Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload… How to turn back the rising tide of murderous inhumanity

Along with hugely intensified efforts to thwart the next killers already poised to strike, what’s vital is a global effort to entrench from childhood the sanctity of life, and ensure serious punitive consequences for those who incite and enable murder

Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload. Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload. Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload…

The efficiency is striking, horrific. A man in black, on a bridge at Bondi Beach, his paternal partner at his side, gunning down defenseless men, women and children. Ruthless. Focused. Utterly indifferent to the inhumanity he is perpetrating.

People who had gathered with joy in their hearts, to spread the Hanukkah light of appreciation for the divine gift of life, murdered en masse by an emissary of darkness.

If he could have, he would have killed them all. Just like Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023.

As the Hamas Charter quotes the Prophet Muhammad as instructing: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'”

Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload.

How to stop it?

How to turn back the rising tide of murderous inhumanity, the surging effort these past 26 months to destroy not only the Jewish state — as Hamas intended on October 7, and most certainly still intends — but the Jewish people?

To demonize, incite against, and dehumanize us. And then to kill us.

In our beds in our homeland. At our places of worship. When we gather indoors in ostensible security.

And, now, as in Sydney on Sunday, to kill us when we dare to come out and gather in public in the open air.

How to stop it?

By bringing the resolute protection of life, the defense and dissemination of fundamental humanity, to bear upon the entire process that carried that efficient killer on the bridge from birth to mass murder.

What does that require in practice? A global effort, advanced by the leaders of countries that truly value life.

It requires the insistent championing and entrenching of humane values from childhood. By requiring tolerance and respect for the other in education and in spiritual leadership in countries ostensibly committed to humane, civilized values. And by making that tolerance and respect — the core authentic Jewish value, widely practiced beyond Judaism, more widely neglected everywhere — a condition for interaction with countries that teach and preach hatred.

It requires the prevention of murderous incitement — by politicians, activists, media outlets, and social media exponents — and the prosecution of offenders.

It requires internalizing that the essential right to free speech also has essential limits, and that it cannot be abused to stir up hatred and, ultimately and inevitably, murder. Free speech is precious, at the heart of the societies we want to live in. We in Israel right now are facing a government moving to silence its critics, and we are not the only ones. Drawing the fine line between legitimate protest and incitement to murder is easier to propose than to carry out, but it is practicable.

It requires far more effective enforcement to prevent the export of murderous extremism, plainly including urgently enhanced screening of emigrants from countries that are educating to kill.

And along with the heightened security necessitated by the failures thus far, it requires a determined, relentless battle to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of those who might use them.

A global restart

Any president of the United States would be well placed to champion this global effort. And this president is a self-declared philosemite and supporter of Israel, with a second-term focus on ending wars.

Believe, as President Donald Trump stated two months ago, that Hamas is “ready for a lasting peace”? Then require not only that it disarm and play no further role in the leadership of the Palestinians, but that it publicly renounce violence and repudiate that 1988 charter.

Consider Qatar to be a great American ally? Then declare any continued partnership contingent on the closure or reform of the Al Jazeera incitement machine, poisoning minds across the Middle East and beyond.

Value a friendship with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Then make plain that the US will not support him, much less sell him sophisticated warplanes, unless he severs his relations with Hamas and stops inciting against Israel.

At home, the US and its partners in the free world must move away from the feckless tolerance of demands for the destruction of Israel, the branding of Zionists as terrorists and the demonization of Jews — currently indulged and even protected everywhere from mass demonstrations in major cities, to hostile gatherings outside synagogues, to placards and banners inside and outside sporting events, to concert performances before adulatory audiences — and prevent the willful encouragement of murder.

In the case of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish nation with a crucial obligation to help protect Jews everywhere, this also requires clear-cut policies and action at home to uphold humane values. Israel must lead by example.

Every effort must be continuously made to minimize the loss of noncombatant life in Gaza. There can be no more of the kind of misguided policies that saw aid barred from Gaza for 11 weeks between March and May. There must be no tolerance for violent Jewish extremism of the kind that Israel is failing to confront against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

And after decades of insistent neglect, Israel needs to invest resources and brainpower in global public diplomacy — at least trying to explain that, in Gaza, it is fighting a war against its avowed would-be destroyers. Against a terrorist government that invaded and slaughtered Jews 800 days ago, and then withdrew into the vast urban battlefield it had built in Gaza to continue killing Jews, cynically placing the people it ostensibly champions in the line of fire and executing those who dissent.

The war in Gaza would never have started had Hamas not invaded. That’s a simple truth conveniently forgotten. Israel had fully withdrawn from the territory and wanted to believe it would never have to return. And the war would have ended long ago, with far less loss of life, had global opprobrium focused on starving the would-be genocidal Hamas terror-government of legitimacy, public support, weaponry and finance. Instead, antisemites obsessively seeking to destroy the world’s only Jewish-majority state galvanized a global effort to deny Israel the right and the means to defend itself.

As many others have noted in the past few hours, Sunday’s mass murder on Bondi Beach was a realization of all those outrageously advanced and tolerated demands to “globalize the intifada.”

Perhaps it will give pause to some of those useful idiots who joined demonstrations calling for the destruction of Israel, death to the IDF and, now and again, including in Sydney, the gassing of Jews.

It won’t shift the true haters, however.

And it won’t deter those so skewed by a lifetime of miseducation and indoctrination as to have lost any respect for the sanctity of life. Those who would resort to murder. Those who would kill us all if they could.

Only concerted corrective and preventive global action — all the way along the path from first steps to potential efficiency with a deadly weapon — can start to change that.

Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload. Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload. Aim, fire, kill a Jew, reload…

And it won’t stop at Jews, either.