Within a day after two gunmen killed 15 people during a gathering for the Jewish holiday Hanukkah at Australia’s most famous beach, a very resilient country began to focus on ways to prevent a similar tragedy: Better gun regulations. A warm embrace of Jewish Australians. A sterner check on antisemitism. Tighter surveillance of potential terrorists.
Yet a particular act of selfless heroism during the Dec. 14 mass shooting has offered up one more possible solution.
A video shows Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim shop owner in Sydney, tackling and disarming one of the alleged Bondi Beach shooters, also a Muslim. This bystander, by bursting bravely into action, may have saved countless lives even as he was shot. “God gave me strength,” he reportedly told a cousin from a hospital bed.
His father, Mohamed Fateh al-Ahmed, perhaps best described the motives of his son, who gained Australian citizenship in 2022 after fleeing conflict in Syria.
“When he did what he did, he wasn’t thinking about the background of the people he’s saving, the people dying in the street,” the father told reporters. “He doesn’t discriminate between one nationality and another. Especially here in Australia, there’s no difference between one citizen and another.”
His instinct to save innocent people from harm, regardless of their beliefs or ethnicity, is not strange for someone from Syria, said Lubaba Alhmidi AlKahil, the media director for the Australians for Syria Association, according to The Guardian. “The community is lovely, supportive, with strong bonds.”
“We’ve refused injustice and persecution [in Syria] and it’s not strange that one of us had the feeling: ‘No, I will not watch, I will die to help.’”
While violence has been historically significant in the Middle East, including Syria, it was not the everyday norm for centuries, wrote Josef Meri, a faculty member at Georgetown University, in The New Arab news site earlier this year.
The Ottoman Empire left a legacy of mutual respect for religious diversity among Jews, Christian, Muslims, and other faiths. “The Quran explicitly states, ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error’ (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:256), emphasising the principle of religious freedom,” wrote the professor, an expert on interfaith relations.
Mr. al-Ahmed’s actions, along with other heroic acts during the shooting, are now seen as a corrective remedy.
“As we see by how all Australians are reacting, we see it as an attack on Australia and the sort of fundamental values that underpin our society – our multi-faith society of respect, tolerance, diversity, and fundamentally a peaceful and respectful attitude towards one’s fellow citizens,” Sen. Dave Sharma, former ambassador to Israel, said to the Special Broadcasting Service.
