Uncategorized
When ‘Context’ Becomes Complicity — The Language That Incited the Bondi Beach Massacre
People walk at the scene of a shooting incident at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, December 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham
On Sunday, a Chabad Hanukkah candle-lighting at Bondi Beach was turned into a massacre. At least 16 people are dead. Witnesses report that the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” between bursts of gunfire. What should have been a moment of communal joy became a scene of mass murder, carried out in full view of a society that has spent years purposefully ignoring antisemitic incitement and terror attacks that led to this moment.
Around the same time, elsewhere in Australia, the same moral failure surfaced again. On a Melbourne tram, an Australian woman verbally accosted a rabbi and his two children, aged eight and 14, telling them to “go to the gas chambers.” She was carrying a bag bearing the PLO flag. A Jewish father and his children were told, in public, to imagine their extermination.
And that was after “protesters” in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews” — with absolutely no consequences.
“Go to the gas chambers.” There is no metaphor here. No policy critique. No political argument hiding behind rhetoric. There is only genocidal hatred, delivered calmly and directly.
And yet anyone familiar with the pattern already knows what comes next. Not moral clarity, but “context.” Not unambiguous condemnation, but explanation.
We will be told about anger, about trauma, about spillover from Israel’s war with Hamas. We are reminded that emotions are high, tensions are inflamed, and nothing can be viewed in isolation.
This is not analysis. It is evasion.
This is the anti-Zionism exception.
In any other context, this kind of mass murder would end the conversation. No editor would ask what provoked it. No official would suggest it must be understood through global politics. No journalist would hesitate to call the racism exactly what it is. And don’t forget that before the State of Israel was created, one third of the entire global Jewish population was murdered for their religion. But now we’re going to be told that this is only happening because of Israel.
When the targets are Jews, and when the hatred can be draped in the language or symbols of the Palestinian cause, the rules change. Antisemitism becomes negotiable. Murderous language becomes expressive speech. The victims become abstractions.
This is why anti-Zionism has become the dominant framework through which antisemitism is excused in the modern West. Zionism is the belief that Jews, like any other people, have the right to collective self-determination and national survival through sovereignty in part of their indigenous and historical homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews — while granting it to every other people — is not a policy disagreement. It is a moral inversion that recasts Jewish survival itself as illegitimate.
For years, Australia, like much of the democratic West, has tolerated rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at any other group.
Crowds have chanted “gas the Jews” and many other murderous slogans with no consequence. Universities have hosted speakers who portray Jewish sovereignty as a unique moral crime. Media outlets have repeatedly softened or obscured antisemitic incidents — like burning synagogues — treating them as political reactions rather than as hatred with a long and documented history.
Law enforcement responses have been hesitant and inconsistent, often focused on crowd control instead of stopping incitement.
In England, Jews wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David have been arrested for “provocation,” while standing before crowds chanting “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas,” and “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” — an explicit invocation of the massacre of Jews in seventh-century Arabia.
This matters because antisemitism does not operate like other hatreds. It has always depended on permission structures. It advances not only through violence, but through ideas that render violence against Jews intelligible, justifiable, and even necessary to those inclined to act.
When genocidal slogans are tolerated in public space, when Jewish identity is reframed as provocation, when Jewish self-determination is condemned as uniquely evil, and when hatred is endlessly contextualized rather than condemned, the distance between speech and action collapses.
What happened at Bondi Beach was 100% predictable. A slogan shouted yesterday becomes gunfire today. The targets were not symbols or states or abstractions. They were Jews lighting candles.
The media plays a central role in this process, whether it admits it or not. Language is softened. Headlines are hedged. Victims are pushed to the margins of their own stories. A massacre becomes an “incident.” A threat of extermination becomes “heated rhetoric.” Jewish presence itself is recast as a political act that invites response.
This is how a Hanukkah celebration becomes a “flashpoint.” This is how a rabbi and his children become “part of a broader conflict.” This is how Jews going about their lives in Sydney, London, or New York are quietly reassigned responsibility for the hatred directed at them.
Some will insist that Bondi Beach and the Melbourne tram were isolated events. They never are. Antisemitism has never announced itself first with bullets. It begins with the libels societies allow to circulate. It begins when calls for violence against Jews — “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” — are treated as political opinions rather than warnings.
A culture that cannot draw a red line at “go to the gas chambers” has already erased the line entirely.
Bondi Beach was not unforeseeable. It was foretold — in slogans excused, in threats contextualized, in hatred endlessly rebranded as politics. The massacre did not appear without warning. It appeared after years of permission.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
Uncategorized
Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
Uncategorized
Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.