The tragic mass shooting at Bondi Beach yesterday during a Jewish Hannukah celebration, where 11 people were killed, has dominated press headlines in a way that we never saw once during the Gaza genocide, with its monumental death toll inflicted by “Israel”.
Inevitably of course, newspapers in both Australia and the UK capitalized on the opportunity to link this to Pro-Palestine demonstrators and their justified protests over the past 2 years at “Israel’s” atrocities and genocide in Gaza.
Although many UK newspapers rightfully praised the hero of this occasion, the Muslim shopkeeper and father of two, Ahmed al-Ahmed who risked his life to save more Jews from being slaughtered and ended up in critical care after wrestling the gunman to the ground, predictably the incident is being used to fuel Islamophobia and explicitly suggest that opposition to “Israel’s” genocide precipitated this event.
For example, the elite Lord Wolfson KC, Shadow Attorney General whose son serves as a soldier in the IDF and who is known for his benevolent mission to create pop up cafes to feed the IDF and provide them with rest breaks during their hard work of genociding innocent civilians in Gaza, yesterday in the Daily Telegraph bemoaned the dangers to Jews in Britain whom he referred to, along with himself, as being the “canary in the coalmine”.
The irony of this allusion that is symbolic of those from the lowest rungs of society used as collateral to indicate danger to the rest of the herd, is astounding from a man who represents the most elite rungs of British Jewry as well as being a lynchpin of the Zionist dominated British establishment.
It is alarming yet predictable that elites like him deploy such emotive language tinged with associations of antisemitism in order to promote an agenda of clamping down on legitimate protest – this type of thing is an integral building block in the path towards debriding us of our civil liberties and our legitimate right to protest, and this is what we are seeing today, with each successive development in IDing us and censoring us, part of a wider covert objective to muzzle us.
The irony of hand wringing over the apparent “anti-Semitism” in the UK that allowed him and many of his compatriots to end up in such elite positions should not be lost on anybody. It is figures like him who revel in disseminating narratives of Jewish victimhood from atop the highest positions in the country in order to contribute to the clamping down on our rights and freedoms.
He talks at length about Chanukah, Yom Kippur and various other Jewish traditions, and in the same breath demonizes Muslims, deploying the same tired and frankly stupid stereotypes sprinkled with words like “Jihad” and “Intifada” the provenance of which most of the public are ignorant of and that constitute a very distinct attempt at deliberate conflation.
The cynical utilization of this incident to create divisiveness and play victim in a society where not only is Islamophobia alarmingly on the rise but far right racist groups have been openly deployed by “Israel” to stoke the flames of racial hatred in order to obfuscate the issue and deflect from “Israel’s” genocide is appalling and detestable manoeuvring.
The fact is that the recent unravelling of “Israel’s” hasbara and the loss of their grip on the narrative has seen them going into a freefall of panic, offering sums of up to seven thousand for influencers to spread their propaganda on social media. “Israel” and its Mossad, virtuoso of false flag operations cannot be ruled out here, but we also cannot expect that the evidence of a false flag will ever be easy to unearth.
What we do know is that “Israel” has no problem sacrificing its own people as collateral, as it did on October 7th via the Hannibal Directive, as it did during its indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, killing its own precious hostages – precious for leverage that is, dead or alive.
Given that some details on the shooters are yet to emerge, but what we do have is a clear picture of the Muslim man who risked his life, where is the gratitude from people like Wolfson?
While this act of selflessness and true heroism was praised by one rabbi, Central Synagogue Rabbi Levi Wolff – it would be entirely appropriate to see this gratitude amplified within the Jewish community as a whole, and furthermore, to see key figureheads of Jewish organisations explicitly acknowledge his act.
In a situation where people were fleeing, it took a Muslim man to step up and do the consummately brave thing, to display the courage, honour and noble heroism to save Jewish children and civilians from being indiscriminately killed. He was shot twice and is recovering in hospital.
Where is the gratitude from the Jewish community? Where is the acknowledgment from the UK Jewish elites who have colluded to demonize Muslims?
