In a post on X in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocities, BBC presenter Nick Robinson lamented that “Jews all over the world now live in fear”. If you “struggle to understand that fear”, he added, “I urge you to think of the impact on the Muslim… community of the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand”.
Robinson seemed to be arguing that Muslim unease was somehow easier to “understand” than that experienced by those obnoxious Jews, and encouraging people to use the former as a way to accomplish the more difficult task of relating to the latter.
The fact that Robinson himself has Jewish heritage made it even more bizarre.
It was hard to escape the sense that this bewildering statement was simply a ham-fisted effort to shoehorn a far-Right attack against Muslims in 2019 into the story of a jihadi massacre of Jews in the present day. That is what passes for “impartiality” at the BBC these days, I suppose. It’s all surface and no depth.
Ironically, Robinson’s bumbling and navel-gazing diatribe distracted from a far more consequential aspect of the story: the hero in the white T-shirt who disarmed one of the shooters with his bare hands was Ahmed Al-Ahmed, 43, who appears to be a Muslim.
Bang goes the theory that Islam is the problem. I must caveat my analysis by pointing out that at the time of writing, nothing is yet known about the motives of the terrorists or indeed the character or religious observance of Mr Al-Ahmed.
On the face of it, however, it is a reminder that Islam is not inherently hostile to Jews and the West, and Muslims are heroes too.
So much was proved beyond doubt on October 7 in Israel and in the weeks that followed. On that terrible day, when 15 Muslims were butchered alongside more than a thousand Jews, heroic Arab Israelis risked their lives to protect their Jewish compatriots.
The following day, the popular Muslim news anchor Lucy Aharish – who personally oversaw the rescue of two families on October 7 – called for national unity in a monologue to the camera.
“We, the citizens of the state of Israel, all of us, left and right, secular and religious, Jews, Christians, Druze, Muslims, minorities and immigrants from all over the world, stand united together in this fight,” she said.
As the country reeled in the aftermath, Alaa Amara, an Arab bicycle shop owner from Tayibe in central Israel, donated fifty children’s bikes to evacuees from the south. When his shop was burned down by extremists in an act of retribution, a crowdfunding campaign raised more than $150,000 to rebuild it.
The Bondi Beach hero has thrown into sharp relief the bloody fight for the soul of Islam - Jake Wallis Simons
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Captain Ella Waweya, the most senior Muslim woman in the IDF, recorded a powerful message for social media. “We are all together defending and protecting our homeland and our state,” she said. “We are all Israeli, and we know why we are fighting.” She signed off with a salute: “Long live Israel.”
So appalling and widespread has the jihadi movement become that it is easy to overlook the fact that many Muslims stand against it. Moreover, the way in which Islamists focus obsessively on antisemitic verses in the hadith, build for themselves a bloodthirsty version of the faith, and present themselves as representatives of all Muslims, blinds us to the many examples of harmony between Islam and the West, in the past as well as the present.
At least 400,000 Muslims fought for Britain in the Great War, with 47,000 making the ultimate sacrifice. About a million fought for this country against Hitler. And despite extensive wars of conquest against Christendom over the centuries, there are many examples of Jews living relatively freely under Muslim rule, even rising to positions of prominence.
When I interviewed him on my podcast, The Brink, last week, British writer Ed Husain told me about his own journey from being a jihadi sympathiser in his youth to a devout, pro-Western Muslim today, who strongly supports the existence of the state of Israel.
“My father’s heritage is originally from Yemen,” he told me. “My family moved in the 14th century as traders and preachers into India and then my parents came to Britain. My mum’s family to this day lives in Saudi Arabia, in Medina, and one of my cousins teaches in the Prophet’s mosque, so we have those credentials that, over time, forced me to rethink. Did I want to pursue their form of more mystical, rooted Islam? Or was I going to adopt this new Egyptian export called the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Strikingly, he was converted out of his extremist mindset not by mainstream British society but by his father, a conservative Muslim who deplores jihadism and adheres to an older version of the faith.
What emerges is a picture of a struggle for the soul of Islam. Twenty-four-year-old Naveed Akram, one of the Bondi Beach terrorists, likely represents an extremism that sprang up in the 20th century and was moulded by Hitler’s fascism.
Meanwhile, although little is known about the courageous Ahmed Al-Ahmed, who risked his life to disarm one of the killers and was shot twice for his trouble, he can be taken as a symbol for all those decent Muslims who stand by their Jewish cousins and the West.
For mainstream Britons, understanding these complexities is vital. Jumping to the conclusion that Islam is inherently hostile to our way of life, and that all Muslims are enemies is a betrayal of those who stand with us and will only foster further unrest.
While demanding utter ruthlessness towards jihadis and extremists, we must allow ourselves to embrace those who wish to embrace us and fight this evil together.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out now
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