Australians Being Massacred Shouldn’t Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred
Caitlin Johnstone, 16 Dec 25, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/australians-being-massacred-shouldnt?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=181738154&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say”.
Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025?
Does that day stand out in anyone’s memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder?
No?
Same here.
I honestly can’t remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake “ceasefire”, a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn’t one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn’t exactly stand out in the memory.
I have no idea who those people were. I don’t know their names. I never saw their pictures flashing across my news feed. I never saw any western officials denouncing their deaths, or media institutions giving wall-to-wall coverage to the news of their killing. So I don’t remember them.
I saw a tweet from Aaron Maté yesterday:
“15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.
“Israel’s atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the number one driver of anti-Semitism worldwide. And to show how little Israel and its apologists care about anti-Semitism, many are exploiting the Sydney massacre to justify Israel’s rejection of a Palestinian state; baselessly blame Iran; and demand more censorship of anti-genocide protests.”
Indeed, the worst people on earth are using the Bondi Beach shooting to argue for crackdowns on free speech and freedom of assembly to silence Israel’s critics online and on the streets, in Australia and throughout the western world. And when 15 Palestinians were killed by Israel on March 16, the west barely noticed.
I don’t remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.
Hell, I can’t blame it all on society; if I’m honest I made a much bigger deal about it myself. I’ve felt sick thinking about the shooting ever since it happened, partly because I know it’s going to be used to roll out authoritarian measures and stomp out free speech in my country, but also partly because I’ve felt so bad for those who died and their loved ones. Even after spending two years denouncing the way western society normalizes the murder of Arabs and places more importance on western lives than Palestinian lives, I’m still basically doing the same thing myself. I’m a damn hypocrite.
I wasn’t born this way. This was learned behavior. If I had my slate cleaned and could see the world through fresh eyes it would never occur to me that I and my society would ever see 15 people being murdered in Australia as more significant than 15 people being murdered in Palestine. I would expect them to be viewed as exactly as terrible.
And they should be. Palestinians don’t love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren’t any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did.
Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives have been directly devastated by this tragedy, thousands more indirectly, and in some ways the nation as a whole has been changed. The trauma will reverberate in the victim’s families for generations. The sorrow is palpable and ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; in the streets, at the supermarket. There is catastrophe in the air, and people around the world are feeling it.
And this is appropriate. This is what 15 deaths ought to feel like. This is what it feels like when you see mass murder inflicted upon a population whose murder hasn’t become normalized for you.
That’s all I’ve got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.
In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we’re really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world, who might not look and speak and live as they do. Maybe even extending it so far as caring about the non-human organisms who share our planet with us.
As Einstein wrote in a condolence letter toward the end of his life,
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
Humanity won’t survive into the distant future unless we grow into a conscious species, and part of that growth will necessarily include widening our circles of compassion to include our fellow beings around the world. If we can’t do that, we’re not going to make it. We’re too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it simply is not sustainable. It’ll get us all killed eventually.
We’ve got to become better. We’ve got to become more caring. More emotionally intelligent. Less susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and the pursuit of profit.
That’s the only way we’re making it out of this awkward adolescent transition stage with these large, capable brains still wound up in vestigial evolutionary fear-based conditioning. That’s the only way we achieve our true potential and build a healthy world together.
Wait, What?!
Racket cartoons, by Daniel Medina, https://racketcartoons.substack.com/p/wait-what?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=549592&post_id=181841928&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email, Dec 17, 2025
After the devastating massacre at Bondi Beach on Sunday, Australia’s PM and leaders promised to tighten gun laws to help make sure it never happens again. As an American reading this, and hearing more than just “thoughts and prayers,” I sat at my desk and felt deeply sad. Our country is so dysfunctional that we cannot handle even the basics of governing, let alone face the leading cause of death for American children: firearms.
What stood out to me was how quickly Australia’s leaders responded and how they seemed to agree that the government should act after something so terrible. In the United States, mass shootings are often followed by sadness but no action. It can feel like we accept these deaths as normal instead of trying to prevent them. Seeing another country treat gun violence as a problem they can fix makes our inaction even harder to understand.
Bondi demands grief, respect, fairness and empathy
15 December 2025 David Tyler, https://theaimn.net/bondi-demands-grief-respect-fairness-and-empathy/
A massacre demands clarity, not opportunism. Honouring the dead means resisting the rush to weaponise grief and insisting on evidence before politics raises its voice.
Australia’s Bondi Beach massacre demands grief, respect, fairness and empathy before anything else. As of the afternoon of 15 December, fifteen people are dead, murdered while gathered to mark Hanukkah. Families are shattered. A community has been targeted.
Politics Ebook
Nothing written in these first days should forget that, or rush past it.
But grief does not require silence, and it does not require surrendering the dead to political theatre. Within hours of the attack, familiar scripts were already being dusted off. Foreign leaders, local ideologues and media provocateurs moved quickly to bend fresh blood into proof of arguments they had long prepared. That reflex is not analysis. It is cheap, cynical, opportunism.