During the Gaza genocide where civilians, women and children have been killed indiscriminately, we have seen only the minimizing of their deaths in the Western media. The New York Times and The Atlantic amongst others have applied their momentum and clout to galvanize the claim that the Bondi Beach incident represents the concrete manifestation of “Globalize the Intifada”.
This is a very specific, conscious and targeted objective to suppress protest. “Intifada” is an Arabic word that means “shaking off” – of oppression, of chains; in the context of Palestine it refers to the shaking off of the chains of occupation.
This represents not only a legitimate human yearning for freedom, but the possession of the liberties that most of us take for granted, and that appear to be an incontrovertible and inalienable right for Westerners or “Israelis” but a forbidden and censored desire for Palestinians.
“Intifada” that is deliberately conflated with “Jihad” and then demonized, means freedom from occupation, whereas “Jihad” which is propagandized as holy war, means struggle, internal or external. One is religious, the other is a word for an uprising against oppression, in this case 100% legitimate.
But what we need to remember of course, is that what is legitimate and indeed expected for one population of people, is prohibited and disfavoured for another; the proscription of Hamas as a terror organization when it has never waged any acts of “terror” outside of Occupied Palestine is an utter hypocrisy when its only agenda is to fight the unlawful occupation by “Israel”.
“Intifada” is a word the Zionist establishment would like to see erased from the dictionary in much the same way that the sinister and Orwellian establishment of 1984 sought to erase words that alluded to human rights, freedom or dignity for most of the population of their totalitarian world.
In this case it is those words that represent the struggle of the indigenous people of Palestine against unlawful occupation on their own lands and the word that most clearly articulates the fight against their erasure and symbolizes their right to resist, their claim to equal humanity, that the Zionist establishment wants to censor and that the Zionist elites are threatened by.
Condemning pro-Palestinian protestors consolidates them all into a monolith, an accusation often levelled against racists, who see all members of a race as one uniform monolith with the same features, a casting that inevitably leads to prejudice and ultimately dehumanization.
The attempts of many Western media outlets to categorize all protestors against “Israel’s” genocide as “pro-Palestinian” and then proceeding to demonize pro-Palestinian as some seething and unruly mob when they are simply incredibly diverse groups of people from various demographics protesting the killing and brutalization of innocent civilians, is a very deliberate ploy.
The truth is that acts of terrorism are committed each and every day by “Israel” a rogue state of lawlessness, apartheid brutality and institutionalized and legalized doctrines and precepts of violence towards the Palestinians, that requires not just intifada – but globalized intifada on a mass scale.
This means protest against occupation; it does not mean acts of violence, because that would make pro-Palestinians the same as the inhuman monsters who perpetuate their violence upon innocent civilians – and we are not like them.
Returning to the term “intifada”, the word that encapsulates freedom from occupation and equal access to humanity for the people of Palestine – and therefore by implication, equal rights for all – we must resist its demonization.
Up until the abolition of slavery, if the slave masters had known that there was a word for freedom that conjured up the emotions associated with freedom, and they were able to do so, they would have banned that word and its associated feelings from the lexicon.
Indeed, every colonial master, every despot and every flagrant violator of human rights would want to erase the notion of freedom from chains and occupation, they would wish to do away with any equalizing framework that placed the oppressed and oppressor on equal terms.
Despotism thrives on inequality, and such ironclad systems of injustice as Zionism that has spread its tentacles over most of the Western establishment and that seeks to tighten its chokehold day by day need to be recognized. The gradual boiling of the frog dynamic where we allow this noose, of the curtailment of liberties, to tighten gradually around all our throats, must be urgently recognized.
Perhaps one day, when our freedoms have been almost entirely eroded and we are the nodding puppets of the Zionist establishment who decide which words we can and cannot use, just as we can trace the acceleration of this erosion back to Palestine-“Israel”, maybe the word “intifada” will be the one that also delineates our path to freedom – it would be a fitting irony and appropriate ending to a dystopian novel that the Palestinian’s word for freedom was the word that could unlock our own freedoms.
We need to resist the colonization of our words, language and semantics by Zionism; we need to keep our sights on what is the real injustice; we need to ensure that the word “shaking off” and the feeling of freedom are not gradually eclipsed in this sinister darkening of our world that has accelerated through our apathy in the face of a genocide.
We need to globalize the intifada.
