Chaos, Horror, and Heroism: Examining the Bondi Beach Massacre

A mass-shooting targeting a Hanukkah gathering at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach killed 15 victims and wounded 39 others on December 14, 2025 in what is now Australia’s deadliest terrorist attack–but far worse carnage was avoided due to civilian bystanders and police officers risking their lives to save others. A closer examination of the perpetrators, victims, and heroes of this horrific tragedy paints a complex picture of immigration, prejudice, radicalization, and violence in the 21st century. 

Chaos, Horror, and Heroism

Approximately 1,000 men, women, and children were present at Bondi Beach during an outdoor “Chanukah by the Sea,” celebration while beachgoers on the sand nearby were out enjoying a warm summer day characteristic of December south of the Equator. One of the attendants was an Israeli travel vlogger filming the event, whose video of jelly pastries being handed out minutes before the gunfire erupted later aired on news networks all over the world. It was a family-friendly affair organized by the local Chabad chapter featuring food stalls and children’s activities, including a petting zoo. 

The two terrorists, a 50-year-old and his 24-year-old son, parked their car next to a footbridge adjacent to the Bondi Pavillion around 6:41 PM local time–both wore black t-shirts, but the older man wore white pants while the younger one was in all black. Both men wore ammunition pouches to quickly reload their weapons, at least two shotguns and one hunting rifle, and placed a homemade Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) flag over the windshield. The younger one stepped out of the vehicle with two guns and sprinted over to the footbridge, placed one on the ground, and aimed the other at dozens of families fifty meters away from an elevated position while his father was confronted on the sidewalk by an elderly Jewish couple.

Boris and Sofia Gurman–who were 69 and 61, just a few weeks shy of their 35th wedding anniversary, originally from then-Soviet Ukraine but had spent most of their married years living in Sydney–appearently challenged the gunman over the ISIS flag before noticing his weapon. A dashcam on a passing vehicle inadvertently filmed a few seconds of Boris Gurman and the terrorist wrestling for the gun, causing both men to stumble into the street. Sofia was filmed following and watching as Boris seized the gun by its barrel and attempted to club the terrorist with its buttstock, but the latter shoves his way past the woman to the car’s open door. That last move allowed him to grab another gun, aim at the couple, and shoot them both at point blank range. 

The Gurmans died in each other’s arms as the terrorist walked up the footbridge to join his son and the two opened fire at the Hanukkah celebration–drone footage taken near the end of the massacre later showed the couple lying next to each other. Bystanders nearby started to run while the people being targeted farther away reportedly thought they were hearing fireworks before they saw victims being shot and realized they were in mortal danger.

Hundreds of people of all ages dressed casually or in swimwear started sprinting in every available direction as the gunfire rang out while some took cover behind vehicles and sidewalk curbs or sought concealment underneath outdoor tables and chairs. At least one person reportedly had to be pulled out of the water by life guards after swimming too far out into the ocean to escape. The shots were quickly joined by a ceaseless chorus of screams, police sirens, and burglar or car alarms while a small number of police officers present at the scene tried to engage the terrorists–two officers were wounded while attempting to usher civilians away from the scene and had to be hospitalized.

Bystanders filmed the shooting on their smartphones from multiple angles as the older terrorist walked down the footbridge to target people running away and the younger one kept firing long-range shots from the elevated position. The former is at one point filmed aiming his gun at a man who appears frozen with fear, only to discover he is out of ammunition–this gives the intended victim a chance to flee. 

Analysts later highlighted a few seconds of video where the younger terrorist can be seen turning around and waving away bystanders filming him from that angle, only to then turn back around and resume shooting in the direction of the Hanukkah gathering. These movements are a “dead giveaway,” that the intended targets of the massacre were Jews, according to police sources speaking to Australian media.

This gesture happened seconds before Ahmed al-Ahmed–a 44-year-old father of two, local shop owner, and naturalized Australian citizen originally from Nayrab, a town in northwest Syria–tackled the older shooter. He ducked behind cars for cover while inching toward the terrorist, then broke into a sprint once he was close enough and put the other man in a headlock while the latter was aiming in the opposite direction. The younger terrorist saw this, stopped shooting, and walked down the footbridge to help his father while Ahmed wrestled for the older man’s gun and eventually got it by pulling the weapon’s sling upward. 

