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

Were these two murderers members of a cult? Which one?

Hind Rajab and Matilda are of equal value. Both of them should be alive today.

I won’t post what I just said about that kind of view. So bad.

Ahhhh, here we have someone who has swallowed the BBC, Guardian etc. propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Radical Islam, you know the ones with a long history of this sort of thing .

True; but Christians no longer go around the world torturing and slaughtering those who don't share their faith. All religions go through a dangerous period of expansionism, and it's currently Islam's turn. It's daft to pretend otherwise, frankly.

What exactly are you disputing here? The death toll? The poster is simply making the point that many children have died as a result of the war in the Middle East and that is unacceptable. Some of those children have received more coverage than others, that's also an indisputable fact,

ISIS. You might have heard of them.

They could just be two anti-Semitic nutjobs. The rush to assume the father and son are part of a cult is a bit sudden. The Muslim mosque in the area has said they don’t claim them.

Who said they’re part of ISIS?

Well suicide bombing would be pretty dense if you're a Christian, suicide being a pretty unequivocal one-way ticket to the hot place in that religion. But the text makes plenty of references to smiting the old unbeliever, and the majority of violent antisemitism in this country has always been Christian-on-Jew.

Look, no-one is saying that there isn't a serious problem with Islamic extremism in this country and globally, or that radical Islam isn't inherently anti-semitic.

But I think that this has a lot more to do with how the texts have been interpreted, and how that interpretation has in some sectors failed to evolve with the times, than with the text or tenets itself, as pretty much all religions in their core texts are misogynistic, homophobic and religiously intolerant, in keeping with the times that they were developed. So if we could stop talking as if there's this huge inherent problem with Muslims and Islam, and more focus on the real reasons why this faith has not integrated, evolved and modernised to the same degree that other religions have for the most part in western societies, we'd make more progress.

Or we can sit here playing 'find the nastiest quote' as if that's going to change the way things are NOW, Aand as if there is something inherently different in the core texts of Islam as compared to the other Abrahamic faiths which has any bearing on why the fundamentalist interpretation of those texts has more Muslim adherents than Christian or Jewish ones.

Yeah the death toll. But aside from this, if Hamas didn't deliberately use hospitals as shelter, steal food and medical aid, and generally abuse and terrorise the residents of Gaza (see recent Hamas mass assassinations of those alleged to have not complied with their rules), then perhaps the death toll would be less?

it is very complicated and deep rooted, not just about what has been happening in Gaza, to say it’s racism is simplistic, it results from ongoing conflict, perceived injustices and prejudice with roots over 2000 years ago. The entwining of Judaism (a religion) with Israel (a nation state means that it is different to some other racism BUT it doesn’t ever make it right. Racism is always wrong, violence is wrong, murder is wrong. We need however to understand the causes to stand any chance of rooted it out

The point is that the victims of this attack are separate to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine. They should be able to celebrate Hannukah without fear of being attacked or killed.

What happened was terrible. Really sad for the families, their community and the wider Jewish community.

I think Antisemitism exists, and is wrong. I don’t get the sense it is condoned though? It is widely, publicly condemned, including by our own government and previous governments. That’s not to say it, sadly, doesn’t still exist.

I listened to someone talking on Radio 4 this morning about the attack. He pointed out that despite Russia having invaded and continuing to attack Ukraine, Russian places of worship, Russian nationals and Orthodox Russian Christians around the world are not targeted by terrorists, we don’t have demonstrations across the UK almost weekly where we all wear Ukraine flags and call for the destruction of the Russian State and Russians worldwide don’t live in fear of attack because they are Russian. The same cannot be said of Jewish people worldwide. Antisemetism is out of control.

If you are one of the "many" that genuinely believe that Jews have a right to live safely then why would you object then to Jews having a country where they can live safely, which let's be honest after the latest attack in Bondi is something they need more than ever.

Lets be honest everyone who chants "from the river to the sea" supports the eradication of Jews in Israel and everyone who claims that they are anti Zionist and not anti semetic supports the eradication of the State of Israel.

Quite simply every time I see a pro Palestinian protest I see anti semetic terrorist supporters - either knowingly or through ignorance.

Every time I see Palestine Action supporters I see people who think it is acceptable to fracture a police woman's spine by hitting her with a sledgehammer.

It is part of a bigger picture. Radical Islamists want to destroy the West, it's values and its people. Israel is (or was) considered part of the West, along with its Jewish population.

But despite the fact that they want to destroy you, me, and our families, people on here are defending them? Madness.

Well if you forget about the other 2000 years of people hating Jews, sure. But this was a problem before this war and before the state of Israel and onwards for thousands of years. It's not the fault of any recent conflicts.

The problem is not all men or all Muslims.

Islamic extremism is a big problem however, and it tends to be male extremists who commit acts of violence like the Bondi beach terrorist attack.

You can choose not to respond to the murder of a child with victim blaming.

I'm not in any way "talking as if there's this huge inherent problem with Muslims and Islam." There is a huge inherent problem with radical Islam, and until we can recognise the difference, and discuss this without gaslighting, it's going to continue to pose a real danger, including to peace-loving Muslims. We need help identifying the fringe nut jobs, because it would be bad enough if they were going home to beat their wives, but the problem is far more terrifying than that, unfortunately.

But the vast majority of these type of attacks are carried out by Muslim men. Fact!

I agree, it's mainly some Muslim people being racists towards the Jews because of the Palestine war. It's rasicism, no one should be joining in.

I'm afraid this thread, and others on MN currently, show how "alive and well" it is.