There’s been over 4,300 times more Palestinians killed in Gaza than the fifteen Jews killed at Bondi Beach. From Patrick Lawrence at thefloutist.substack.com:
Bondi Beach reconsidered.
491 days before Bondi Beach. Gaza Strip, 10 August 2024. (Hussam Shabat, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)
21 DECEMBER—I read in a BBC report that the victims of the 14 December shooting at Bondi Beach, along the coast a few miles from central Sydney, were “generous, joyful and talented.” These were Jews who had gathered, a sizable group, to celebrate Hanukkah under Australia’s summer sun. Immediately this is cast across the West as a case of out-of-control, come-from-nowhere “anti–Semitism,” a stand-alone phenomenon having nothing to do with the conduct of “the Jewish state.”
Two of the victims, Sofia and Boris Gurman, “were people of deep kindness, quiet strength and unwavering care for others,” the family said in a statement the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published Tuesday.
I read that Reuven Morrison, another of the 15 victims, was “the most beautiful, generous man who had a gorgeous smile that would light up the room.” I read that Dan Elkayam also had “a smile that could light up a room.” The friends of Dan Elkayam, a French Jew marking the holiday in Australia, “described him as a down-to-earth, happy-go-lucky individual who was warmly embraced by those he met.”
You can read about these victims of the Bondi Beach shooting, too. The ABC published commemorations of 12 of the 15 under the headline, “Lives Lost Remembered with Love.” There are photographs, the intimate remembrances of those who knew the deceased, some boilerplate describing how Australia’s state broadcaster is reporting the story. The New York Times published similar items on 13 of the victims in a piece headlined, “What to Know About the Victims of the Bondi Beach Shooting.”