The grappling and sudden separation from his weapon sent the terrorist falling to the ground while the younger man aimed at Ahmed and fired once or twice–it is unclear from the bystander video if this first shot hit either Ahmed, the tree next to him, or just missed both entirely. 

Ahmed briefly aimed the weapon at the older terrorist but did not fire–it is unclear if he said anything, perhaps gave commands such as “Stay down!” or “Put your hands up!” as the younger one fired two more shots and then fled to the footbridge. The man Ahmed had been fighting then got up and slowly backed away while the shop owner took his right hand off of the weapon’s trigger guard, then waved his empty palm in the air while lowering the gun by its barrel with his left. This was most likely an attempt to avoid being mistaken for one of the terrorists–a misidentification by police at that moment could have resulted in Ahmed being shot by police officers scrambling to neutralize the active shooters.

The older terrorist briefly leaned on a street lamp to rest, seemingly winded from wrestling with the Syrian-Australian shop owner, while the younger one shouted at him to keep moving and get to the footbridge. That was when Reuven Morrison, a 62-year-old Jewish man who had been born in the Soviet Union and moved to Australia in the 1970s, was filmed charging at the older terrorist and throwing at least one brick at him. He was forced to fall back, however, when the terrorist on the footbridge fired several shots–effectively a burst of suppressive fire–in the direction of Reuven and Ahmed, who ended up crouched down next to each other behind the same tree. 

The older shooter walked up the footbridge steps towards his son and picked up a gun the latter had left there at the start of the attack before they simultaneously fired multiple times at the tree. It is unclear when Ahmed al-Ahmed and Reuven Morrison were shot, but both men were hit multiple times–the former would survive with serious injuries requiring surgery and intensive care but the latter man succumbed to his wounds. 

The terrorists then had to duck as small rounds impacted the footbridge railing–the first visual confirmation of police officers engaging the terrorists with their pistols, four minutes after the shooting began. 

They continued to exchange fire with the police and shoot at innocent bystanders while a plainclothes detective with 15 years of service crept up behind them, an angle they neglected to guard, and opened fire on them. The older terrorist dropped from a crouch to a prone position and never got back up, only twitched and moved his limbs for the remainder of the shooting–the younger man ducked, turned around, and tried to fire on the detective at close range. The latter managed to find cover and police gunfire increased as other officers took advantage of the distraction.

The younger terrorist continued trading fire with the police from the footbridge for another three minutes while bystanders taking cover nearby shouted profanities at the man who had tried to murder them. He was cornered and almost certainly running low on ammunition by the time he finally collapsed from an unknown number of gunshot wounds sustained at unknown points in the shooting, most likely near the end. 

Bystanders cheered when they saw him fall and some of them rushed to the footbridge before police officers could get there and secure the scene for investigation–among those who charged at the wounded terrorists was an asylum seeker from a war-torn country in the Middle East, whose name has been withheld due to a pending court case. This man, a father of two Australian citizen toddlers with an Australian citizen partner currently pregnant with their third child, crept up as shots rang out and waited for the terrorist to run out of ammunition. He ran forward as soon as the firing stopped and kicked a rifle away from both shooters now lying motionless on the footbridge. 

Then bullets started impacting near him on the footbridge railing and he realized the police had mistaken him for one of the terrorists–first he ducked, held his hands in the air, and shouted “Don’t shoot!” before fleeing the opposite way he had arrived. But this brought him face-to-face with an angry mob convinced that he was one of the terrorists–the asylum seeker had the misfortune of having a similar skin complexion as the shooters.  

Enraged bystanders swarmed the bridge as the asylum seeker attempted to flee and they started beating him up along with the unconscious or barely conscious terrorists before the police officers managed to separate everyone and gain control of the footbridge. 

The plainclothes detective who earlier risked his to shoot at the terrorists emerged and emphatically defended the asylum seeker, shouting, “He’s not involved! He’s not involved!”

One bystander filmed the two shooters being given CPR by police while other officers cleared civilians out of the area and began working to gather evidence while an occasional civilian slipped through to stomp on the terrorists or the asylum seeker–the massacre was over within 11 minutes.

Investigation and In Memorium

Bondi Beach was littered with the debris of more than a thousand people fleeing for their lives while overloaded with adrenaline and bombarded with more sensory stimuli than any human brain can process at one time. Shoes, flip-flops, hats, towels, and other belongings scattered during the chaos were gathered by life guards and organized to help survivors find their property.