What we know, and what we do not
Police have confirmed that two men, a father and son, carried out the attack and were confronted by NSW Police within minutes. The elder was killed at the scene. The younger remains critically injured and under guard. Authorities are examining motive, movements, digital traces and licensing history. At the time of writing, no public finding has established foreign direction, state sponsorship or organisational command. That work belongs to investigators, not to commentators with deadlines.
What is clear is that the victims were Jewish Australians gathered for a religious celebration, and that antisemitism must be named plainly where it exists. There is no moral ambiguity about that.
Jews were targeted because they were Jews.
That fact alone is grave enough without being conscripted into other causes.
The moment that breaks the script
Police have confirmed that two men, a father and son, carried out the attack and were confronted by NSW Police within minutes. The elder was killed at the scene. The younger remains critically injured and under guard. Authorities are examining motive, movements, digital traces and licensing history. At the time of writing, no public finding has established foreign direction, state sponsorship or organisational command. That work belongs to investigators, not to commentators with deadlines.
What is clear is that the victims were Jewish Australians gathered for a religious celebration, and that antisemitism must be named plainly where it exists. There is no moral ambiguity about that.
Jews were targeted because they were Jews.
That fact alone is grave enough without being conscripted into other causes.
The moment that breaks the script
Against the horror stands a moment that should have arrested the rush to caricature. Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim Australian, fruiterer, father of two, ran toward danger. Video shows him confronting a gunman, disarming him, placing the weapon aside, raising a bloodied hand. He was shot and seriously injured. He survived. Others did not die because he intervened.
This matters. Not as sentiment, but as evidence. The attack was antisemitic.
The act that saved lives was Muslim.
Anyone who cannot hold both truths at once is not interested in understanding what happened, only in exploiting it.
The politics that arrived too quickly
Even before victims were formally identified, the blame industry went to work. Overseas figures folded Bondi into broader regional conflicts, pressing it into service as proof of distant enemies and permanent wars. Locally, others rushed to claim that Australia’s foreign policy settings, recognition debates or protest movements had “sent signals” and invited murder.
This does not withstand scrutiny. Over 140 UN member states recognise Palestinian statehood in some form, many for decades, without suffering massacres on their beaches. The attackers did not target Parliament, ministers or symbols of state. They targeted Jewish civilians at prayer.
Turning that into an argument for diplomatic reversal or communal suspicion is not security analysis. It is retrospective storytelling.
Bob Katter’s predictable calls for racial crackdowns and collective punishment follow on cue. They always do. Such politics does not make Australians safer. It corrodes trust, narrows cooperation, and teaches whole communities that silence is safer than engagement.
That is how information dries up, not how it flows. We do not need a smaller, meaner, whiter Australia.
Media and the hunger for immediacy
The media environment bears responsibility too. In the first 24 hours, speculation raced ahead of verification. Some outlets responsibly reported confirmed facts and official statements. Others leapt straight into imagined foreign command chains, proxy wars and ideological pipelines before evidence existed. Guidelines on reporting mass violence exist for a reason.
Premature conjecture does not inform the public. It inflames it.
There is a difference between naming antisemitism and conscripting it into every geopolitical conflict on the map. The first is necessary. The second is reckless.
What honouring the dead requires
Honouring the victims means insisting on facts over fury. It means allowing investigators to do their work without political interference or media frenzy. It means refusing to let grief be converted into justification for ‘forever wars’, domestic panic or the erosion of civic trust.
There will be time to ask hard questions about gun licensing, early warning and prevention. Intelligence. Those debates matter. They will be stronger if they are grounded in what actually happened, not in whatever story we most want to tell.
And it means holding onto the image that should endure from Bondi. Not the slogans, not the hot takes, not the scramble to assign blame, but a man who ran toward gunfire to save strangers whose faith was not his own.
That act does not erase antisemitism.
It rebukes the idea that violence must harden us into camps. In the long struggle against extremism, solidarity like that starves hatred far more effectively than all the pious goodwill rhetoric of a lifetime.
Coda: facts, not appetite
Here are the facts as they stand.
- Fifteen people were killed at a Hanukkah gathering on Bondi Beach. Two men carried out the attack. One was killed by police. One remains under guard. Police are not seeking a third suspect.
- The victims were targeted because they were Jewish. That is the crime. Nothing else needs to be smuggled into it.
- No public finding has established foreign direction, state sponsorship or organisational command. Those questions belong to investigators, not to press conferences.
- One man intervened.
- Ahmed al Ahmed disarmed a gunman, was shot, and survived. His actions saved lives.
- Everything beyond this is commentary.
A serious country knows the difference between evidence and appetite.
A resilient country resists the urge to conscript grief.
A decent country insists on grief, respect and empathy before politics raises its voice.
Politics Ebook
That is not timidity. It is how democracies hold their shape when they are tested hardest.
In moments like these, when fear tempts us toward smaller versions of ourselves, the work is to stay open, stay decent, stay human. We owe all of this to all others in their inconsolable, inconceivably painful, grieving.
Above all, we must expect it of ourselves; surely, this is how we realise our common humanity.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 