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The fight against the growing darkness of antisemitism

16 0
17.12.2025

The grandparents of 10-year-old Matilda, who was killed during the Bondi Beach mass shooting, grieve at the floral memorial in Sydney on Tuesday.Jeremy Piper/Reuters

There was darkness, and horror, on Bondi Beach on Sunday. Two gunmen saw hundreds of Jewish Australians gathered to celebrate the start of Hanukkah, and did not see fellow human beings, but only a cluster of targets.

Fifteen people were murdered in Australia’s worst terror attack, ranging in age from a 10 year-old-girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Thirty-eight more people were injured. Not all of the victims are Jewish, and the investigation is ongoing, but the hateful motivation of the two attackers is clear enough. Through their radicalized eyes, they saw the killing of Jewish Australians as part of the fight against Israel, and against Jews, wherever they live.

And if anyone was still unclear as to what the chants heard in countless rallies in Canada and elsewhere to “globalize the intifada” mean, the answer is to be found in the carnage at Bondi Beach. The two gunmen heard and heeded the call to intifada.

There is darkness, so much as to nearly overwhelm. But there were also flickers of light in that darkness. Boris Gurman, 69, and Sofia Gurman, 61, tried to disarm one of the gunmen before the killing spree began. The couple, a month away........

© The Globe and Mail