Photographs of discarded shoes and other belongings on the sand and manicured grass prompted some to draw comparisons to similar images taken during the Holocaust and the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023. One picture–that of an abandoned picnic with towels, food, drinks, a cooler, grocery bags, and a small Christmas tree–emphasizes how traumatic this shooting was for everyone who experienced it, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. 

Police officers locked down the entire beach and combed the area for evidence, with particular attention paid to the terrorist’s car–still sporting an ISIS flag that covered the windshield–which was found to have two improvised explosive devices (IED’s) inside. The two bombs and a third found nearby, described as “rudimentary” by the police, were quickly disarmed by a specialist squad. Further raids by the police were carried out at a property in Bonnyrigg where the gunmen had resided and at an Airbnb-listed house in Campsie where the gunmen had told their relatives they were going on a fishing trip. 

Ambulances drove 42 patients, including the two terrorists, to hospitals spread out across the city–the older perpetrator was pronounced dead and the younger one remains in critical condition after being comatose for the first two days.

39 victims were hospitalized after the shooting, including Ahmed al-Ahmed–who suffered multiple wounds to his arm and shoulder–and a police officer who lost sight in one of his eyes. The 15 lives lost range from adults as old as 87 to a child as young as 10 in the deadliest massacre of diaspora Jews since the 1994 AIMA bombing in Buenos Aires conducted by Hezbollah. 

In addition to Boris and Sofia Gurman as well as Reuven Morrison, the dead include Edith Brutman–a 68 year old B'nai B’rith vice president, Dan Elkayam–a 27-year-old French immigrant working in Sydney as an IT analyst, and Alex Kleytman–an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor from Ukraine who had lived in Australia since 1992. 

Kleytman was a teenager when he survived the uniquely hellish brutality that characterized the Eastern Front of World War II and reportedly shielded his wife with his own body during the Bondi Beach massacre instead of trying to save his own life.

Yaakov Levitan–a 39-year-old rabbi and father of four originally from South Africa who helped organize the "Chanukah by the Sea” event, Peter Meagher–a 61-year-old retired police detective hired as a freelance photographer, and Eli Schlanger–a 41-year-old assistant rabbi who also worked as a chaplain for imprisoned criminals–were also among the killed.

Marika Pogany–an 82-year-old Slovak-Australian who volunteered to deliver meals to other Jewish senior citizens, Boris Tetleroyd–a 68-year-old visiting Sydney for the holiday, and Tania Treitak–a 68 year old local attending the event–were either found dead at the scene or pronounced deceased in the hospital. Adam Smyth–a 50-year-old father of four and noted football fan who lived close to the beach–was walking with his wife when he was fatally struck by gunfire. Tibor Weitzen–a 78-year-old great grandfather and retired automotive engineer originally from the Soviet Union before immigrating first to Israel and then Australia in 1988–was reportedly killed while attempting to shield both his wife, Eva Weitzen, and Edith Brutman from the gunfire.

The youngest victim was a 10-year-old girl named Matilda, the Australian-born daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who fled systematic discrimination against Jews during the Soviet era, who was shot while running toward her father.

Conflicting Accounts and Online Misinformation

The aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre saw a confusing mix of conflicting accounts and downright misinformation circulating across the Internet, from critiques of the police response to arguments about identities of the perpetrators and respondents.

Soundbites of traumatized witnesses speaking to local and international media were immediately shared without context and contributed to inaccurate perceptions about the event and those it impacted. Many expressed confusion about why the police took so long to respond and some described officers as looking “frozen” during the shooting, sparking accusations of cowardice and incompetence. 

Video footage of the shooting makes it clear that while Australian police may need better training to deal with mass shootings and that Bondi Beach certainly could have used more officers with better weapons than their standard pistols, they were engaging the terrorists within four minutes. 

Many will argue that the police should have neutralized the shooters much faster, but those first four minutes of observing and orienting unquestionably helped the police avoid shooting innocent people by mistake and cause further tragedy. They moved carefully, aimed cautiously–to prevent friendly fire upon those whom they protect and serve–and fired back at the shooters as best they could with the weapons they had available at that time. 

