Steven Tucker
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.
I strongly suspect the sentiments I am about to express mean this is not going to be a very popular article, and I equally strongly suspect the Daily Sceptic is one of the very few publications in this country which would actually print it. But, when it comes to Australia’s horrific Bondi Beach shooting, in which at least 15 Jews celebrating Hannukah were shot dead by a father-and-son team of presumable Islamists, it may in some ways have been better if the brave and noble actions of the man who ran up to one of the two terrorists and wrestled his gun away had not happened.
Obviously, he is a genuine hero, and it is brilliant his intervention saved lives. So perhaps I should qualify my statement here as meaning less ‘I wish he hadn’t stepped in’, and more ‘I wish his actions hadn’t been reported in the way they have been’. Because, as you just may possibly perhaps have heard, the hero of the hour was a local fruit-seller named Ahmed Al Ahmed – and he was a Muslim. So, it appears, were the two named shooters, Sajid and Naveed Akram, but most of the world’s media don’t seem to want us to dwell on this particular detail of the matter quite so much.
Jews of the World
The front pages of the majority of Britain’s newspapers the morning after the slaughter chose headlines designed to highlight less that some Muslims had shot some Jews but that another Muslim had tried to save them. Some of these newspapers were even the very ones habitually labelled as being ‘far-right’ and ‘Islamophobic’ by the left, like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, Britain’s only daily news publication with a medieval Christian Crusader as its mascot.
Other outlets like the Telegraph tried to be a little more balanced, implying the very best and very worst of Islam and humanity alike were on display at Bondi that day.
Only the occasional daring publication like the Sun focused primarily on the horror and violence of the situation: no doubt, if and when Labour’s proposed new definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ is pushed through, such blasphemous presentations will be rendered completely haram.
Overall, the editorial line was quite clear: one hero Muslim saves Jews, not two Muslims kill Jews. It’s a bit like saying WWII Germany was great because of Oskar Schindler, whilst completely ignoring Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. What is the subliminal (or not so subliminal) implication of the standard media presentation of this matter, as illustrated above? That the West must import more Muslims, as only they can save non-Muslims from other Muslims. Have these people never heard of ‘The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly’? (I keep making this analogy, but no one ever listens.)
Beach Bodies
Ahmed Al Ahmed is indeed a hero: he certainly deserves some kind of reward, and not only in Paradise. Happily, a billionaire American banker, Bill Ackman, has just offered him one, to the tune of $100,000. There have been calls for the Jewish state of Israel to hand him an official honour too, although whether he would really like to go and receive a gong from what many Muslims regard as the bloodstained hand of Benjamin Netanyahu would perhaps provide the ultimate test of just how well-integrated Mr Ahmed truly is.
Rewards can consist of praise as well as money, of course. The tides had not yet washed Bondi’s sands clean of Jewish blood before ranks of liberal-minded commentators were repurposing the whole situation to stand less as an emblem of the failures of multiculturalism, more as an illustration of its complete success. A columnist in no less than the Jerusalem Post wrote:
There is another reason this matters. The Bondi Beach attack will be exploited by extremists who want to turn it into fuel for collective blame, collective suspicion, and collective hate. That road leads nowhere good. [And where does the opposite road lead, then?] Jews know what it means to be judged not as individuals but as a category, a problem, a target. Ahmed’s story is the antidote to that poison.
But it isn’t, is it? The delusional excessive elevation of Ahmed’s bravery away from belonging to himself personally, and the projection of it onto Muslims living in the West as a whole, will not act as the “antidote” to the poison of murderous Islamic extremism, but will only enable it to spread ever further.
If the warrior who had tackled the gunman had happened by remarkable coincidence to have been Tommy Robinson on a winter beach-holiday, do you think we would have been getting columns like this being pumped out everywhere? And I really do mean everywhere, even in ostensibly right-wing publications like the Spectator, where Aussie columnist Terry Barnes argued this:
But Ahmed’s courage and bravery also serves a nobler purpose, especially today in shocked and horrified Australia. In the aftermath of Bondi, many Australians, in their anger at the perpetrators of this horrible terror act, haven’t hesitated to tar all Muslims with those men’s vile and evil brush. … They should instead be thankful that many Jewish lives were saved by a Muslim man, who could have chosen to keep under cover and save himself. Ahmed’s selfless bravery is a timely and welcome reminder… that it is wrong to conflate peaceable, faithful and devout Muslims with radical Islamists. … [Ahmed] is an antidote to the hatred the perpetrators showed to the Jews they targeted.
No, he’s not an “antidote”, he’s a politically convenient bromide in human form. Awkward though it may be to say so, although Ahmed personally had no intention to do anything but good on Bondi that day, he is inadvertently being made to serve the cause of violent global jihad nonetheless by Panglossian useful idiots like the above.
Family Bondis
What’s the best way to ensure more Jews (and others) die at the hands of Muslims in the West in the future? Import more Muslims. With that in mind, examine the interview the Australian Broadcasting Corporation rushed to carry out with Ahmed Al Ahmed’s parents. They live in Sydney and are presented as being impeccably well-integrated. If so, why does his mum still dress like this?
