Media can play the role of building bridges and finding mutual understanding, or it can play the role of being the propaganda arm for a genocidal regime. NPR, BBC, and the New York Times have all obviously chosen the latter, and coverage of Bondi Beach reinforces that inescapable reality.
In the wake of the massacre on Bondi Beach in Australia, NPR, BBC, and the New York Times, along with most of the western media, are interviewing supporters of Israeli genocide and calling them "representatives of the Jewish community." So many of the people they're interviewing actually represent Zionist organizations but are not identified as such. Then they share their views about a supposed global "wave of antisemitism." The reporters then completely fail to push back against these preposterous claims that are largely based on a ridiculous definition of antisemitism, where making any statements against the genocide of Palestinians or in support of people fighting back against genocide is considered antisemitic.
Committing a massacre of civilians is a terrible thing, and not justifiable in any way. But an act of revenge against a civilian population that is seen as -- and that largely depicts itself as -- completely intertwined with a state that is currently engaged in an ongoing genocide of an entire civilian population (the Palestinian people) is not indicative of a global "wave of antisemitism." It is probably not an indication of any kind of rise of Islamic State, either. It is, much more likely at least, an act of revenge against a civilian population for the crimes committed by the state with which this civilian population is closely associated.
People are going to read this essay and say that I am "justifying" a massacre of Jews, which, to repeat, I am not. My aim with the observations I'm about to make is only to explain how it is historically the case that when a group of people is associated with a genocidal state, revenge attacks against this population associated with the genocidal state will happen. This is how many people behave, around the world, under these sorts of circumstances, historically.
Revenge attacks against civilians, against children, against the elderly, etc., are terrible -- reprehensible even. But they will likely keep on happening, history demonstrates, as long as the state that associates itself so closely with all the Jews of the world (Israel) keeps on indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinian children and destroying Palestinian towns and cities every day. There is a quid pro quo here that is hard to avoid comprehending, except for the most obtuse observer -- or the Zionist so committed to their calling that they would prefer to ignore reality and the safety of the people they supposedly identify with as "theirs," in favor of further vilifying the Muslim "enemy" in order to guarantee ongoing support from Islamophobic western leaders for their ethnonationalist state.
Given the circumstances of an ongoing genocide being committed by a state that identifies itself with all the Jews of the world, revenge attacks against Jewish civilians are also almost unbelievably rare, and not at all any kind of indication of any kind of "wave" of anything.
There were times in history, however, when revenge attacks against civilian populations associated with horrible crimes against humanity like genocide were actually extremely widespread.
The latter half of the 1940's in Europe is a period of history that most people in most of the world are completely ignorant of, as far as I have observed, but it's some of the most important history to know, in order to better understand human behavior, and, crucially, in order to put the Bondi Beach massacre into any kind of sensible historical context, of the sort that the western media are utterly failing to do.
In 1945, anti-German sentiment in Europe was at an all-time high. With the defeat of the Nazi regime, primarily by the Red Army, and the lack of the German occupation army to protect the ethnic German populations against revenge attacks, revenge against German-speaking civilians across Europe took some of the most terrible forms a human could invent or imagine. The revenge was taken against women, the elderly, and children, largely with no attempts to ascertain whether individuals or populations had been involved with supporting the Nazis.
For a lot of different historical reasons, German-speaking populations existed throughout eastern Europe, many of which had been there for many centuries. There were many millions of ethnic Germans living in German-speaking communities in parts of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere. Some survive to this day, I can say from direct experience visiting Romania years ago.
In one region of Czechoslovakia alone there was a forced march of 27,000 ethnic Germans towards the German border, during which time Czech mobs beat these unarmed refugees to the extent that half of them were killed before they reached the German border. Thousands of those killed were children.
In another part of Czechoslovakia thousands of ethnic Germans -- probably a third of them children -- were drowned in the river by Czech mobs.
In Denmark, where there were 250,000 German refugees in the immediate post-war period, the Danish medical association refused to treat wounded and sick German refugees. The German refugees were moved by Danish authorities into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. More German refugees died in Denmark in 1945 than all the Danes who died under the Nazi occupation of Denmark.
Across eastern Europe, thousands of orphaned ethnic German children tried to survive being refugees together, and there are many documented cases of children being beaten, abused, and raped by locals expressing their hatred of all things German -- even defenseless, orphaned children.
The number of German women raped by occupation soldiers -- especially but most definitely not limited to Russian soldiers -- was as high as 2 million.
We could go on and on with more examples of how anti-German sentiment found expression in the immediate post-war period after the Nazi occupation of most of Europe was over.
In the western media at the time there was mostly silence. Where there wasn't silence, except in rare cases, the media was justifying the actions of the mobs.
The extremely violent mass expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans happened throughout the formerly Nazi-occupied nations of central, northern, and eastern Europe. This happened even though so many of the ethnic Germans were children or elderly, and had nothing to do with killing Jews or anybody else. The expulsions happened even though no small number of those ethnic Germans had been directly involved with the resistance to fascism, while so many others did their best to stay out of the war, and just farm the land they lived on along the Volga River or wherever else.
It was a violent collective punishment of all German-speaking people that happened across Europe.
What might have prevented these horrors? How might the innocent ethnic German children and senior citizens and farmers have been protected from all of these massacres of thousands of people at a time, these death marches that killed more thousands, these expulsions from places their families had lived in for many generations or even centuries?
Perhaps the leaders of the day, and the media of the day, could have said the sorts of things we're hearing lately from the prime minister of Australia. What if, instead of looking the other way or justifying the massacres and expulsions, they could have said things like what Anthony Albanese has been saying?
If they had, then they would have described anti-German sentiment in Europe in 1945 as "pure evil." They would have described anti-German attitudes as an "abhorrent ideology." They would say anti-German sentiment is something that needs to be "stamped out" and "eradicated" with "every single resource required."
