Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The gruesome and terrifying attack on a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, left 15 people dead, including a rabbi, a ten-year-old girl and a Holocaust survivor. Some 24 are in hospital. The perpetrators were apparently Australian Muslims of Indian origins, Sajid Akram and his son Naveed Akram, who formed an ISIL cell in Sydney. They made a suspicious trip to the Philippines in November and the BBC reports that Sajid Akram used an Indian passport, while Naveed used his Australian travel document. Naveed was born in Australia and so had citizenship, but his father Sajid was still only a resident. They would have killed many more people except that a Muslim Australian of Syrian extraction, Ahmed al-Ahmed, intervened to disarm one of them, being hit by two bullets himself. He is convalescing in hospital and is in danger of losing his left arm.
Murder is heartrending and leaves anyone with a soul shaken and mournful. Australians are not used to these sorts of headlines. In a country of 27 million, they only have about 260 homicides a year. This low homicide rate is a result of their sensible gun laws, which the present government is pledging to tighten further. The country’s small Jewish community of some 117,000 people is shaken to the core, and understandably so. Targeting Jews qua Jews is the definition of antisemitism.
What interests me about this narrative is the way it complicates easy binaries. Yes, Muslims belonging to a small radical cult — born in the maelstrom of the American occupation of Iraq — perpetrated the unspeakable attack. Yet a mainstream Muslim intervened to halt it.
Australians are not notably antisemitic and opinion polling shows that their attitudes toward Jews have not become more negative in the past two years. At the same time, 58% of Australians believe that the Israeli government is committing a genocide in Gaza and want sanctions put on that government similar to what has been done to Putin’s Russia. Only 16% disagree. This polling shows that Australians distinguish between Australian Jews and the Israeli government.
The progressive Jewish Council of Australia is also critical of Israeli policy, so the community is hardly monochrome. Some 500 Australian Jews took out a full-page ad in a major newspaper last February to repudiate President Trump’s then plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza.
As for the perpetrators, many Indians really wanted them to hail from Pakistan, and flooded social media with the allegation that they were from that country, which appears to be false. Sajid Akram holds an Indian passport. India and Pakistan fought a brief war earlier this year, and depicting Pakistanis as terrorists is a favorite propaganda tactic of the Hindu far right movement called Hindutva, which is ascendant today. An earlier generation of far right foot soldiers of Hindutva were responsible for murdering Mahatma Gandhi for being soft on Muslims. Police found homemade ISIL flags at the Akrams’ home. Extremism begets more extremism. As Mahatma Gandhi pointed out, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Meanwhile, rightwing Zionists wanted the perpetrators to be Palestinians, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on people advocating for a Palestinian state. Ideology makes people say ridiculous things. But there is at least a strong possibility that these Indian Muslims, seeing their community targeted by the BJP government of Narendra Modi, believed that Modi is allied with Israel and that Zionists are aiding in their oppression. It may seem fantastic, but such conspiracy theories flourish in an illiberal atmosphere. And after all there is a kernel of truth to it. This warped way of thinking, if it was part of the impetus here, erred in tarring everyone in a group with the same brush. It is an execrable error of morality and ethics that turns people into murderers.
Muslims are not intrinsically more violent than anyone else, and their religion has nothing to do with the violence perpetrated in their countries. Many Muslim-majority countries have low homicide rates, and the ones that experience violence are suffering from ethnic conflicts, environmental degradation, food shortages, & etc. In contrast, Buddhist Myanmar, Cambodia and Sri Lanka have in the past half-century often been wracked with violence and hatred despite the Buddha’s teachings on love and peace. Largely Christian countries like Cameroon and Colombia also see high rates of terrorism.
Photo by أخٌفيالله on Unsplash
The disdain for mindless violence exhibited by most of the world’s 2 billion Muslims is exemplified by Ahmed al-Ahmed. He interrupted the negative stereotypes of Muslims so powerfully that white nationalists spread false allegations that he was actually a British IT specialist with a Christian name. Others attempted to maintain that he was a Christian Lebanese, which his name makes impossible. The New York Times declined to mention his religion. That there should have been a Muslim Schindler, a hero who followed the toleration promoted by the Prophet Muhammad, was so insupportable to Islamophobes that they felt constrained to make up fantasies and obscure reality.
The Gaza genocide weighs heavily over the Bondi Beach attacks, but it shouldn’t. ISIL shot up Paris in 2015 before the recent Gaza conflict, and massacred Shiite cadets in Iraq. The terrorist organization doesn’t need the Palestinians and has never done anything for them. ISIL was defeated in the Middle East mostly by other Muslims — by the Iraqi national army and allied Shiite militias, and by the Syrian Kurds and their Arab allies. Australian Jews were simply a scapegoat for these two violent, hateful men, who added nothing to the world, but subtracted from its humanity.
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