When Extremists Fear Candles, Flags, and Church Bell |
At the funeral of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a victim in the Bondi Beach mass terror shooting, in Bondi on December 17, 2025, in Sydney, Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker, Pool) Kesis Desalegne Nemomsa, a victim in the Horo Guduru Wollega, Ethiopia mass terror shooting December 14, 2025 (Photo credit and commercial-use permission: Bewuntu Yenager)
To secure both the Red Sea and democracy itself, Israel and the West must stand with free peoples of faith not with forces that would silence them.
By Dr. Shmuel Legesse
In a world where dictators disguise themselves as democrats and extremists wave the banner of freedom, moral clarity has become a rare commodity. The battle for the future of democracy will not be decided only in Washington or Brussels but also in synagogues in Sydney, churches in Addis Ababa, and along the Red Sea, where the Horn of Africa meets Jerusalem’s horizon.
As an Ethiopian-Israeli educator and advocate of Moral Diplomacy, I have watched the same forces that question Israel’s legitimacy turn their violence against Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia and against ancient Christian communities marking holy days in Ethiopia. These are not isolated events. They are symptoms of a single moral crisis: the targeting of faith, identity, and human dignity by ideologies that cannot tolerate difference.
Faith Under Fire — From Hanukkah to Holy Communion
During Hanukkah the Jewish festival of light, resilience, and freedom Australian Jews were attacked in an antisemitic terror incident meant to turn celebration into fear. The timing was not accidental. Hanukkah commemorates resistance to forced conformity and religious erasure. That is precisely what extremists seek to crush. The same pattern appears thousands of miles away in Ethiopia, where the Tewahedo Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, one of the oldest continuous Mosaic Christian traditions in the world has faced attacks during religious holidays, the desecration of sacred sites, and violence against worshippers. In both cases, faith itself becomes the target. The message is chillingly consistent: public religious identity is intolerable.
This is why antisemitism and anti-Christian persecution cannot be treated as separate phenomena. They are part of the same moral assault on freedom of conscience.
The New Mask of Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism no longer arrives only with tanks and uniforms. In our generation, it often comes disguised as populism or as an ideological “awakening.” Across Europe, both socialist and radical extremists’ movements have begun to erode pluralism, branding dissent as treason and demanding that faith bow before ideology.
In parts of the Middle East and Africa, extremist and nationalist factions including some radical religious and traditional extremists’ movements, now grant greater dignity to abstract causes or symbols than to human beings themselves, turning ideology or even nature into an idol while neglecting the divine image in humanity. They exploit democratic openings only to seal them once in power, silencing women, minorities, and moderates........