The media reaction to the deadly attack on Jewish Hanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach in Australia has revealed far more about entrenched bias and selective outrage than about the incident itself. Within hours, large parts of the press and broadcast media shifted their focus away from the massacre and toward exploiting the attack to mount an assault on pro-Palestine demonstrations around the world, branding them as complicit in antisemitic violence.
This response followed a familiar pattern: a criminal act was weaponized to smear a global protest movement that has consistently mobilized against mass killing, genocide, and state violence--Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza. Framing the Palestine rights movement as responsible deliberately obscures a basic truth--our demonstrations have always been against killing, mass slaughter, starvation, and genocide. They are protests against the destruction of civilian life, not against Jews or anyone else.
Many of the shocked, shocked commentators now expressing alarm about violence are the same figures who, over the past two years, justified or remained silent about Israel's bombardment of Gaza, rationalized the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, or said nothing as hospitals, schools, and refugee camps were reduced to rubble.
It's also interesting to note what has been minimized, marginalized, and played down: a Syrian Arab Muslim man, Ahmad Al-Ahmad, jumped one of the shooters and prevented him from continuing his killing spree. His actions should have been central to the story; instead, they are nearly erased. Why? Because the facts interfere with the false notion that Muslims are inherently violent, driven by hatred of Jews.
Conflating peaceful protests against genocidal atrocities with a criminal act draws attention away from those atrocities and chills legitimate dissent.
But we will not be chilled. We refuse to allow smears to replace facts, or selective outrage to silence a movement rooted in the most basic moral demand of all--that human life, Palestinian life, must matter.
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