What does ‘well integrated’ mean in Western Muslim terms now? Wearing a hijab in nice Laura Ashley pastel colours instead of ISIS flag-black? I know absolutely nothing about how religious the pair are, but even so, the mild Islamic conservatism the mother’s mode of dress appears to indicate represents precisely the kind of comparatively bland and benign, ethno-religious sea within which killers like the Bondi gunmen can swim inside Western societies like Australia.
The pair took the opportunity to praise their son’s bravery:
When he did what he did, he wasn’t thinking about the background of the people he’s saving, the people dying in the street. He doesn’t discriminate between one nationality and another. Especially here in Australia, there’s no difference between one citizen and another.
But there demonstrably is quite a bit of “difference between one citizen and another” in Australia these days, isn’t there? For example, the difference between Australia’s sainted Muslim citizens, who are continually pandered to, and everyone else, who are subjected to Islamists going around firebombing synagogues, stabbing priests and attempting to slaughter Christmas shoppers with machetes and bombs because they thought it would be ‘cool’. At least their teen-speak language was fully Westernised, then.
The Boomerang Effect
The final paragraph of ABC’s interview with Ahmed’s parents is worth repeating in its entirety:
Family calls on PM for help
They fear that due to their age, they won’t be able to help their son in his recovery [from the gunshot wounds sustained during the attack]. As a result, they are calling on the… government to help his two brothers, one from Germany and the other from Russia, to travel to Australia to support the family. “He needs help now as he’s become disabled now,” Ms Ahmed said. “We need our other children to come here to help.”
No you don’t. Besides Bill Ackman’s $100,000, the hero of the hour had received $550,000 in thoroughly deserved public donations in a mere 12 hours – I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s $1 million by now. The Ahmeds could use that to pay for professional nurses. Or move back to the Middle East and live as comparative sheiks there for the next few generations (albeit, given their son’s now famous Jew-helping exploits, he may soon find himself taking a few more bullets from distinctly more unsympathetic locals if they do). Letting any more Muslims in, even good ones like we must presume the Ahmeds are, is the last thing Australia needs right now.
Also worth reprinting in full is the final paragraph of our very own Guardian’s coverage:
For AlKahil, [an Australian Muslim the Guardian interviewed] the profound tragedy also brought a sense of fear. “As Muslims, every time there’s an attack we say to ourselves, oh no, people will say it’s Muslims that are bad,” she said. “We are scared to leave our houses if we’ll be accused. But our religion is a religion of peace and we are very peaceful people. This proves that.”
Two Muslims shoot some Jews, and the ‘correct’ official conclusion to be drawn is that this “proves” Islam is a religion of peace. Isn’t a far better lesson to be drawn that certain strains of Islam are peaceful, certain strains are outright genocidal, certain strains are somewhere in-between, and that, just to be on the safe side, absolutely all strains should be kept safely quarantined somewhere distant on the other side of the world, away from the previously peaceful West?
Not according to Kumbaya dreamers like Labour MP Lola McEvoy, whose immediate response to Bondi was as follows:
You don’t want to speculate on what the factors are that have contributed to this awful tragedy [You might not want to, Lola, but I do]. … I firmly believe that people are good, and that given the opportunity, they will look out for each other. And I just want to say that as much as possible, we should try and detoxify the way that we think of people who aren’t like us, because our diversity in this country is our strength. And I firmly am on the side of working together and celebrating our differences. Because, you know, I was a community organiser a long, long time ago, and the strongest campaigns that we ever worked on were about bringing people of different faiths and different world views and different backgrounds together to find what we had in common.
I have absolutely nothing in common with you, Lola, and nor do most of your traditional electorate. That’s a major part of why the Labour Party’s support is utterly cratering at the moment, because normal sane people are sick to the back teeth of utopian vomit like this spewing out of your stupid Islamophilic mouths after every such massacre whose supposedly mysterious “contributory factors must not be speculated on”, lest any such conjecture should happen to alienate the ever-growing Muslim vote in traditional Labour safe-seats like Bradford and Oldham. “I firmly believe that people are good,” this fool says, even when some “people” are shooting other people dead on a beach.
Still, Lola’s just an obscure English PPS in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Thank God Australia itself doesn’t have suicidally empathetic Eloi like that in positions of actual power at the current moment in time, eh? Oh no, wait. At his post-pogrom press conference, Palestine-pandering Left-wing PM Anthony Albanese paid tribute to Ahmed tackling the gunman as a paradigmatic example of “Australians coming together”. “Australians coming together?” That’s a funny way of describing a Syrian immigrant taking on some (reported) Pakistani immigrants in a gunfight over some Jews, isn’t it?
In the short term, Ahmed Al Ahmed saved dozens of Jewish lives. In the medium to long term, his fine example is going to be systematically exploited to ensure that thousands more Jews (and gays, whites, Christians, apostates, etc., etc.) are the victims of Islamist attacks. I know Ahmed is a genuine hero. But please, let’s not treat him as one, at least not in the way Albanese and McEvoy are: the ultimate cost will just be too great.
I know this column makes me sound like a heartless piece of shit. But empathy has got us absolutely nowhere. And heartlessness is generally better than brainlessness.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