They would have passed laws against hate speech, perhaps. They would have passed laws that calling someone a "fascist" was just coded language for hating ethnic Germans. That anyone calling a German a "fascist" should be held responsible for their vile anti-German sentiments, and perhaps face prison time for their use of this hate speech.
As it happens, here in 2025, the situation is very different from 1945. The far larger and far more ambitious Nazi regime in Europe killed tens of millions of people and occupied most of a large continent, and parts of other continents as well. When the Nazis were defeated, ethnic German populations that existed around Europe were an easy scapegoat, and completely vulnerable. They paid the most terrible price for Hitler's crimes imaginable -- in so many cases, they died horrible, violent deaths.
Israel, on the other hand, and its backers from the west, are not a defeated empire. Israel continues its slaughter of Palestinian (and Lebanese and Syrian and other) people. Israel continues to occupy its walled ghetto full of millions of starving, diseased, dying civilians -- a ghetto which has been besieged and controlled by Israel since 2006, or since 1967, depending on how we define our terms. And since October, 2023, the siege has gone from a slow genocide to a very fast one. Which is ongoing, happening right now. The state that calls itself the Jewish state, that claims to represent the Jews of the world, is right now committing genocide, while the western governments aid them in this effort, and the western media alternately justify it, or ignore it.
And then NPR interviews some clown in Australia who claims to represent the so-called "Jewish community" in a country with a very well-assimilated Jewish population that does not in fact exist as an ethnic or religious community as most people would understand such a thing in the first place, and he says that "95% of Australian Jews are Zionists" -- I'm paraphrasing, but these are his words. No pushback on this lie from the NPR interviewer. (Recent polls indicate this number is more like 60%, which is alarming enough.)
Given that all of historic Palestine is either now part of what they call Israel, or is directly controlled by Israel, it's hard to know what kind of revenge attacks Israeli Jews might face as a population if Israel were defeated in a war, and Palestinian mobs were in a position to try to seek revenge in the way the Czech mobs did against the Germans in 1945. This has never happened, except perhaps on October 7th, 2023, for one day.
But given how many countries there are like Australia, the UK, France, the US, etc., where there are large numbers of people living together in the same cities who are on dramatically different sides of the debate with regards to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, etc., and Israel's ongoing war against these countries and their civilian populations, I find it to be wildly impressive how rare the kind of violence that we just witnessed in Australia is in these countries.
Rare, but not nonexistent. Add Israel's war crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Iranians, etc., to the US and its allies' slaughter of millions of people over the course of decades of occupations of the overwhelmingly Muslim nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the relative lack of revenge attacks by Muslims against American, British and Israeli targets around the world since 2001, at least, seems to me like a wildly impressive testament to the sophistication of the vast majority of people in these countries, and their ability to differentiate between a country's violent rulers and a country's innocent civilians, many of whom may deeply oppose their government's policies.
Still, I know I can't be the only person out there regularly fantasizing about acts of violent revenge against the Israeli and American snipers occupying Gaza, who daily play target practice with the heads of Palestinian toddlers out looking for food and water. Other people have these fantasies, too. And when the point is driven home by most everyone in the western media and people like Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump, etc., that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are inseparable, and criticism of one is just like criticism of the other, they are making Jewish people so much more unsafe, around the world. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who has not been brainwashed by pro-Israel propaganda and is not being paid by AIPAC.
Being that I'm not brainwashed, and given that I, as an emotionally well-adjusted, married father of three with a good life, regularly have violent revenge fantasies myself just from looking at my Instagram feed, I can only imagine how destabilizing it is for other people -- especially people who may be themselves related to Palestinians, Lebanese, or Syrians today under Israeli bombardment or in an Israeli prison -- to watch this genocide continue, to hear the "Jewish community leaders" and western politicians and media talk about a nonexistent "wave of antisemitism" instead of putting revenge attacks into the context of the genocidal reality from which they come. I can only imagine how those with relatives under the rubble might feel when they see see a thousand self-identified Jews having a party on the beach while the self-identified Jewish State is engaged in an ongoing genocide.
As one of those sophisticated people not apt to commit revenge attacks against anyone who isn't actually responsible for committing any crimes themselves, I abhor the massacre at Bondi Beach, and the one in Pittsburgh. I also abhor the Czech mobs that killed thousands of innocent German children, and the Danish doctors who refused to treat them.
But I also am capable of comprehending that in this kind of elevated atmosphere of genocidal tension, in a world where my government and its western allies is always occupying some other country somewhere, and always engaged with killing more Muslims or other people somewhere ever since I can remember, I avoid large crowds celebrating holidays of any kind. For anyone reading who has had their heads in the sand since the "War on Terror" began, and "Terror" began to retaliate, large gatherings of people celebrating holidays are a prime target for those seeking to bring terror to the streets of the countries that are terrorizing the Palestinians, Lebanese, etc. A lot of people are very upset about their people being indiscriminately slaughtered by Israeli bombers flown by dual citizens from Australia and the US, loaded with Australian and American bombs, and they are upset for very good reason, obviously. Some of them, naturally, think like the leaders of Israel do -- that collective punishment against civilians is the appropriate response to collective punishment of civilians.
This is, of course, not to condone either anti-Jewish sentiment today, or anti-German sentiment in 1945, but just to make sense of why it exists, or existed. If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment stop altogether, we won't do this by condemning, or by passing laws against hate speech, or by preventing Muslim immigration. If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment or, for that matter, anti-American sentiment stop, then as with any hope to curtail anti-German sentiment in 1945, we have to stop committing genocide, stop supporting regimes that are doing so, stop justifying genocide, and stop trying to explain revenge attacks by making up nonsense about a "wave of antisemitism."
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