The massacre in Sydney at Bondi Beach was ugly, and I’m not talking about what the Australian cricket team has done to England’s, though a three-nil lead in the Ashes, after three Tests, making it a dead rubber with two games to play, is about as bad as it gets.
A beach might seem an odd place to have a Hannukah picnic, but then, it seems Australian Jews are that little bit different. Of course, Australians are probably going to celebrate Christmas at Bondi Beach, safe from interruption, and unfazed by the killing 15 people.
I wonder how anti-Semitic Australians are? They recently recognised Palestine, which is about as anti-Semitic you can get these days. But there was a curious rightness about how it was hotly debated whether the perpetrators of the massacre were Indians or Pakistani. Indeed, there was a cricketing feel to the debate, as if the rivalry on the field was being carried over to the massacre.
Look, it’s quite simple. The massacre was carried out by South Asian Muslims. Sajid Akram, 60, and his son, Naveed Akram, 30, carried out the massacre. Sajid, by the way, had married an Italian woman, so you had a sort of revival of the World War II alliance between Germany and Italy, where the Italians were drawn into killing off their Jews too.
It was the half-Italian Naveed who caused the confusion, or rather the Internet did, orv rather some overenthusiastic netizens. They got onto Naveed Akram’s Facebook page, and identified him as a Pakistani. Problem is, of the 16 Naveed Akrams it throws at you before anyone from Sydney, 12 are from Pakistan, one from AJK, and three don’t identify where they’re from. Then you only get one from Western Australia (where the Ashes Test didn’t last two days), of about a thousand or so. They’re mostly Pakistani, though there’s a smattering from the UK, Greece, and the UAE. However, the majority don’t identify their addresses.
Anyway, an ex-colleague of Naveed’s said he was from India. The Indian government then reluctantly admitted that Sajid Akram had gone to Australia from Hyderabad in 1998. That means that, after the USA and Canada, Australia is the third country to be hit by Indian terrorism, though it has to be admitted that it wasn’t government terrorism. Indian PM Narendra Modi is not hearing good news these days. After the Bondi Beach debacle, Shubman Gill, that untrustworthy Sikh, has been dropped from the T20 team, but the low-caste Suryakumar Yadav has been retained as captain. No good can come of this.
Modi has also got to work overtime to placate his Israeli friends, who would have noticed how many Jews had been killed by men of Indian origin. It isn’t just the number, but also how Indians had not been taught to love Jews. It was decidedly crazy, for those who died did not invade Gaza. They had invaded Australia. And its decidedly skewed for an Indian immigrant to object to any other migrants. As a matter of fact, everyone in Australia except the Aborigines are quite recent migrants.
Meanwhile, former Punjab CM Manzoor Wattoo passed away at 86. He had also been a minister in the PPP government of Yousaf Reza Gilani and Raja Pervez Ashraf, but I best remember him as a firm presiding officer of the Punjab Assembly, a place he held for eight years, until he parlayed that position into the Chief Ministership.
Now the Speakership seems virtually interchangeable with the Prime Ministership or Chief Ministership, but at the time, back in 1993, it was a novel development. It had been a long journey, and his memoirs are a model of clarity, mixing both the political and personal.
