Two shooters opened fire on Bondi beach at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration. Glenn Beck reacts to this horiffic act of evil and also to the heroic act of a man who tackled one of the shooters.
Transcript
Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors
GLENN: So let me just cover the headlines really quickly: Brown University, yesterday, there was a shooter. Two are dead. The only one that has been named so far is the Republican Club Vice President Alec Cook. There have been nine that have been injured. They thought they had the shooter. But turns out, it's not him. He has been released. And there's just some questions on this one that are weird.
Also, al-Qaeda struck and killed US soldiers over the weekend in Syria. There will be a military response to that, I am sure. And yesterday -- yesterday, on the beach, Sydney's eastern suburbs. Sydney, Australia, it's summer there. There's locals. There are people that are coming from all over the country, all over the world, for the warmth of summer and the community celebration of the first night of Hanukkah. The rest of the world is the darkest days of winter. On the other side of the globe, it is still sunlight because it is in the middle of sunlight. But it was a dark, dark day yesterday despite the sun being up.
There were families with children. They were chasing the waves. The smell of grilled food that was drifting across the sand. Music, conversation, laughter in the air. And then around 7 o'clock, laughter was replaced with screams of terror. Two men dressed in black and armed with high-powered firearms positioned themselves atop a small concrete pedestrian bridge. It arched over the Campbell parade near the Bondi pavilion. They stood on top in the center of this bridge and rained bullets as they fired into the crowd. Shots rang out. Astonished the crowd.
VOICE: Get down. Get down. Boys, get down. Oh, my God.
GLENN: It just went on and on and on. Thousands had been gathered for Hanukkah by the Sea. They're now ducking for cover. Some trying to push children to safety, others frozen in disbelief as friends and strangers alike fell all around them.
The carnage was unbelievable. For ten minutes, these guys fired off this bridge. The beach, usually alive with surfers and sun seekers, just transformed instantly. Bodies were trampled. Frantic dash for some sort of shelter and protection, as the waves just continued to lap innocently at the shore while people were screaming for help.
Now, in the chaos, there were acts of individual courage. A fruit vendor, later named by the media as Ahmed al-Ahmed. He saw one of the gunmen firing his weapon. And in a moment of pure resolve, he vaulted from behind a nearby car, tackled the shooter from behind, and wrestled the rifle away. It was an unbelievable scene. Witnesses say -- and it was all captured on tape. There he is. Witnesses say, his bravery likely saved countless lives.
Police arrived, they started shooting at him. They shot at the two that were up on the bridge. They wounded both of them.
15 people had been killed by the time it was over. Dozens wounded. Young children to the elderly. Cherished members of the Jewish community, including Rabbi Eli Schlanger, a British-born assistant rabbi. He helped organize Hanukkah by the Sea.
The beach won't be looked at the same ever again. As the suspects went down, people from Australia just ran up on to the bridge.
And what I thought was an amazing, amazing moment that spoke volumes of our culture! The police were on top of these men, trying to administer care to keep them alive. While citizens, understandably, came up on the bridge and just started kicking them.
Police jumped on those people and pushed them away. And said, stop, stop, stop. And they did.
Because we're not a culture of death. First suspect, 50 year old, Sajid Akram, 50 years old. He's a dad. The second suspect is his 24-year-old son. Both in critical condition. Now in the hospital under police guard.
Let me ask you to imagine just for a minute, what it must feel like to be Jewish today. Not in theory. Because we -- we had an incident stopped in Amsterdam over the weekend, in Germany over the weekend, in LA, somebody, a drive-by just shot at a Jewish home with the Hanukkah candles in the window, screaming, "F the Jews." You want to know what -- you want to chant, "Bring the Intifada here," this is what it looks like.
It is here now. So what does it feel like to be Jewish today?
I don't know. I can't relate. But I want you to imagine, not as a talking point. But in quiet moments, when the phone would light up with another alert, another headline, another synagogue guarded by concrete barriers, armed police.
There's a particular fear that comes with memory. Jewish people carry history. Not as abstraction, but as inheritance. And it lives in names that are whispered at dinner tables, and photographs rescued from ash. And stories that begin with, "And we thought it would never happen here."
Europe told itself, that very thing once. So did Germany. So did France. So did polite society, everywhere, right before it happened.
And the world has been saying that for decades now. It would never happen here. And here we are again. And here we are, the worst we've seen in America.
Shadows that all of us hoped were buried forever. Hatred with organization, ideology. Hatred with teeth. Violence. Justification.
