And Then It’s Bondi Beach

 THEY STORM INTO PLACES that host lives they think are a decadent deviation from the path, a revolt against the most sacred. What they, impatient for justice, see is that which quickens the pulse of the dutiful killer: when paradise is a gift bestowed upon the martyr, here the revellers create a false one of simulated pleasure. Take the recent cases of genocidal rage. On October 7, 2023, in southern Israel, they came, breaching the border between the Jewish state and Gaza, riding motorcycles and brandishing guns, and went back with 251 hostages—and left behind hundreds of people, among them the old and infants, maimed, raped and killed. The newest episode in the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and it would be condemned by some in a language of cautious moral positions. In Pahalgam, Kashmir, they were hiding in the pine forest, waiting for the tourists. Before they shot them point-blank, they made sure they killed the right ones with the wrong religion. And now at Bondi Beach in Sydney, they came looking for Jews celebrating Hanukkah, and the fact that it was the Jews who were having a good time was a justifiable reason for mass murder. The defenders of the faith may have retreated from Gaza, but their project of hate will be implemented by God’s mercenaries elsewhere.

It is not that we need constant reminders about the globalisation of jihad. But the killers, who are never short of new contexts to make the “acts of justice” easily relatable, know they need to keep the war going even without the hyperbole of the impending Caliphate. The stamp of the Islamic State on the Bondi killings was such a reminder: yesterday it was the sight of the infidel in orange robes, a nod to the Guantanamo dress code, on his knees, the God’s executioner hovering over him, dagger drawn, in the sandy vastness of an exhausted war on civilisation; today it is random horror with easy allusions to headlines.

The prey comes from a predictable list of offenders. Among them: the writer who offends by imagining an alternative that shatters the certainties of religion, by daring to put his words against the Word; the cartoonist who sinned by turning laughter into freedom; and anyone who defied the filtered wisdom of the only Text. The blasphemers and heretics challenged a world where history was a lie, and where the dissemination of the gospel required a kingdom of the obedient, and by so doing, they forfeited their right to be alive. When Osama bin Laden, from his Mount Jihad, spewed hate against America and other enemies of the Book, and his campaign culminating in 9/11, the arc of evil, in rhetoric and reality, was bigger. Its terrifying grandiosity made fear a part of global diplomacy. The short-lived reign of the Islamic State gave the fantasy of the Caliphate an army of radicals in search of a revolutionary idyll. It was bound to collapse like the earlier Islamic eruptions in history. A rejection of humanity and organisations built on the mythicised enemy could not sustain what was projected as God’s most ambitious political agenda spanning geographies and revamping histories.

What is happening now, in the absence of a grand story to peddle in the ghettos of the Middle East and elsewhere, is not the rage of the lone wolf. It is a movement without a centre, without a guiding spirit like a Khomeini or an Osama. It is an idea armed by a thousand grievances, all born from misread histories, and it seems to need more datelines like Paris and Pahalgam and Bondi to make the new jihad an episodic saga. The world after Gaza has given the idea of revenge urgency—and the enemy a distinctive identity. The Jew is a marked entity again, and this time, the Final Solution is a shared rhetoric and a weakened struggle. Anti-Semitism pervading the campuses of America, and the streets of London, has already turned the romance of the Palestinian resistance, even if without the poetic flourish of a Mahmoud Darwish, into a rejection of the state of Israel. And whether progressive writings on the ‘inevitability’ of October 7 and Israel’s unjust war in Gaza have given the anti-Semitism of our times an intellectual context is a question we should ask. You may still read that “Bondi was inevitable.”

Which makes the pious and the platitudinous—and the rest are Islamophobic—unknowing collaborators in the crime against the life most of us have been living against the wishes of faith’s last martyrs lurking amidst us.