop pretending they’re not being arrested by the cops too, stop pretending they’re not speaking at every rally, stop pretending this is a religious conflict when it has always been a colonial project imposed by the West. For as long as the modern cult of Zionism has existed, anti-Zionist Jews have opposed it on both ethical and religious grounds. For more on this, I encourage you to read the work of Jewish historians like Zachary Foster, Ilan Pape, and Norman Finkelstein.
We can and should be able to say that the key* reason antisemitism is rising is because of Israel’s sadistic violences, and that this is an additional reason to oppose it, not an excuse for it to continue unabated. Instead, the ruling class insists the only reason antisemitism is on the rise is because we are protesting. Instead, they insist that discord is only born from protest and not the livestreamed genocide, the mass slaughter of children and babies, women, and men that we’ve watched every day for two years. Instead, they engineer smear campaigns against artists and journalists, they fire anyone with integrity who attempts to advocate for human rights, they undermine and assault any institution—including even international law itself and the world’s top courts—that challenges their right to mass murder on an industrial scale. Instead, they restrict our speech, and try to ban our protests while screaming “social cohesion” at us. It’s unbelievably galling that we are so consistently treated with open contempt.
*I say key and not sole reason, because obviously some credit is due to the neo-Nazis and rabid white supremacists lovingly profiled and defended ad nauseum by mainstream media over the past two decades in an unceasing effort to support the empire’s violent extraction of resources in the Middle East.
Intifada, Intifada (Or, The Ongoing Assault on Our Civil Liberties)
Now, we have NSW Premier Chris Minns banning the phrase “globalise the intifada”, and new laws have been passed giving the government the power to unilaterally forbid protesting for up-to three months following any terrorist event. What if we want to protest the government’s ineptitude in failing to stop a terrorist attack? Too bad. What if the government commits an egregious violence or crime in the three months following a violent event? Too bad. Or say, if our government invites the war criminal Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, a man whose genocidal speech is filed as evidence in the International Criminal Court, to visit Australia coincidentally within this three-month timespan? Which is exactly what they have done, of course. This is yet another disgraceful attempt to curtail our rights, something Chris Minns has been attempting to do ever since he was elected. His record is one long wretchedness and it betrays entirely his every attempt to appear sincere, that this specific attack is what warrants the extreme of his response, when in fact he’s been trying to do this from the start.
This is the man who knew that the “Dural caravan” event was a hoax. It was not terrorism, it was a set up by criminals trying to gain leverage over a hysterical government, which police indicated they knew from the outset. Still, Premier Minns and our racist, sensationalist media knowingly and deceptively hyped it up as a terrorist threat to rush through new hate speech laws. Later, when this became clear, he refused to face an NSW Parliamentary inquiry about it. In short, this is not a man who can be trusted, this is someone who has, every step of the way, sided with the genocidal enterprise, sided with violating international law. Extraordinarily, in the wake of this shooting, former conservative politician and investment banker Josh Frydenberg (who has used this tragedy to relaunch his political career) made the following remark: “When a caravan has a deadly message against Jewish people, we are told it is just a hoax.” Well, yes, because it was a hoax. That is the determination made by the Australian Federal Police:
The AFP have proven, conclusively, that a number of the anti-semitic graffiti and vandalism incidents were carried out by paid actors, many of whom were poor, jobless, or part of an existing criminal network. They were paid by “overseas actors” using cryptocurrency, making it difficult to track. Trying to use a real tragedy to retroactively authenticate con jobs as antisemitic - that is, motivated by hatred of Jews - is obscene. It’s deeply concerning that nobody in the Australian media bothered to fact check Frydenberg’s implication. Why bother tying this attack to the string of clunky con-jobs around which numerous inconsistencies and questions remain? It’s deeply strange, not least because the Australian government publicly declared that at least two of these con jobs were orchestrated by Iran; they expelled the Iranian ambassador, and designated the IRGC a terrorist organisation as a result. Putting aside the fact that there’s no credible evidence for this, and that it defies all logic and sense, it’s worth noting—given these ISIS killers are now part of the narrative—that ISIS and Iran are bitter enemies who quite literally are at war with each other. But according to Zionists and Australian media, the peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, which are often co-led by or feature anti-Zionist Jewish speakers, have been so effective at spreading antisemitism that even diametrically opposed ideological enemies like ISIS and Iran have been inspired to carry out attacks in Sydney and Melbourne, all of which not only achieve precisely nothing as far as Israel is concerned, but also manage to consistently spur local authorities to give ever greater amounts of money and power to Zionists.
