WhatsappThe time for platitudes is over. What’s needed is zero tolerance of Islamic extremism and anti-Zionism.
How many wake-up calls does anyone need? The cliché that the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre was just that is singularly inappropriate.
Australia and the West have had one wake-up call after another. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Australian synagogues have been firebombed; as elsewhere, anti-Israel marches have regularly chanted for the mass murder of Jews; and on campus, Jewish students and academics have been harassed and intimidated.
The significance of all this has been ignored by Western governments, which have stuck their heads ever more deeply into the sand. But now the attacks have gone into overdrive.
In Britain on Yom Kippur, two Jews were killed in an Islamist attack on a synagogue. Last Saturday, two Iowa National Guard soldiers and a U.S. interpreter were killed and three were wounded by an ISIS terrorist in Syria’s security forces.
Last Friday night, an assailant shouting antisemitic abuse fired about 20 rounds into a private Jewish home in Redlands, Calif., which was decorated for Chanukah.
This week, yeshivah students were assaulted on the New York City subway when returning from a Chanukah event. In another attack, a Jewish man was stabbed in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., by an attacker who declared: “It’s OK if the Holocaust were to happen again.”
Two students at Brown University were murdered in an attack on the economics class of a Brown University professor, who also teaches Jewish studies courses. A Jewish professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shot dead inside his home; there are unconfirmed reports of Iranian involvement.
During a Chanukah celebration in Amsterdam, dozens of violent anti-Israel protesters were arrested after police had to physically surround Jewish families to protect them. Islamic terror plots have been foiled at German and Polish Christmas markets.
In other words, this is a global intifada. For Diaspora Jews, it’s an emergency. But it’s also a last warning for the West to take Islamic extremism much more seriously as a danger to everyone.
This has developed into a global crisis because of a climate of impunity. For more than two years, the streets have been colonized by demonstrators screaming for the murder of Jews and jihad against the West. This has all been largely shrugged aside as “free speech.”
On the very day of the massacre on Bondi Beach, where 15 people were murdered and three times that may wounded, demonstrators marched in the British Midlands city of Birmingham behind a banner reading “Brum [Birmingham] says one solution, intifada revolution.”
The Oct. 7 attacks acted as a galvanic signal to the Islamists that they were now within sight of a final victory over Israel and the West. The way in which the West’s political and intellectual elites bought into their defamatory and obsessional lies about Israel, turning it into a pariah state for daring to defend itself against genocide and reacting with indifference to the escalating abuse of Jews, emboldened and incentivized them to ramp up their intimidation and attacks.
Too few realize that for the Islamists, the destruction of the Jews, who they understand to be central to Western civilization, is the necessary precondition for its destruction.
From Sayed Qutb, the early-20th-century Islamic theorist who inspired modern extremist Islam, to Osama bin Laden and the Hamas Charter, Islamic jihadis have said that their war is against modernity, which is a bacillus carried by the West. And behind both modernity and the West are the Jews.
It’s important to acknowledge the many Muslims who have no truck at all with Islamic extremism. The hero of Bondi Beach, who tackled the 50-year-old man who perpetrated the attack along with his 24-year-old son, and disarmed him with his bare hands, is reportedly a Muslim of Syrian origin.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of global terror attacks are committed in the name of Islam. The history of Islam as a religion of war tells us that today’s terrorism is not an aberration by a handful of extremists.
Following the Bondi Beach massacre, there has been a chorus of imams declaring that this attack was inimical to Islamic teaching.
But that isn’t true. Islamist extremism—or the spreading of Islamic precepts by violence to the rest of the world—is founded in texts and precepts upheld by all Islamic authorities. The warlike verses in the Quran, including those that mandate the killing of unbelievers and hatred of Jews, are held to supersede the more pacific verses.
True, many Muslims don’t interpret their religion in this way. Many simply ignore its religious precepts.
Still, no Islamic authorities have repudiated these warlike texts. And there’s no shortage of imams in Britain, Australia and America preaching hatred and murder against Jews and the West with no pushback from either state or Islamic authorities.
In Australia, an Islamic scholar, Wissam (“Abu Ousayd”) Hadad, preached in November 2023 that the Jews were “rats” and “cowards” who controlled the media and the banks, and who needed war to continue in order to make money.
In Britain, imams have been documented referring to Israel as a “rapist” who suffered only a “scratch in his face” in the Oct. 7 attacks; praying for victory over the “cursed” Jews and infidels, stating, “Scatter them and rip their groups apart, and destroy their houses and homes, bring them down and punish them like you do criminals;” and preaching that it was “obligatory” for Muslim leaders to support jihad and praising Hamas as “heroes.”
In the Islamic Center of Kansas, an imam reportedly proclaimed that “Gaza has begun a new page of Jihad and sacrifice” and then prayed for the destruction of “the criminal Zionists.”
Are all these imams contravening Islamic teaching? Hardly.
Following the atrocity in Australia, U.S. President Donald Trump said: “All nations must stand together against the evil forces of radical Islamic terrorism, and we’re doing that.” Britain’s Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has spoken up with refreshing bluntness by stating that Islamic extremism is incompatible with Western democracy.
This may appear to be a statement of the blindingly obvious. But the problem is that very few other Western leaders have explicitly called out this problem for what it is. And none of them has taken the action necessary to tackle it.
Trump has made a start by deporting extremists. But Washington could do much more. And the governments of Britain, Australia and Canada have combined extreme hostility towards Israel with a refusal even to identify Islamic extremism as an acute problem, let alone take the measures necessary to deal with it.
For starters, a responsible and civilized government should be rooting out these extremist imams, prosecuting or deporting them as appropriate. It should be banning the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, along with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is intolerable that these subversive or terror-promoting groups should be operating with impunity in the West.
In addition, any responsible and civilized government should be calling out the defamatory lies about Israel as the tissue of falsehoods that they are and as a weapon of war to destroy Israel through delegitimization
Yet the British, Australian and Canadian governments have themselves been promoting these lies, thus fanning the flames of murderous Islamist hysteria about Israel and Jews.
The Jewish world should be likewise calling out those in its own community who unwittingly lend their support to the Islamist onslaught.
The danger to the Jews is not just from physical attack. What we are witnessing is an all-out onslaught—not just on Israel, but on Judaism, by anti-Israel obsessives both inside and outside the Jewish community who are seeking to set Judaism against Zionism.
Since Judaism constitutes the inseparable fusion of the people, the faith and the land, setting it against Zionism—the right of the Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—is an attempt to rip out Judaism’s very soul.
If the struggle to stamp out antisemitism is to mean anything more than hollow platitudes, then it must consist of zero tolerance for Islamic extremism—and zero tolerance for the delegitimization of the world’s only Jewish state.