One policy change that could potentially address these issues would be stationing armed police tactical units in specialized vehicles at events that are at high risk of being targeted for mass shootings or other extremist violence. This is a method used by multiple law enforcement agencies at the federal and local level in the United States of America, a country that has learned hard lessons from enduring far too many similar shootings. American police realized their Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams could not respond to mass shootings fast enough to prevent death and injury using traditional methods as early as 1999–the year of the Columbine High School massacre. 

This prompted federal agencies and local police departments in major cities to start pre-positioning tactical teams in armored vehicles at events deemed to be at high risk for a terrorist attack or other mass violence. Examples include speeches given by the US President, state visits by high-ranking foreign dignitaries, and gatherings of people with a history of being targeted for violence. 

Editor’s Note: The writer of this article has personally witnessed this phenomenon multiple times in Washington D.C. and other major cities across the United States.

Reuven Morrison had publicly sounded the alarm about increasing antisemitism and hate crimes targeting Jewish people and synagogues in an interview he gave to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on December 14, 2024–exactly one year to the day that he himself would be killed at Bondi Beach. It could be argued that police in Sydney did not take the threat of antisemitic violence seriously enough, especially after the sharp increase in anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions in the wake of the gruesome Gaza War. 

Misinformation extended past the police officers and soon focused intensely on the two shooters as well as Ahmed al-Ahmed and the anonymous Middle Eastern refugee, with different flavors of confusion or dishonesty filtering in from different corners of the Internet. Websites impersonating reputable news outlets were created within hours of the massacre to spread conspiracy theories and falsehoods while people all over the world were trying to comprehend what horrors had just taken place in Sydney. Examples range from unevidenced claims that one of the shooters had served in the Israeli military to claims that one of the shooters names was searched in Israel the day before the shooting–an overall theme was trying to spin the attack as an Israeli false-flag operation. 

Ahmed al-Ahmed’s identity was particularly contested in a maelstrom of identitarian-based assertions and outrage as many people struggled to wrap their heads around the idea of a Middle Eastern man–a Muslim, no less–acting heroically during a terrorist attack. 

One of the imposter news websites initially identified Ahmed as an Australian-born man named “Edward Crabtree,” which fell apart once his real name was made public. This was followed up by swarms of malicious social media accounts insisting that he must be from a non-Muslim minority community in the Middle East. First they asserted that he was a Maronite Christian from Lebanon, then later an Alawite from Lebanon or Syria, then a Druze from Lebanon or Syria, and eventually some claimed that he was a Jew. Ahmed’s relatives still living in Syria and his elderly parents–who had just moved to Australia two months before the shooting–confirmed in interviews with multiple media outlets that they are indeed Muslims from al-Nayrab.

The anonymous asylum seeker who kicked away a terrorist’s gun is also a Muslim, but his circumstances are far more precarious due to his immigration status and other ongoing legal issues. 

His lawyer, Allison Battinson, told Australian media, “[my client] has no right to stay in this country and, in fact, he could be removed at any moment… He’s on a temporary visa, and even though his family, his partner and his children are Australian citizens, and his partner is pregnant at this moment, despite that, he could be removed at any time.”

The Australian Financial Review reported that the asylum seeker had been arrested the night before the shooting for allegedly transporting cocaine and was held in police custody until the following afternoon–they also report he has a past criminal history. The complexities of this flawed man’s life and choices, at times antisocial and at others heroic, compel one to ask hard questions about redemption for past transgressions and when does one deserve a pardon? 

The asylum seeker is also faced with the problem of being misidentified as one of the terrorists in videos of the civilians swarming the footbridge to beat up everyone they perceived as being the shooters. This will potentially cause him more problems in the future if he manages to avoid being deported back to his unsafe country of birth or having to serve time in prison for drug offences.

Ahmed al-Ahmed’s true identity gradually came to public knowledge and widespread awe of his heroic acts during the shooting prompted donations from all over the world to cover his expenses, eventually totally more than $2.5 million US dollars.

The Best and the Worst Sides of Immigration

The Bondi Beach massacre also provoked a heated debate about immigration not only in Australia but all over the world, with citizens of different countries often projecting their own country’s issues onto a place they have never visited or researched. This makes it necessary to thoroughly examine the shooters and their backgrounds as well as those of their victims and the heroes who stopped them from victimizing even more people.