The reason Frydenberg et al are referencing Dural and other moments of criminal activity is because the overwhelming message, aside from assigning blame to Palestine/Palestinians/anyone who advocates for human rights and equality, is that the Australian government and specifically Anthony Albanese has not done enough to stop antisemitism. This is the same Anthony Albanese - a man I utterly and publicly despise - who has given over $100 million to Jewish and Zionist organisations in the past 18 months, including $57 million to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry specifically to boost security for Jewish events; who has given over $930 million to Israeli arms manufacturer, Elbit; who created the office of “Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism” at the expense over $1m a year to the Australian public and filled it with multimillionaire Zionist lobbyist Jillian Segal, despite her clear conflicts of interest and despite being a major funder of far-right racist group Advance; who created a national police taskforce to track and combat antisemitism; and who continues to arm Israel in defiance of the law. This is the man who has not done enough? The very same Albanese who is the only Western leader so far to have been referred to the International Criminal Court on charges of complicity with the Israeli genocide?
It’s extraordinary to watch this unfold in real time. In the absence of substantive detail like this, which proves Albanese has in fact done a great deal, they must instead point to an amorphous cloud of activities they insist are antisemitic, in order to try to pressure him to giving into their demands - the first and foremost of which is that these pro-Palestinian protests, the so-called “hate marches”, must stop. Incredibly, given the relentless characterisation of these weekly demonstrations as terroristic “hate marches”, you would think that Australian media would be recording every speech and releasing them online as evidence? It’s so strange that this doesn’t occur. It’s so strange that, despite police being present in overwhelming numbers each and every time, none of these hateful speakers are arrested - which, if anything truly dangerous were being said, one imagines would be the case. The second primary demand is that the government implement Segal’s plan, a 19-page document widely panned as an absurd overreach, which insists on giving her the power to monitor all Australian news and media and “assist” them with being impartial and objective, to surveil universities and issue them with a “scorecard” on the basis of antisemitism, to intervene in our education system at every level, alongside sundry other action points giving her, an unelected official, unprecedented power. In the week following the Bondi attack, Albanese publicly declared he would implement this plan.
A great deal of Zionist rhetoric has been aimed at our education system, at artists and journalists, at universities for the “student encampments”, at our freedom of speech, at our freedom of assembly, at our freedom to teach, at our freedom to wear clothes and accessories (no kheffiyehs, no pins, no watermelons, no reference whatsoever to Palestinian existence), at our healthcare system. No one who objects to the Zionist murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians is safe. Total obedience and total erasure is required, and it will be demanded in the most emotional and sensational way possible so as to override critical reasoning. And yet, looking at Segal’s plan, looking at the demands, there is not a single thing that, having been enacted, would have prevented the Bondi terrorist attack. It wasn’t carried out by a uni grad, or artist, or activist - it was carried out by a bricklayer and his unemployed loser father who somehow gained access to weapons they should never have had. What’s more, the Muslim community warned police about the extremist preacher the terrorist was connected to, over a decade ago, and were told authorities wanted his centre kept open because “it was a good source of intel”.
But no, the problem is the protests, and the artists, and the hate preachers (but not the Zionist hate preachers, not the Zionist schools funding and supporting the IDF), and the chants, oh god the chants, from the river to the sea to, now, “globalise the intifada”. Of course Zionism is allowed to be global, Zionism is supported and enabled by an international coalition of governments without whom Israel would not enjoy the impunity that has enabled it to go so irrevocably far down the path of sadistic, genocidal racial supremacism. When the powerful declare that we cannot “globalise the intifada”, they are asserting that we must accept the illegal and horrific oppression they enable. And what does a globalised intifada look like, as far as I’m concerned? It looks like boycotts, like sanctions, like work strikes, like civil disobedience. It looks like a mass refusal to allow the corporate elite to manufacture the murder of billions of people through preventable climate change, it looks like a mass refusal to accept transparently false and partisan media coverage of genocide.
We are now at the end stage of a decades-long bipartisan erosion of our civil liberties. We saw a dramatic uptick of this erosion in recent years when climate protestors began to conduct acts of civil disobedience, and we are seeing it again now: the major political parties are nothing more than stewards of capital, and they will always side with the wealthy and powerful over the people, with profit over ethics and humanity. It’s our obligation to change that, or else perish. Let’s be clear: our governments are not just refusing to abide by the law with their continued financial and material support of the genocide, they are also trying with every resource available to them to stop us from dissenting, to stop us from applying civil and commercial pressure to achieve our legal and ethical aims, which is equality for all from the river to the sea or failing that, at the very least, an end to our government’s support of the apartheid state.
Just as Israel criminalised and brutalised Palestinians who attempted non-violent resistance—like their murderous assault on the Great March of Return or with Zionists calling BDS “economic terrorism”—Western governments are restricting and punishing civil dissent, no matter how peaceful it is, no matter if it’s in alignment with international law and ethics. In the UK, the proscription of the Palestine Action group, which carried out non-violent acts aimed at disrupting arms manufacturers, the wholesale banning of the phrase “I support Palestine Action” has led to mass arrests of over 2,000 people. We are heading down the same path - this should alarm everyone. Where does it end? Look to Israel for your answer.
