I am not your canary in the coal mine

The Bondi shooting deliberately targeted Jews. It's important to say so

Because it’s Hanukkah, a festival all about celebrating joy and light, I thought it might be fitting to start with a little game. Winners get a chocolate coin but everyone can enjoy a hollow laugh.

One of the X (formerly Twitter) posts below commemorating the Bondi Beach shooting — Australia’s deadliest terror incident and one that specifically targeted Jews — is by Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The other is by Iranian Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei.

For context, the Australian government recently expelled the Iranian ambassador, after it accused the Islamic Republic of directing multiple antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne, including the arson of a synagogue.

X screenshot

X screenshot

Can you guess which is which? It doesn’t really matter¹. The point is, once you see it, it’s hard to miss it. That is, the absence of any mention of who the victims were. It’s weird. Eyewitness accounts early on were clear. The shooters were even encouraging beach-goers to flee. They were only interested in killing Jews. But for some reason, some people have a hard time verbalising that fact. And it is difficult to imagine this would be the case if the targets were from any other vulnerable minority.

New York Times

You see these messages of general condolences all the time, from individuals and organisations that are usually so quick to name things and understand that specificity matters. Messages telling everyone in response to Bondi to “look after their mental health” without mentioning who was actually targeted. This is not confined to modern day incidents. The number of Holocaust Memorial Day statements by leaders that manage not to mention the word “Jews” or “antisemitism” would knock your socks off.

I suppose you could ask “Who cares?” When there are 15 people dead, including a 10-year-old girl called Matilda Britvan and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alex Kleytman. But I happen to think this is about more than semantics, and that it matters a great deal. Because this was not a random attack or senseless tragedy. It was targeted at a specific group of people.

“And all other forms of racism”

Famously, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn could never quite bring himself to condemn antisemitism in isolation. His form of words, to the point of parody, was almost always “and all other forms of racism”. But he is far from alone. Jews all too often get All Lives Matter’d.

Frequently, references to antisemitism are accompanied by those to Islamophobia. This is odd for a number of reasons, not least because Islamophobia, like antisemitism, is important and distinct enough to be condemned separately and on its own terms.

This post below by Adam Bienkov is, I think, instructive. What you see is a left-leaning journalist appearing to complain about the national broadcaster interviewing a cabinet minister and spending too much time talking about antisemitism. For context, this interview took place days after the Manchester synagogue attack, in which two Jews were killed on Yom Kippur.

Bluesky screenshot

It couldn’t have happened to anyone

Sometimes people don’t mention the J-word because, as discussed in yesterday’s newsletter, they would rather not offend antisemites than defend Jews. In other words, they just don’t want the hassle that inevitably accompanies any online statement that mentions Jewishness. Yet other times, this sort of thing is driven by Jews themselves.

There is a long history, particularly since the Second World War, of Jews desperately trying to find ways of getting non-Jews to care about antisemitism. That is why so much effort has gone into the universality of the Holocaust. Not only did it involve the slaughter of six million Jews, but it was also a lesson for the entire world to learn about where hatred can ultimately lead.

You will also occasionally hear people — including Jews themselves — refer to antisemitism as the “canary in the coal mine”. That is, when anti-Jewish hatred starts to rise, it is evidence of a wider moral disease within a nation. Again, I understand the drive to do this. Non-Jews won’t die directly from antisemitism, but they may be concerned about societal decline.

Here’s my issue, and apologies for the bad language but data suggests swearing can reduce pain: I am nobody’s fucking canary. I am not here to die as a social studies lesson for anyone else. I may die a hundred different ways, from an old man in my husband’s arms to a pulmonary embolism next May when Arsenal concede a last-minute equaliser on the final day of the season to lose the league title. Either way, I promise, there will be no lessons for anyone.

Sorry, Jewish deaths are political

The blood was still being scraped off the pavements when some started barging in, warning ‘bad actors’ (by which they mean people with whom they disagree politically) not to use this moment to their advantage. This is called projection.

It’s not that people with no interest in Jews or Jewish safety won’t seek to weaponise the Bondi attack for their own political purposes. They absolutely will and we should have no truck with them. But I’m afraid that the mass murder of Jews at a Jewish festival is an inherently political act.

What those who don’t want this to be ‘politicised’ are functionally saying is that they don’t want people they actually care about to suffer as a result of this terror attack. Furthermore, my hunch is that if the Bondi massacre had been perpetrated by neo-Nazis rather than inspired by Islamic State, some on the political left would have loudly crowed that it had nothing to do with them, or the widespread antisemitism tolerated in the pro-Palestinian movement².

The Bondi factor

I won’t pretend to understand the essence of Australian-ness just because I’ve spent a few Christmases there. But while for many foreigners, images of Australia conjure up the Sydney Harbour Bridge or Opera House, for Aussies, it may just be Bondi. Because the beach really is a way of life and it is for everyone. The fact that this massacre happened there is significant for iconography alone.

Bondi Beach (Jack Kessler)

Violent antisemitism is no longer confined to synagogues, kosher delis and Jewish childcare centres. It has come to the nation’s most famous and beloved stretch of sand. It shouldn’t have taken this appalling tragedy to force Australians to wake up to the daily abuse and threats to life their Jewish friends and neighbours have been experiencing for the last two years.

But now no one can claim they didn’t know. Perhaps, we can finally confront this hatred together, head on and begin the healing process.

1. Martin released a further statement the following day which did reference that the shooting targeted Sydney’s Jewish community.

2. Support for the Palestinian people’s legitimate aspirations for statehood, horror at the intolerable loss of civilian life or criticism of the Israeli government, is not antisemitic.