🌊 Bondi Beach, Gaza, A Heroic Muslim, Double Standards, and a World That’s Increasingly Numb to Mass Violence
Trying to tell the truth about a massacre, a genocidal double standard, and the Muslim hero the world almost doesn’t know what to do with
As-Salaam-Alaikum and good evening from Austin, Texas to each of you.
This evening I want to try my best to thread a needle and very carefully, ethically, compassionately make some rather complicated points. Please forgive me for any shortcomings with my words and, as always, feel free to push back in the comments, or echo your support.
On Sunday, fifteen people were slaughtered at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Families were running for their lives across the sand. Children were hiding. A Holocaust survivor was killed at a Jewish holiday event with his children and grandchildren present. A father and son opened fire into a crowd, and the images and videos are devastating.
And I’m going to tell you something that feels awful to admit out loud: as horrific as this attack is, as evil as it is, for the first time in my life, I noticed that my brain wasn’t shocked by the carnage of a mass shooting. I see non-stop carnage 24 hours a day.
Before I go any further, I need to ask you, from the heart, to become a member today. I keep this reporting and reflection free for the world — for readers in Gaza, in Sudan, in refugee camps, in public schools, in prisons, for families living in deep poverty — because a smaller circle of people who can afford it choose to carry some of the cost. If that’s you, I’m asking you to click here to become a member or click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding membertoday. Your support keeps this work free for them, and even for you when you can’t afford to pay.
Now let me tell you what I saw today, and what I felt, and why I think the world is more dangerous than it was before this shooting.
Gaza Has Broken the World’s Shock Meter
For over two years now, Gaza has been a livestream of horror that human beings have never seen before in this way, at this scale, with this frequency. I’m not talking about one viral video or one massacre that trends for a weekend. I’m talking about a constant, daily flood of the worst things a human eye can see.
Children crushed under concrete. Men and women burned alive. Babies frozen to death in flooded tents. Entire families wiped out in a single airstrike. People starved in full view of the world. Mass graves. Bodies pulled from rubble for the thousandth time. All of it filmed, photographed, uploaded, shared, and seen.
When I say Gaza has changed everything, I mean this: it has changed my capacity for shock.
Fifteen people were killed at Bondi Beach, and that is a nightmare. It is absolutely heartbreaking. But I now see fifteen people killed on random boats bombed by the United States every day. I see fifteen people killed in a single strike on a refugee camp in Rafah. I see fifteen people killed in line waiting for bread. I see fifteen children dead in one classroom. Gaza has turned “fifteen dead” from a once-in-a-year headline into something my eyes see over and over, every single day.
And I’m not alone. Every single person I spoke to about this attack today said some version of the same thing: “This is terrible, but my mind just can’t react to it like it used to.” That is not because we care less about Jewish life or Australian life. It is because our brains are being subjected to a level of violence that no generation has ever had to witness in real time before, and our nervous systems are trying to survive it.
I need you to understand how dangerous that is. Genocide doesn’t just kill people. It floods the world with so much brutality that ordinary people lose the ability to feel the right amount of horror when new atrocities happen. If you have watched thousands of children be killed in Gaza and never see a single official held accountable, what does your mind do the next time you see a mass shooting somewhere else? It says, “This is awful,” but it also says, “This is what the world is now.”
That is not healthy. That is not normal. And it is not an accident.
The Kill Standard Israel Has Normalized Is Terrifying
The second thing I need to say is harder. It is delicate. And I’m going to say it with as much care and morality as I possibly can.
Israel has spent this entire genocide defending a standard for who it is “justified” in killing that is absolutely horrifying. They have told the world that if a person took a picture with Hamas, that person is a legitimate target. If someone worked in a ministry that Hamas also touched, even in a completely unrelated role, they are a legitimate target. If someone expressed emotional support for October 7th, or for Hamas generally, they are a legitimate target. Not just them — but anyone who happens to be in their home, their car, their office, their apartment block, their neighborhood when the bomb hits.
That is not a theory. That is what they have done in practice, day after day. They have bombed homes, streets, apartment towers on the basis of who someone took a picture with, or worked for, or cheered for.
This is a very dangerous precedent to set.
Because once you tell the world, “If you ever express support for a group like Hamas, or celebrate mass violence, if you pose with the killers and bless what they’re doing, that alone makes you a legitimate target,” you have opened a door that does not stay inside Gaza.
Today, one of the people killed at Bondi Beach was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, an assistant rabbi of Chabad of Bondi. He was described as a devoted chaplain, beloved in his community. He also, according to widely shared posts, signed missiles with the IDF, took photos with Israeli soldiers, and loudly supported the idea that the West Bank belongs exclusively to Jews.