The terrorists were a father and son duo named Sajid Akram–a 50-year-old man from Hyderabad, India who moved to Australia in 1998 on a student visa and achieved permanent resident status by marrying an Australian woman–and Naveed Akram, a 24-year-old Australian-born citizen. The latter man is now in police custody facing prosecution for 59 offences–charges ranging from multiple counts of murder and attempted murder as well as one count of committing a terrorist act. Sajid had no known criminal record but Naveed had been under investigation on and off since 2019 by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) due to his association with people arrested for terrorism offenses.

The Al Madina Dawah Center in Bankstown, a suburb southwest of Sydney, has gained notoriety over the last decade after multiple adherents were charged and eventually convicted of supporting the Islamic State (IS, more commonly known as ISIS or ISIL). Their crimes range from membership in a designated terrorist organization and distributing propaganda to attempting to acquire firearms and plotting attacks. Naveed Akram was both a regular worshiper at the Bankstown mosque and friends with two men who served prison sentences for ISIS-related activity. 

The same center came to public attention once again in mid-2024 when an imam named Wissam Haddad was successfully sued for violating Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act for dehumanizing statements made about Jewish people in November, 2023. He described Jews as, “wicked,” “scheming,” “vile,” and “descendents of apes and pigs,” in sermons filmed at the Al Madina Dawah Center and later posted online. Haddad’s lawyers argued that his speeches were an educational examination of religious scripture given to a private audience of Muslims and did not refer to Australia’s Jewish community. 

This lawsuit coincided with the State of Israel’s controversial military actions in the Gaza Strip following the deadly Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023–events which have horrified and enraged Jewish and Muslim communities all over the world. Antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric as well as anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric have proliferated like wildfire since 2023, becoming a regular occurrence in unsavory corners of social media. 

Justice Angus Stewart rejected Wissam Haddad’s legal defenses and declared, “The imputations include age-old tropes against Jewish people that are fundamentally racist and antisemitic… they make perverse generalisations against Jewish people as a group.” 

But he also emphasized that criticism of Israel, the Israeli military, and Zionism are not inherently antisemitic. “[An ordinary, reasonable listener] would understand that not all Jews are Zionists and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group.” 

Stewart noted, “political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity… The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other."

Wissam Haddad’s penalty was being ordered by the court to delete the videos, publish corrective notices on his social media for 30 days, and to pay his plaintiff’s legal fees–his organization Dawah Van Incorporated was also deregistered as a legally-recognized charity, one month later. 

Haddad has vehemently denied having any role in the Bondi Beach shooting or having mentored Naveed Akram, writing, “The term ‘follower’ is not explained and could refer to something as minimal as a social media follow, which does not establish endorsement, influence or personal relationship… No evidence has ever been produced showing any personal, organizational, or instructional link between Naveed Akram and Wissam Haddad.”

Haddad remains, for now, a controversial imam who preached at a mosque that has seen multiple attendants go on to commit ISIS-inspired crimes, including attempted and successful terrorist attacks. He has never been, at the time of this writing in December 2025, charged with any terrorism-related crimes and has not been named as a suspect in the massacre by Australian law enforcement.

Many people who have been suspicious, anxious, or even flat out contemptuous of immigration–particuarly that of Muslims into “Western” nations–for years if not decades now point to this massacre as supposed proof that closed borders and discrimination are necessary.

These assertions overlook the contributions immigrants provide to society, exemplified by the multiple engineers among those killed at Bondi Beach, and the fact that Sydney has long been one of the most diverse cities in the world. More than forty percent of the current population were born outside of Australia, a larger foreign-born population than even London or New York, with multiple languages and religions coming together to create a unique blending of cultures. 

It should also be noted that Sydney has far lower crime rates than either London or New York despite its larger immigrant population–American and British commentators frequently blame immigration for the latter cities becoming increasingly unsafe, despite the lack of evidence.

Sydney’s thriving Jewish and Muslim communities are just two of many examples of diaspora life in the city, both of which contain individuals who range from the best to the worst of humanity and everywhere in between. A blanket ban on Muslim immigration and mass-deportations would not eradicate senseless acts of violence which target innocent people in Western countries, as shown by mass shootings and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by Westerners. Examples of this include the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia, the 2011 Norway attacks, and dozens of bombings or shootings in the US targeting courthouses, Olympic Games, and schools. 