They're no longer whispers. They're shouting it now in our streets. They're shouting it in the streets of Australia. They're shouting it in the streets of Germany. And England and France. And Norway. They're burning flags. They're firing guns. They're chanting not only death to the Jew, but death to the West, death to Canada, death to the US. Death to Europe. This is no longer confined to the margins anymore. And the West is tolerating it. The west has explained it away. We have minimalized it. We have said it was a lone wolf. Sometimes we even excuse it.
Just for the day, let's just stop and look at Australia for a minute. For years, Jewish communities are warned the officials.
Anti-Semitism isn't theoretical. It's here. We're living it. We're seeing it. It's not just graffiti or angry words.
It's metastasizing into something ideological and organized and deadly. And in Australia, the officials told them, calm down.
Trust the institutions. We've got it.
Somehow or another, multi-cultural harmony would manage itself, but it didn't. Because it doesn't.
Ideology doesn't dissolve when it's ignored. It consolidates. It grows he has and it has across the Western world entirely. Europe, Britain, Australia. Canada. The United States. It's the same pattern!
Violent anti-Semitism rising Jewish schools like fortresses. Your families wondering whether visibility itself is now a liability.
And yet, all across the West, officials hesitate, to name the problem. Clearly!
So let me do it. Precisely. Precisely.
Truthfully.
Islamism.
Islamists. Not Islam. Not Muslim. If you're a Muslim, you want to live peacefully, worship freely. Raise children. Continue to, you know, live and contribute to a society. You know, and you're not an enemy of the West. I'm totally good with that. Look at the fruit cart guy. He apparently didn't hate Jews. He wasn't part of the culture of death.
He stopped it.
And millions do that every single day. But Islamism, Islamists, that's something entirely different.
Islamism is a political ideology.
It's not about faith. It is about power.
It's the belief that society has to be governed by religious law. Sharia law.
That freedom of conscience is illegitimate. That women are subordinate, that dissent is heresy, and that the world and everything in it has to submit. And it's very clear about all of this. It writes it down. It teaches it. It shouts it from the public square. For the love of Pete, it's everywhere. It chants it. It doesn't hide its ambitions. It doesn't hide behind anything. But here's what it doesn't do: It doesn't co-exist with open societies.
It replaces them and has been replacing open societies for centuries.
Any culture built on individual liberty, freedom of speech, equality before the law, it can't survive alongside an ideology that views all of those principles as sins or as an affront to Allah! In that scenario, one side must yield, or one side will be destroyed!
And history is very clear on which one does. You know, we're very different people. Even the difference between us and Canada. And us and Europe.
It might be seemingly starved. It might be we're very different. But when you look at us as a civilization, we're very different. Together, we're very different from the rest of the world.
We don't understand these things. Because we project our values, on everybody else.
We assume that everybody ultimately wants to live. And to compromise. Live side by side. We assume violence is accidental. We assume that it's a lone wolf. We assume that words like to do and dialogue mean the same thing to everybody.
But they don't! And so we tolerate politicians and newscasters and everything else that explain things away. They explain the stabbings and the truck attacks and the shootings and the riots. It's isolated incidents. They're not! We talk about finding the root cause. But we won't -- we won't name the root itself!
We call it extremism, as though it sprang out of nowhere, as though it was a weather event, instead of a worldview that's been around for centuries! I ask you to think about what it feels like to be Jewish today because of the Jewish people.
But also because, you're next. Jewish communities always pay the price first.
They always do. And believe me, you're on the list. You!
Your freedom. Your children are on the list!
And history shows this, with brutal consistency.
When a society begins to rot, from ideological cowardice.
The Jews are always the early-warning system.
They're the canary in the coal mine.
When they're targeted openly. And the state responds with hesitation.
That society is already sick and in the hospital.
It's already in trouble.
And make in mistakes.
The science is not far away.
It is already here.
Synagogues attached. Jewish students harassed on campus. Jewish neighborhoods guarded like war zones. Public celebrations requiring armed protection now. This is not normal, and it's not sustainable. And the West likes to believe and understands freedom.
But freedom is not a five! It's not a comfort. It's not the absence of conflict. Freedom is costly! And it requires moral clarity, and it requires the courage to draw a line and say, this doesn't belong here! And if we refuse to do that work now, our children will have to do it later under far worse conditions! They will have to fight, not to preserve freedom, but to recover it. And history always shows, that's much more costly. America, you're closer than you think to losing not only our country, but countries that took centuries to build!
Not through invasion. But through erosion. Through silence. Through the polite refusal to speak uncomfortable truths.
If not you, who?
If not now, when?
You're running out of time.
