The reactions to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack has shown how racist many posters are here.

[TheTamerShrew]

I’m posting because I’m struggling with how racism against Jews is being talked about here following the recent terrorist attack in Australia. What I’ve seen, again and again, is minimisation: it wasn’t really about Jews, it was more complicated than that, let’s not jump to conclusions, other groups have it worse. All the familiar caveats come out remarkably quickly when the victims are Jewish.

I want to say clearly: racism against Jews is racism. Full stop. It doesn’t become less serious because it’s uncomfortable, politically inconvenient, or doesn’t fit neatly into how some people understand racism. And it doesn’t need to compete with other forms of racism to be real or worthy of being named.

What I find particularly painful is how often antisemitism is explained away rather than confronted. We would rightly challenge this pattern if it happened after an attack on almost any other minority group. Yet when Jews are targeted, there seems to be an urge to dilute, reframe, or downplay what’s happened.
I’d really ask people to pause and self-reflect on why that might be.

Why does naming antisemitism feel harder?
Why is there a rush to qualify it, contextualise it out of existence, or deny it altogether?
Why is Jewish fear so often treated as oversensitivity rather than a rational response to a long and very real history?

Acknowledging racism is not an accusation against everyone else. It’s the first, necessary step in confronting it. If we can’t even name antisemitism when it’s staring us in the face, we have no chance of challenging it, let alone preventing it.

We don’t make the world safer by minimising hatred. We make it safer by recognising it honestly, even when that recognition makes us uncomfortable.

I hope this can be read in the spirit it’s intended: not to shut down discussion, but to ask people to explore and self reflect.

See the attached photo: in order to become Anti-racist, one needs to first acknowledge racism

I was asked a question., that's why. And at no point do I condone retaliation.

Literally no-one is saying it makes sense. It couldn't ever.

This bears repeating and is the thing to focus on the most. Most people are good people. There is such light in the darkness. I am so thankful for their goodness and their courage.

People are trying to explain it by using the word “retaliation”.

They are, with human nature and posts along the same lines.

Indeed. Any why a couple of Pakistani men - with no connection to Israel or Palestine - would decide to shoot a bunch of Australian Jews....
What is their connection to Gaza exactly?

The kind of person who was interested in understanding every potential aspect of the situation, including the attacker's self-perceived or self-declared motives? There's a reason the police actually read and analyse the "manifestos" of terrorists rather than just chucking them in the bin. They are not expecting to find pearls of wisdom there, but insight into the minds of the terrorists that can help them understand the incident, set it into context and (hopefully) prevent future incidents. Same as they read the suicide notes of the men who commit family annihilation - not to justify the crime but to understand the psychology that led up to it.

There are many British Jews who lost family and friends in the actually genocidal attack on October 7th. None of them has gone on a murderous rampage AFAIK.

7/7 has bred terrorism among Israelis. Settler groups are becoming more and more violent to Gazan civilians. Obviously nothing to the organised scale of 7/7 but that horrific incident has certainly tipped some people over from thinking Palestinians have no right to be on that land to actively beating and intimidating them with a view to driving them off. It would be daft to think this escalation was not influenced by 7/7, just as it's daft to think these terrorists would not frame the war in Gaza as a major motivation for their actions.

Netanyahu has linked the Australian recognition of a Palestine state as a reason for this attack so this is not an isolated observation. Doesn't mean it justifies it of course it doesn't and of course Australian Jews have absolutely nothing to do with it but what victims of a terrorist attack ever do? They are the innocent victims of an horrendous crime but it can help with the investigation and prevention of further attacks to understand the motivation behind the attack, that is standard practice in an investigation.

I think people need to stop looking at views on motivation as some kind of justification for the attack because that is not what people are doing.

They are explaining the thinking of the terrorists, not endorsing it FFS. Why is that so difficult to understand?

Quote please as the only thing I saw about human nature was someone acknowledging they couldn't possibly understand what the global Jewish community were going through in the wake of this attack, as it is human nature to identify most strongly with victims of our own racial, national, religious or cultural groups. Not saying it was human nature for the terrorists to attack the victims.

Islamic concept of Ummah which sees all Muslims as part of a big family. Someone who was fundamentalist might well take that literally and feel they have a personal stake in any conflict involving other Muslims. Note I said "feel", not saying it's a rational position or that terrorism is a justified response to that feeling.

And if people organised marches through the streets of London demonstrating against ‘two tier policing’ and on those marches people chanted about grooming gangs or held placards up about grooming gangs, would you argue those marches had no impact?

On their month long trip to the Philippines "Both reported Davao in Mindanao island as their final destination, and left the country on a connecting flight from Davao to Manila en route to Sydney", she said. The southern island is where groups aligned with the Islamic State have operated.

In 2017, Islamic State-led militants tried to seize Marawi City in Mindanao, leading to a five-month battle with Philippine troops that killed more than 1,000 people

You keep letting yourself believe that.

I think most people are saying ‘these terrorist thugs think Palestine gives them license to be hateful. It’s ridiculous and stupid but that’s what they thought’ not ‘retaliation is a normal word to use when violent thugs murder a child in Australia’. At least I hope so.

But I still believe and will keep saying that anyone who continues to go on hate marches through the middle of Uk cities every weekend is part of the problem. Whatever the original intent of the marches was. Whatever obvious feelings everyone has for the innocent victims in every stage of the story. Whatever the history here it has to stop now. These marches are triggering and frightening and emboldening to the worst parts of our country and I absolutely forgive no one who continues to encourage them.

Is Netanyahu right?

I took it to mean that it’s retaliation only in the deeply fucked-up and twisted minds of the terrorists. Not actual retaliation in the way that any normal person would accept or think is reasonable. “Retaliation” should probably be in quote marks. Not that it’s “retaliation” that is in any way justified or in any way makes sense, but that that’s how the terrorists are seeing things. People are just trying to make sense of Bondi, which is of course a hopeless effort because there’s no making sense of it.

For the record, I think the attack was utterly heinous, one thousand percent anti-Semitic, and it’s not the fault of any Jewish person or politician anywhere. It’s the fundamentalist terrorists, who only need to feel a breeze on the tip of their nose to lose their minds and are probably unduly influenced by the news cycle. They are completely insane. I know some posters here think that lots of other posters are blaming Jewish people for the attacks, but I really think that’s a misunderstanding. I certainly wouldn’t dream of blaming any Jewish person for it, anyway.

What you don’t acknowledge is that trying to understand the thinking of terrorists is empathising with them.

Retaliation is a completely unacceptable word to use in relation to Australian Jews getting gunned down at a beach party. Why not just call it what it is - antisemitic hatred.

Sorry. I don’t understand what you are saying?

This is an issue for those at the receiving end, eg the actions of the shooters at Bondi.

@Beachtastic Excellent response.

And as I've said, this Ummah is apparently very selective about which Muslims dying they actually get angry about

You are talking about children witnessing Gaza who could become terrorists of the future, you say this is human.

What did the shooters in Bondi personally experience to lead them to their actions?