These leaflets were recently dropped by the IDF in the occupied West Bank: “We are monitoring what you do online. Disseminating, writing, or publishing inciting content online is considered a terrorist crime in every sense and may lead to arrest or imprisonment, as has happened in this house. We have warned you.”
Summary
In the wake of this mass shooting, the same racist liberals who spent two years insisting that they have nothing to do with the genocide, that their actions and speech and lives are immaculately removed from influencing anything anywhere, are suddenly screaming that anyone who criticised Israel has “blood on their hands”. The same people who have been blue in the face saying our direct military and financial support for the genocide is immaterial, support for apartheid and Zionism immaterial, it has nothing to do with them, now say that if you have advocated for Palestinian human rights, you are responsible for all antisemitism ever. Somehow our words always matter, but theirs never do.
We’ve seen again the conflation of Israel with Jewish people, which is Zionism’s aim, and the conflation of Palestinian rights with antisemitism generally, which is far more insidious and frankly evil. There is also the conflation of Muslim with Palestine. These three reductions serve the imperial agenda. This had nothing to do with Palestine whatsoever. The killers were not Palestinian, not advocates for human rights, not organisers of rallies - they’re random assholes with known links to terrorists from as early as 2019, the father purchased his weapons in September 2023, before any of the protests or chants that are currently being blamed, and not only that, they are apparently affiliated with ISIS who are ideologically opposed to Hamas, and to Palestinian liberation. The attempt to link this attack, in this specific way, is no more than a sickening retrospective justification for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the ongoing colonisation of their land, and genocide.
Meanwhile, Jews are not endangered by Israel’s apartheid violence, not by the deranged daily mass murder, rape, and starvation celebrated by a majority of Israelis, many of whom have perverted the symbols of Jewish faith and culture in acts of sadistic cruelty and ethnic violence—no, they are only endangered by anyone criticising Israel. The gross logic here is that to criticise Israel, to protest, to wear Palestinian colours, is to make visible Israeli crimes which are otherwise routinely ignored by Western media. Therefore, by making their vile racism and violence visible, any rise in antisemitism is your fault. Which is simply to reiterate that any opposition to Israel’s violence is unacceptable because the possibility of harm to any Jewish person—whether affiliated or not with the ethnostate—supersedes the rights of everyone else.
We are all of us culpable for antisemitism but never anti-Arab violence, never white supremacist violence; that is always the province of the individual - there’s no limit whatever on the murder of brown and black peoples, at the hands of “Western” states or Nazi “lone wolves”, no institutional response required, and likewise there’s no limit whatsoever to the racist screeds Western propagandists can publish in national media.
Hypocrisy reveals the levers of power. Words don’t matter when it’s slurs against minorities but any phrase relating to Palestinian freedom is unacceptable because what we say could upset their jailers and those who fund them; diverse representation is not meaningful unless an ethnic actor takes on a “white” role, or a woman a man’s, in which case it’s wokeness gone mad; the free market is the ultimate arbiter of fairness, but you’re not allowed to boycott or divest from the apartheid state and if you criticise it, say goodbye to your job, general employability and possibly even ability to travel.
The truth is there is no such thing as a “culture war” waged by effeminate elites who care too much; everyone actually agrees that symbolism is important, that what we say and how we say it can have real impacts—the only difference in opinion is who should be “protected” or rather, prioritised in the abstract. It’s all identity politics entirely removed from material inequities and injustices. In this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, we are captive consumers held hostage to the increasingly fascistic status quo that is demanding total control of artistic, cultural, social and political expression.
Finally, for everyone who says “now is not the time” - now is always the time. Palestinians are being massacred every single day, they have been massacred every single day for 810 days, and they are not given the dignity of a private death, not given the dignity of mourning, not given the dignity of tragedy, not given the dignity of nuance or sensitivity or individuality. They are not in any way, shape, or form responsible for antisemitism, nor for this act of terrorism and anyone trying to use what happened in Bondi to suppress advocacy for Palestinians is a monster beyond compare.
We can and must insist on justice wheresoever injustice occurs. We can and must insist on rigour, on caring, on compassion, on freedom, and accountability. Take note of the messaging deemed acceptable. Take note of the rhetoric employed by the powerful. Take note of who is sacrificed at the altar of empire. Take note because our attention is the very last thing left to our control, and even that is limited. Lastly, take note that calls for unity that are not predicated on justice and equity are inherently fascistic.
Salaam,
Omar
Brilliant article Omar.
As always, your deconstruction of the dominating narrative is acute.