Excluding Muslims and other immigrants will mean depriving a country of the benefits that come with accepting hardworking entrepreneurs, professionals, or simple laborers for the sake of a negligible, barely noticeable decrease in terrorism and other mass violence.

Unanswered Questions

It is still not clear what led Sajid and Naveed Akram down the path of becoming radicalized mass-murderers or if any accomplices helped them commit their heinous acts. 

Australian media has reported the two men visited the Philippines a month before the attack–this sparked speculation that they had received “military-style training” from ISIS militants in the country. The island on which they stayed the longest, Mindanao, has been the scene of guerilla warfare between the Philippine government and rebel groups from a variety of ideological persuasions, ranging from communists to Islamists allied with al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Police in Mindanao and staff working at the hotel where both of the Akrams stayed dispute this notion, saying that the men barely ever left their rooms and received no visitors during their stay–although a month locked away in a hotel room is bizarre even under the best of circumstances.

The guns used by Sajid and Naveed Akram were legally purchased by the older man because he had a firearms license relating to his membership in a shooting club–his son also trained at the same club, despite being investigated by ASIO for alleged ISIS connections. This has resurrected a heated debate about gun control in Australia, once promoted as the gold standard by Americans who wish to tighten firearms law in the United States.   

Some blame the recent Free Palestine protests for fomenting antisemitism and laying the groundwork for the horrific violence that shook Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025–this both in some ways unfortunately true and simultaneously a racist oversimplification. Anti-Zionism, opposition to the ideology calling for a Jewish nation-state in their ancestral homeland, does not have to go hand-in-hand with antisemitism or Jew-hatred. It is possible to dislike or despise the State of Israel because of their government’s actions without demonizing the Jewish people as a whole. 

But far too many people fail to make this distinction and do indeed conflate the two in toxic, counterproductive ways–meanwhile a similar number of Jewish and non-Jewish individuals who support the State of Israel simultaneously also circulate similarly hateful tropes about Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

The contagious nature of “us-vs-them” hatred leading to an endless cycle of reciprocal and retaliatory violence makes it necessary to move on from the antiquated practice of generalizing entire groups of people with essentialist prejudices.

Lighting the Menorah

Tensions remained high in Sydney in the days after the now-deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history took place in none other than their beloved Bondi Beach. 

Police presence at Jewish places of worship and other places deemed to be at risk of being attacked has been increased, leading to the detention and questioning of multiple people in an effort to never allow a similar massacre to ever happen again. 

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addressed the nation, calling the massacre, “shocking and distressing,” as well as a, “targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah,” and “an act of pure evil, an act of antisemitism and terrorism on our shores.”

Calls for stronger gun laws echoed through the Australian political landscape and the National Cabinet unanimously agreed to pass even tougher restrictions, chiefly limiting firearms licenses to only Australian citizens instead of including permanent residents and other noncitizens. The New South Wales government also began drafting legislation to crack down on hate speech, including certain phrases associated with current anti-Israel protests. It remains unclear what impact these new laws will have on free speech and the right to protest in Australia or if restricting hateful rhetoric will decrease hatred in society.

But there is also reason to be hopeful for Sydney and the uniquely multicultural city’s future–the heroism Ahmed al-Ahmed demonstrated during the shooting has helped bring the local Jewish and Muslim communities together instead of driving them further apart. His actions have been celebrated around the world by both Jews and Muslims alike, for preventing further bloodshed as well as providing a counterexample to widespread stereotypes about Islam and terrorism. 

Ahmed explained in interviews from his hospital room that his sole motivation was to save lives–nationality, religion, or skin color made no difference to him as he risked his life to save others. His humanistic outlook is one that many Westerners could benefit to learn from, particularly those who work in media and at first seemed to struggle with the concept of a Muslim heroically defending other people solely because other people matter. 

Those who obsess over what they perceive as immutable civilizational or cultural clashes should watch the video of Rabbi Eli Schanger’s brother-in-law visiting Ahmed in the hospital, thanking him as one human being to another, “not only for saving lives, but for your courage.” 

Jewish worshipers and other Sydney residents gathered in Bondi Beach the following nights to continue observing Hanukkah–albeit in a tremendously more somber, grief-stricken mood than on the first night–and to pay their respects to the victims. On the night of December 21, 2025, Ahmed al-Ahmed’s elderly father–a Muslim who had spent most of his life living in Syria–was invited to light a candle on the menorah and happily accepted the offer.