After Bondi Beach, we can't normalization of antisemitism |
On the first night of Hanukkah, two gunmen opened fire on Jewish families celebrating at Bondi Beach. Sixteen people are dead.
Among them were Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who organized the celebration; Alex Kleytman, a Holocaust survivor killed while shielding his wife; a 12-year-old girl; and others ranging in age from 10 to 87.
This was not spontaneous violence. It was the foreseeable outcome of a climate in which antisemitism has been tolerated, rationalized and normalized.
Violence against Jews becomes possible long before the first shot is fired — when Jews are isolated, stigmatized and stripped of their humanity in the public imagination. The question is not only who pulled the trigger. It is who created the moral environment in which pulling that trigger became imaginable.
Antisemitism is laundered through language. It is softened by euphemism and legitimized through repetition. Slogans glorifying violence against Jews are quoted without definition. Incitement is reframed as grievance. Jewish fear is dismissed as exaggeration.
When antisemitic rhetoric is treated as debate rather than danger, audiences absorb the message that Jewish vulnerability is negotiable. When Jewish identity is portrayed as uniquely political, empathy erodes. When coverage explains hostility toward Jews while interrogating Jewish responses, a moral asymmetry takes hold. Over time, that........