sometimes you see a story take shape in real time. not the event itself but the narrative that forms around it.
first, the facts: on december 14, 2025, a father-and-son duo attacked a menorah lighting celebration to mark the start of hanukkah in bondi beach. they explicitly targeted a jewish celebration and murdered 15 people and wounded many more. people tried to intervene by fighting off the shooters, and several were shot or lost their lives in the attempt.
you’ve probably heard of ahmed al ahmed, the shopkeeper who seized a gunman’s weapon and forced his retreat, sustaining gunshot wounds in the process. you should also hear about alex kleytman, a holocaust survivor who died saving his wife; reuven morrison, who warned of dangerously rising antisemitism in australia a year before and hurled bricks at the attackers before being shot dead; sofia and boris gurman, a couple who died trying to fend off the attackers; and chaya dadon, a 14-year-old girl who was shot multiple times while shielding younger children with her body. she is in the hospital.
when the details of the attack became clear, i saw condemnations of the violence. some of them highlighted the explicitly antisemitic nature of the attack. others decided this was really an issue of gun control, or a false flag, or actually a really great thing that they wanted to see more of because the victims belonged to a group that they despised.
i saw a few themes emerge. one was apologetics, a desperate desire to downplay the significance of the attack.
and this weird forced positivity approach of “look at this person who helped other people, even though he is — gasp — muslim and they are jews.” as though muslims and jews are fundamentally at odds, that it’s surprising that human beings would come to the aid of human beings outside their group.
take none of this as a criticism of ahmed, who is objectively a hero and righteous man. he did not ask to be made the symbol of a feel-good story, to be the only thing that many people mention about the attack at all.
and i understand that it is an effort to preempt islamophobic responses to the attack, i do. it’s just that the message, over and over again, makes jews an afterthought in our own story.
it’s not his fault that his gofundme has received more donations than all of the other victims and survivors’ combined. he did risk his life to save others at considerable cost to himself.
but i’m reminded of righteous gentiles, the ones who saved jews in the holocaust. certainly they are worthy of admiration. but there were relatively few righteous gentiles all told, which you might not know considering the many, many movies about them. jews are so rarely seen as the heroes in our own stories.
i think dara horn was wrong: people don’t love dead jews. they’d really prefer not to think about them at all.
i think it’s easier for people to highlight gentile heroism when they don’t want to look at the deeper issues. but this was preventable. this didn’t have to happen at all.
kaledo-art
annaxmalina
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