We must not let the weaponization of Bondi beach shooting divide us

I was born in Campsie, a four-minute drive from where the father and son gunmen who perpetrated the Bondi Beach shooting, Sajid and Naveed Akram, hid their rifles in a rented house. I was raised in those suburban streets as Greek Orthodox, among Muslim school friends and neighbours, mostly children of parents who had fled the Lebanese Civil War. We still keep in touch. My mother and aunt still live there.

In my childhood, I knew about Ramadan, shared the sweetness of feasting at Eid. When I travelled to the Levant in my twenties, the dawn call of the muezzin felt familiar and comforting.

I opened a bookshop café in Bondi and lived up the hill from the beach for a year. It was there I made good friends amongst the Jewish community, and where I learned about the significance of Hannukah, visited a synagogue for the first time and understood what it meant to keep kosher.

For ten years, I co-judged Waverley Council’s local literary award, the Nib, where I read the work of many celebrated Jewish writers.

Both the Jewish and Muslim communities are part of my internal landscape, my fondest memories and important events in my life. This is why the dichotomy of ‘us versus them’ in the wake of the Bondi Beach shooting is so dangerously flawed.

Every life is sacred. Extremism, sectarianism and radicalism in any religion or ideology is equally abhorrent. This is where dehumanisation begins and where it inevitably ends in violence and death. This is why defaulting to collective blame and selective outrage is not the path forward.

Demonising all Muslims for the actions of two people is the worst kind of reductive thinking. And we all know how Islamophobia grew worldwide after September 11, fuelled by the same blinkered self-righteousness and misplaced anger, and gave rise to retributive attacks.

This is why, when I hear bad faith commentators and politicians weaponizing this tragedy, exploiting the situation and conflating the pro-Palestine movement with the shooting at Bondi, I despair for my country.

Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, has already linked the Bondi shooting to the pro-Palestine movement. She claims that: “In Australia, it began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House. We then watched a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving terrorist flags and glorifying extremist leaders. Now death has reached Bondi beach.”

 

 

 

 

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People at those peaceful protests came from all walks of life, all ages, all genders, all political affiliations, all religions. Caring about the suffering of one community does not preclude us from caring for another community. Either Segal is blithely inflaming division in her own country, or she is sadly deluded.

This is also why, when Benyamin Netanyahu railed against Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for recognising the State of Palestine, saying that he, “let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today,” I can only shake my head at his mendacity, at his hellbent desire to once again use Jewish murders to his own advantage.

I have seen this same conflation from Jewish and Christian ‘friends’ on social media. Disinformation and misinformation is rife, such as dishonest videos circulating of ‘Islamists setting off fireworks in Sydney to celebrate the terrorist attack’. Images of the Prime Minister with blood on his hands. Calls of ‘all Muslims should be rounded up and deported.’

And it gets worse. Already, Muslim graves in south-western Sydney have been desecrated by severed pigs’ heads. Hundreds of NSW Police are stationed at places of worship across the state, as they attempt to calm these erupting tensions.

Ahmed al-Ahmed, a father of two and Sutherland shop owner from Syria, refused to succumb to this reductive thinking. He showed his humanity by acting selflessly. And he acted with such courage and dignity that he has now become a universal symbol, a light in the darkness. A Muslim man who saved countless Jewish lives, who was shot twice himself in the process, and risked his own life for strangers.

It was not the Prime Minister or anti-war protestors who made this massacre happen. If someone espouses this view, they are either wilfully blind or deliberately and cynically using the murder of innocents to further their own agendas. We must focus on the facts, and so far we know that one of the gunmen, 24-year-old Naveed Akram, had been known to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) since October 2019, for his affiliation with a Sydney-based Islamic State terror cell. Furthermore, the gunmen had two homemade IS flags in their car and improvised explosive devices.

Hatred and division is never the answer. It only breeds more hate, more violence, more pain. Here in Australia, this is a tender, liminal time to pause, reflect, listen and then respond with whatever shreds of wisdom we can muster.

The only moral response at this moment, to what has been perpetrated against our communities, is grief. We must be allowed to stop and mourn. And then, when we feel stronger, we must be determined and brave. Generous. Humane. To embrace collective responsibility and compassion. To stretch that dormant muscle, the heft and capacity to hold many truths at the same time.

We must not allow the far right in Australia, the racists and xenophobes, and those overseas actors with their own vested interests, to determine our future. We must stand together and learn from this devastation, a seismic shift we couldn’t have imagined before that light-filled summer’s afternoon on our shores.

Katerina Cosgrove is an award-winning writer, editor, and journalist of Greek and Australian descent, whose work explores themes of identity, displacement, and power. She is the author of three books, The Glass Heart, Bone Ash Sky, and Zorba the Buddha, and her writing has appeared in Al-Jazeera, The Independent, SBS Voices, The Sydney Morning Herald, Island magazine, Sunday Life, and other national and international outlets.

Follow Katerina on Instagram: @katerina.cosgrove

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.