Like the heroes of Bondi, we should all be tackling anti-Semites

Every January, on Australia Day, someone is named Australian of the Year. They can call off the search for the 2026 award. We have him already. His name is Ahmed al Ahmed. He’s 43, a father of two and a shopkeeper. And today he stunned the world with an act of staggering heroism: he single-handedly tackled and disarmed one of the fascist filth who carried out the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

So much of the footage from the barbarism in Bondi is grim beyond belief. We’ve seen images of the dead, the injured, the traumatised – innocents subjected to extreme terror simply for being Jewish. And yet one clip from this atrocity gave the world a flash of hope amid the bloodshed. It showed Ahmed wrestling one of the Jew-haters for his rifle and in the process potentially saving scores of lives.

It is extraordinary footage. Ahmed creeps with great stealth between two parked cars towards one of the men who is firing at the Jews celebrating the first day of Hanukkah. He grabs him round the neck with his right arm and seizes his rifle with his left arm. A brief struggle ensues and Ahmed is victorious – he points the rifle at the disarmed anti-Semite, making it clear he will take a shot if the piece of pondscum makes any moves.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Ahmed himself was then shot. He sustained gunshot wounds in his upper arm and his hand. It’s a risk he must have known he was taking when, with Herculean selflessness, he entered the line of fire between police and terrorists with the singular aim of stopping a killer. This is what we might call ‘heroic mist’ – that slightly reckless but completely human feeling that descends on us in moments of danger, when we elevate the greater good above our own safety.

There were other heroes, too. We’ve seen footage of Aussies tending to the wounded, breathing life back into the injured. Australian PM Anthony Albanese praised the ‘courage of everyday Australians who, without hesitating, put themselves in danger in order to keep their fellow Australians safe’. Let us hope these Australians are commended and rewarded for taking such a valiant stand against the evil that visited the Jews of Sydney today.

These men and women speak to the true spirit of Australia. Australians are a people not known for sitting back in times of trouble. There survives there, even in the era of woke, a proletarian culture of defiance and valour. These heroes also remind us that terrorists can be defeated. They can be disarmed. They can be stripped of their power, just like that.

It won’t always be possible, of course. But where it is, we should strike. Too much official guidance tells us to scarper. The advice of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing is to ‘Run, Hide and Tell’. That is, evade rather than confront, leg it rather than fight, protect yourself rather than your fellow citizens. Imagine if Mr Ahmed had thought like that today. More people would have died.

We live in a ‘walk-on-by’ society. Ours is an era in which the active citizen has been ruthlessly decommissioned by the deathless technocrats who rule over us. They don’t even trust us to raise our kids properly, far less overpower the armed haters of humanity. The end result is that too many people look the other way when tyranny strikes – or worse, stand and film it. One thinks of the crowd that gathered round the Islamist killers of Lee Rigby, faithfully filming their deranged ranting. How much better for humanity it would have been if the crowd had forcefully subdued those hysterics and taken their cleavers.

Bravery finds a way, though. The human instinct to help is not so easily crushed. One thinks of the men who hurled beer glasses and chairs at the three radical Islamists who went on a stabbing spree in London Bridge in 2017. Or Ignacio Echeverría, the Spanish national who used his skateboard to beat one of those London Bridge terrorists (sadly, he was subsequently killed). And now Ahmed al Ahmed, the fortysomething conqueror of a modern-day Nazi.

‘Don’t be a have-a-go hero’, we’re so often told. It’s advice we should resolutely ignore. Having a go is precisely what more of us should be doing. And not only in the heat of an all-out act of Jewphobic barbarism, but in everyday life, too. After all, the violent loathing that shook Sydney today did not emerge in a vacuum. This neo-fascist animus for the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people has been stewing for years. If more of us had ‘had a go’ earlier, perhaps we could have seen off, or at least tamed, this gravest menace in Western society.

Don’t wait until it turns violent. ‘Have a go’ now. If you see someone carrying a placard calling Jews Nazis, get in their face. If you see a keffiyeh mob outside a synagogue, confront them. If you see a frothing Islamist or leftist harassing a Jew in public, put yourself between the scumbag and his victim. Don’t run, hide and tell – stand, fight and tell them to fuck off. Enough is enough. Get out there.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.