The rising threat of antisemitic violence

This can’t keep happening.

Members of the Jewish community in Australia faced a horrific attack at a religious holiday event, with two gunmen — a father and son — opening fire on families and children at Australia’s famed Bondi Beach.

It didn’t matter to the attackers who they were shooting — the dead include a Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife from bullets, two rabbis, a 10-year-old girl, and a 62-year-old businessman and philanthropist who tried to draw the attackers’ fire to save others. An older couple who were both killed as they tried, but failed, to disarm one of the shooters early in the attack.

All that mattered to the shooters was that their targets were Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah.

More than 100 shots were fired by the attackers.

Fifteen people were killed, dozens more were injured.

As the daughter of victim Reuven Morrison put it in an interview with CBS News, rising antisemitism in Australia was obvious: “I feel the signs were coming for a long, long time. The warning bells were there, and the government sat doing nothing.”

Her father, she said, “came to Australia because he thought that this would be safe … This is where he was going to have a life, where he is going to live a life away from persecution.”

Could it happen here? In Canada? In Manitoba?

Of course it could — and we should be taking every possible action to prevent it.

Antisemitic attacks have been on the rise in Canada recently, increasing both in frequency and in severity. Both private and public security services have been bolstered to try to provide protection, with the Winnipeg Police Service providing an increased police presence at Jewish community events in the city following the Australian attack.

A report by the federal Integrated Threat Assessment Centre of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said while “there is currently no observed reporting indicating an imminent, credible threat targeting the 2025 holiday season in Canada, including events associated with the Jewish community … we cannot discount a lone actor or small group using readily available weapons mobilizing to violence with little to no intelligence forewarning.”

“A violent extremist attack in Canada, including one targeting the Jewish community, remains a realistic possibility,” the report said.

The Australian government is pledging increased restriction on guns in that country.

But Australia already has strict firearms laws, following a mass shooting that killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, and Sunday’s shooters were still able to obtain the firearms used in their attack.

There are some signs in all that horror that give hope for humanity.

One is the selfless efforts of 43-year-old Ahmed al-Ahmed, who disarmed one of the two shooters, and clearly saved lives by his efforts. He was shot twice.

Another is the fact that, after Lifeblood Australia announced an urgent need for blood donations, especially O negative blood, almost 50,000 appointments to donate were made — with 7,810 donations of blood, plasma and platelets donated in just the first 24 hours.

But none of that can extinguish the horror that, once again, Jews have been targeted in a public place where people would normally expect to be safe.

The root cause is hatred, specifically antisemitic hatred, and the Bondi beach killings were rightly recognized as a terrorist attack by the Australian government, which says the violence was inspired by ISIS.

Antisemitism has no place in our society. We have to address it directly and be clear that there is no place for it here.

Members of the Jewish community — our neighbours, our friends, our family — should feel safe, and be safe, in this city, in this province, and in this country.

And we should accept absolutely nothing less.

» Winnipeg Free Press