Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets Ahmed al Ahmed at St George Hospital in Sydney on Tuesday, in this photo released by the Prime Minister's office.Australian Prime Minister Office/The Associated Press
It is human nature to look for the light in the darkness. The silver lining, God’s open window, the glass half-filled, the ray at the end of the tunnel.
Sometimes this light can surprise, allowing us some relief from the pit where we have taken to residing.
At this darkest time of year and a dark time in the world, a crack of light presented itself on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in the form of one ballsy, fruit-selling hero, Ahmed al Ahmed, a Syrian-born everyman who was meeting a friend for coffee on Sunday but ended up saving untold lives with a shocking, selfless action that was caught on video.
“He made us proud,” Mr. Ahmed’s uncle told the BBC. “Our village, Syria, all Muslims and the entire world.”
The greatest gift of Mr. Ahmed’s heroism, of course, is the life he preserved. But there is also a gift in the narrative he presents, no matter how unwilling we are to feel an ounce of anything positive at this dark moment. A belief in the goodness of man.
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It shouldn’t matter what the guy’s background is, but we all know it does. It is an absolute gift that the hero who grabbed the gun at this Hanukkah massacre against Jews was a Muslim man.
When a tragedy like this happens in this social media age, it doesn’t take long for the public discourse to progress from the horror of the event and the tragedy of its victims to inevitable questions about the perpetrators.
Please let the gunmen not be (fill in the blank here), I have found myself thinking. For if they were, that could confirm a bias, stoke more division, verify our fears as rational rather than absurd.
The first time I felt what I hate to describe as relief about a perpetrator’s perhaps unexpected identity was on Nov. 4, 1995, when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down – by a fundamentalist Jewish assassin. Had Mr. Rabin’s killer been an Arab, what revenge might have been unleashed upon Palestinians?
Thirty years later, antisemitism has surged since the Oct. 7 attacks and what Israel subsequently unleashed on Gaza. This toxic rise is happening in Canada too, no matter what apologist rationalizers may argue to pacify us, patronize us.
In this environment, after every horrible event, I have braced myself: please don’t let the perpetrator be Jewish. Will that make them hate us more? When Charlie Kirk was killed – and after the attempted Trump assassinations – I prayed (in my own secular way) that the culprit was not Jewish. We don’t need more grief!
Video captured the moment a man rushed one of two gunmen at Bondi Beach and disarmed him while the second gunman continued to shoot from a nearby walkway. The state’s premier hailed the man as 'a genuine hero.”'
EyePress
But also, amorphous listener to my secular prayers: please do not let the perpetrator be an immigrant, or BIPOC, or trans, or any other MAGA-vilified person. In this climate, offering the haters any ammunition to fuel the othering they seem hell-bent upon could prove catastrophic.
The extremist Islamic ties that have been reported regarding the father and son alleged to have committed this massacre are not surprising. At a time when Jewish-Muslim tensions are at a high, Mr. Ahmed offers a different story.
I’m not sure I have any business feeling good right now. But it feels good to feel good about Mr. Ahmed.
It is tempting to go tribal in difficult times, to keep with our own. This is one of many dangers of a time so dark that lessons passed down from generation to generation might be hatred and violence, rather than love and wisdom.
Is this massacre a wake-up call? Maybe. But in its wake, my social media feeds still offered up grotesque antisemitism. On a Facebook thread about a new Toronto-area Uber-type service for Jewish people (following reports of Uber drivers shunning certain customers), one guy wrote: “I thought they were called train cars.” In the hours immediately after this massacre, it wasn’t the only Holocaust-related comment on there. When I reached out to the person who wrote it, he told me: lighten up, it’s a joke. He’s from Newfoundland, he replied, where self-deprecating humour is the norm.
This is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. But antisemitism has crept into socially acceptable territory. Would anyone make that kind of public “joke” about any other minority’s deadly persecution?
I’m so sick of it. The mezuzahs ripped off doorways, the swastikas in public schools, people telling us to go back to Europe. This is happening in Canada.
Sorry if I sound angry during this Festival of Lights. But I am angry.
We can placate ourselves with stories like Mr. Ahmed’s. But we have hit a dangerous place. One man’s heroism is not going to save us. World leaders, Canadian politicians, law enforcement, anyone who has silently stood by while allowing this normalization to happen: it’s your turn to step up and intervene.