Guy Levin

Here's an extract from my @DailyMail column, 'There's a direct link from the antisemitic chants on Britain's streets and the Bondi murders' dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic… The incongruity is sickening, harrowing beyond words. They had gathered together on the beach to sing and laugh and eat doughnuts, to give thanks and light candles for Chanukah, the festival of hope. Yet just as their candles flickered tentatively into light, small beacons of optimism and resilience, the two terrorist gunmen struck, transforming expectation and joy into darkness and horror. Chanukah commemorates a 2,000-year-old miracle when a tiny amount of oil lasted for eight days to light the Temple in Jerusalem. It signifies the triumph of light over darkness, literally and metaphorically. How could anyone with a human heart gun down men, women and children at such a moment? As a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who has written over the years about the most appalling antisemitic attacks, I thought I was inured to Jew-hate and that there was little now that could shock me. I thought I had a full grasp of the depravity of antisemites. But I was wrong. Yesterday's events at Bondi Beach have shaken me to my core. One reason is that, until now, I have never known personally any direct victims of an attack. Nothing brings the horror home more than when you realise that you know someone who has been hit. Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights lawyer, has long been one of the most vocal and effective campaigners against antisemitism. I published many of his articles in the Jewish Chronicle. Just a fortnight ago, after moving to Australia from Israel, he wrote of the 'alarming surge in Jew-hatred since October 7, including the defilement of Australian landmarks being hijacked as platforms for intimidation'. Yesterday Arsen was hit by a terrorist's bullet. But, thank God, he is OK and was soon sending WhatsApp messages. His warning about the surge in anti-Semitism could not have been more prescient. The Bondi Beach attack was not an unpredictable outrage. It was the inevitable consequence of the Australian authorities' and politicians' refusal to tackle Jew‑hate – a refusal we see here in this country, too. Within days of the October 7 massacre in Israel in 2023, a crowd gathered at Sydney Opera House to chant 'f**k the Jews'. Not one of them was arrested, let alone charged. Jewish-owned businesses in Australia – such as the Miznon restaurant in Melbourne – are regularly and violently attacked. Synagogues are set on fire. This is the reality of life for Jews in Australia. There will not be a single Australian Jew who was surprised by Bondi – not least because the Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, is widely reviled in the Jewish community for his obsessive criticism of Israel and failing to take antisemitism seriously. It is to our shame that the same situation exists in Britain. When a terrorist struck at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur in October, no British Jew was surprised. We knew an attack was coming, just not where it would take place. For two years the streets of London and other cities have seen regular crowds of hate-marchers, sometimes as many as 200,000. The response to October 7 itself, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was a protest march the following Saturday – before a single Israeli soldier had even entered Gaza – against the victims of the massacre and in support of the perpetrators. The protesters march under the banner of 'Free Palestine'. But their marches are not really about Palestine. They are about Jews. One of the regular slogans on the marches is 'Globalise the intifada' – a clear and unambiguous call for the mass slaughter of Jews to move beyond Israel. What happened on Bondi Beach was globalising the intifada in action, as was the Manchester synagogue attack. And when they chant it, the police just stand and watch. As they do when protesters chant 'Khaybar, Khaybar, Ya Yahud! Jaish Muhammad sawf ya'ud!' on the marches, ('Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews! The Army of Muhammad Will Return!'). This is a reference to the battle of Khaybar in 628, when Muhammad's army besieged and destroyed a thriving Jewish community. These relentless, wilfully targeted, anti-Semitic chants are now so commonplace that they barely merit a mention by the police or the media. On Saturday, for instance, a crowd gathered in Birmingham and chanted, 'We will honour all our martyrs' and 'Intifada Revolution' – calls which only glamorise violence against Israel. But the truth is there is a direct line from these chants and demonstrations to the Bondi murders, and indeed to every new terror attack. They form a continuum in which verbal assaults lay the groundwork for physical attacks. Yet instead of the action needed to break this link, we get platitudes. 'There is no place for anti-Semitism on the streets of Britain,' we are told after every terrorist attack – a straightforward lie, since protesters and other Jew-haters are evidently given a very large space to spout their anti-Semitism on our streets. That is why Jewish schools and community buildings have to have such tight security – and why anyone who signs up to attend a Jewish communal event will not be given the venue details until hours before, to try to stop terrorists from mounting an attack. That is how we Jews live in Britain. It is our normality. Bondi has been termed a 'wake-up' call. Sadly, it will be no such thing because, still, no one in authority is willing to tackle the antisemitism on our streets. It will turn out to be just one in a long line of attacks that will carry on in Australia, in the US, in France and, of course, here.

Here's my @JewishChron take on the Bondi Beach murders thejc.com/opinion/sydney-ter… Nothing better illustrates the difference between shock and surprise than this morning’s Bondi Beach murders. The attack is, of course, deeply shocking. Even those of us who have repeatedly warned that allowing Jew hate to flourish and grow would make such an incident – or rather incidents – inevitable are nonetheless shocked by the sheer evil on display. You would have to be inhuman not to be shocked by it. But surprised? I don’t often claim to know what "the Jewish community” is thinking. We are far too varied for anyone to make such a claim. But I’ll stick my neck out on this. Is there a single Jew who did not expect to see Manchester happen? Or who did not expect to see more murders after Manchester? Bondi didn’t happen here, obviously. But we all fear – we know – that something like it will. Because just as it sends a message when you tackle hate, so it sends an equal and opposite message when you don’t. And that message has been sent loud and clear by the refusal of our governments and authorities to act (let’s not forget that the hate marches began and then solidified under a Conservative government). Which of us hasn’t had the conversation in recent months as to whether there is a future for us here? I’m going nowhere. They will have to do an Edward I to get rid of me. But like so many in our community, I fear for my kids’ future. I was lucky to be born and to live most of my life at a time when open and serious Jew hate was not the norm. That is no longer the case. It’s said that Jew hate is being normalised. That’s wrong. It has already been fully normalised and it is folly to pretend otherwise. The toothpaste is out of the tube and I don’t see how it can be put back in. The only discussions which matter now are how we deal with that reality. That reality has changed so much about how we will live our lives as Jews. First Yom Kippur, now Chanukah. If we look across the diaspora, the evidence suggests that Jewish festivals are now the occasions on which our enemies seek to kill us. It’s as if we have entered a time warp and gone back to late 19th century Russia. I am not being facetious here. This normalised Jew hate is real, and it is not going to get better. CST is a superb organisation staffed by some of the most brilliant and committed people alive. But the idea that a communal charity can be a bulwark against a rising tide of Jew hate and terror is not so much unrealistic as fatalistic, because if that is all we have then the game really is up. The police are excellent at dealing with terror plots – I will always have personal reason to be grateful to them for that, as my JC colleagues will remember when I was editor, and my presence on a hit list meant I had armed protection outside the office and at home – but they are worse than useless at, well, policing. Worse than useless because their refusal to act against chants such as “globalise the intifada” – globalise the slaughter of Jews, in other words – feeds the hate and enables the terrorists. Every single weekend Piccadilly Circus is taken over by Jew haters and their globalise the intifada chant. And neither the police – nor, of course, the Mayor of London, who has, to my knowledge, not once in two years expressed even a mild hint of a criticism of any of the hate marches and their antisemitic chants – do anything. I am sorry to sound so desolate. I would like to think it’s because the murder of at least 11 Jews is so fresh in the mind. But it isn’t that. It’s because I see no other rational response than desolation at where we now are.