Let me be very clear: what happened at Bondi Beach is wrong. Attacking unarmed civilians at a Hanukkah event is evil. There is no universe in which opening fire on a crowd like that is justified.
But I need you to hear the thought that is now in millions of minds around the world, even if they are afraid to say it out loud.
If a Palestinian in Gaza had done word for word, step for step, what Rabbi Schlanger is said to have done — posed with Hamas fighters, signed rockets, publicly cheered on mass violence, claimed land as exclusively theirs — Israel would absolutely have said that met the threshold to target and kill them. How do I know this? Because they have done just this TENS OF THOUSANDS OF TIMES! They would have bombed that person and everyone around them and then gone on TV and said, “We eliminated a legitimate target.”
That is the kill standard Israel has created. It is brutal. It is reckless. And it is not staying in one place.
I am not saying we should adopt that standard. I am not saying anyone, anywhere, should be targeted under it. I am saying that once a powerful state spends two years insisting this is how the world works, once they repeat over and over that cheerleaders and selfie-takers are legitimate military targets, you cannot be surprised when that logic begins to poison other minds in other places.
This is Pandora’s box. This is the cat that cannot be put back into the bag. You cannot preach a theology of “guilt by association and celebration” and then expect nobody, anywhere, ever to flip that same script back on you.
The answer, in my view, is not to celebrate what happened at Bondi. The answer is to reject Israel’s kill logic at its root. To say no, it is not okay to bomb civilians because of who they took a picture with. No, it is not okay to kill people because they cheered the wrong army. No, it is not okay to obliterate whole families because one person in the building supports a certain group.
If we do not reject that logic completely, it will continue to spread.
The Muslim Man Who Ran Toward the Gunfire
The third thing I need to say is this: it was an unarmed Muslim man who literally stopped the Bondi Beach shooting and got shot twice in the process.
His name is Ahmed al Ahmed. He is forty-three years old. He owns a fruit shop. He is a father of two. In the video that has now circled the world, you see one of the gunmen standing behind a palm tree, firing his weapon over and over. You see Ahmed hiding behind a parked car. Then you see him do something most human beings will never do: he runs toward the shooter.
He launches himself at the gunman, wrestles the gun from his hands, and turns it back on him, forcing the shooter to retreat. Ahmed then lowers the weapon and raises his hand to show police he is not one of the attackers. In that struggle he is shot in the arm and the hand. He has had surgery. His cousin told Australian media, “He is a hero, 100% he is a hero.”
The premier of New South Wales called him a genuine hero and said many people are alive today because of his bravery. The prime minister of Australia praised him. Even Donald Trump, at a White House reception, said he had great respect for Ahmed and called him a very brave person.
Hold that in your mind for a moment. In a world where Muslims are constantly framed as threats, as suspects, as potential terrorists; in a world where Palestinians are painted as subhuman; in a world where people who so much as chant “Free Palestine” are treated like a security problem — it was a Muslim man who ran toward the gunfire at a Jewish event and likely saved dozens of Jewish lives.
At the exact same time, some of the loudest Jewish and Christian voices in the world have been championing a genocide against Muslims in Gaza, cheering on the flattening of neighborhoods, signing bombs, and blessing the pilots who press the buttons.
That is the world we are living in: a world where a Muslim man bleeds in a hospital bed because he chose to protect people who probably would have been afraid of him if they had passed him on the street; a world where his faith is constantly associated with violence, even as he is the one who risked his life to stop it.
I need us to see Ahmed clearly. I need us to say his name, and not as a footnote, but as a central fact of this story.
What happened at Bondi Beach is heartbreaking. It is evil. Fifteen people were killed, including a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, a French citizen, and many more whose names we are still learning. People were hiding under barbecues with their babies. Teenagers heard gunfire and thought it was fireworks, until they saw bodies on the sand.
At the same time, I cannot separate this from Gaza. I cannot pretend that a year of genocide has not rewired our brains. I cannot pretend that Israel’s kill logic and its celebration of violence has not set a terrifying precedent. I cannot ignore the fact that a Muslim man named Ahmed ran toward bullets while the world keeps painting Muslims as if they are the bullets.
My heart is broken. My shock is broken. And the world is more dangerous than it was before.
The work we are doing here — trying to name these contradictions, trying to hold grief and analysis together, trying to resist the numbness and the propaganda — matters. If it matters to you, I’m asking you again: stand with me in it. I want every one of these pieces to stay free for the world, but that only works if some of you decide that this kind of honest, risky writing is worth supporting. If you’re able, please click here to become a member or click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member right now.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Thanks for letting me share my heart here.
Shaun. This article IMHO is the most powerful you have written. “Moral injury” is not nearly strong enough to describe what many of us feel, those of us who are paying attention.
Ahmed Al Ahmed has shown the world what it needed to see, to know. Bless his courage. Thank you.