When I tell people that Australia’s problems that led to the Bondi Beach attack weren’t about gun control, they’re pretty quick to dismiss me. In fairness, it’s not like I’m unbiased on the issue. I’d sooner die than say gun control works, though even if it did, I’d oppose it.
I’m biased as hell against gun control, and I make no apologies for it.
But when someone else who doesn’t live and work within the Second Amendment circles says the problems down under aren’t gun control, I’m going to call some attention to that fact because, well, it’s different.
And in this case, a leader of a Jewish organization–you know, the people targeted in the attack–is the one talking sense.
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, said Saturday on Newsmax that Australian officials blaming a deadly attack on gun access are misidentifying the threat, calling it “an issue of Islamic terrorism” that governments and Muslim leaders must confront directly.
Klein, speaking on Newsmax’s “The Count,” pointed to what he described as the global scope of Islamist violence and said Western governments should stop avoiding religious and ideological labels.
“This is a Muslim issue and we have to call it out and stop talking about the nonsense that this is gun control,” he said.
Debate over high-profile attacks often turns quickly to questions of firearms access and public safety policy, while critics of that framing say authorities downplay ideological motives when the perpetrators cite extremist causes.
He’s not wrong.
We’ve seen this a thousand times, unfortunately. A group of Islamic extremists carries out some kind of attack, and officials immediately downplay that aspect of the motivations out of some fear of backlash against Muslims. The issue automatically becomes guns and hate speech because then they don’t have to address the elephant in the room.
And Klein actually talks sense in how to address that, too.
Klein also said the solution requires change inside the Arab and Islamic world, including education reforms.
“We have to change the education systems in the Arab [and] Islamic world, where they teach hatred and violence,” he said, adding that major Muslim-country leaders should deliver public condemnations of Islamist terrorism.
Again, he’s not wrong.
The fact that so few Muslim leaders step up after an attack like Bondi Beach makes it easier for the next attack to happen. They know that their brethren will support them no matter what they do. They can kill the infidels as much as they want, be they Christians, Jews, atheists, or whatever, and no one in their camp will bat an eye.
Couple that with the so-called education many of these people get in Muslim-majority countries, where hate is the only thing being taught, and what you get is an act of violence waiting to happen. Most won’t become terrorists, of course, but how many need to for there to be a major issue?
If the Islamic world won’t address this, then we’re never going to see an end to these attacks.
No, gun control won’t work, because France has extensive gun control, and the 2015 Paris attacks involved fully-automatic firearms. Terrorists have resources. They can get guns no matter what you do.
So yeah, there has to be a change in the Islamic world.
Without that, we will never fully know peace.
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