‘We don’t mourn fascists’: Award-winning children’s book illustrator slams Bondi Beach victims

The assault struck families gathered for the first night of the Chanukah holiday, including Holocaust survivors and a 10-year-old girl, Matilda.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

An Australian children’s author is facing sharp criticism after publishing a newsletter attacking the victims of last month’s Bondi Beach terror rampage – a shooting that killed 15 people attending a Chanukah celebration organized by Chabad.

The assault struck families gathered for the first night of the holiday, including Holocaust survivors and a 10-year-old girl, Matilda, who had been playing in a petting zoo with her younger sister shortly before she was shot.

Matt Chun, a 2021 Australian Picture Book Illustrator Award winner who has previously received government funding for his work, released the newsletter under the headline “We don’t mourn fascists.”

In the piece, he portrayed the December 14 “Chanukah by the Sea” event as more than a community gathering, insisting it was tied to what he called “a violent supremacist organisation deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”

Chabad, which ran the program, was accused by Chun of helping to enable what he described as a “Zionist and Euro-American imperialist Holocaust of Palestine.”

Chun directed similar attacks at British-born Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of those killed, labeling him a “Zionist zealot” and alleging he backed “the eradication of Palestinians.”

He argued that after the shooting, “the story was immediately written by Zionist lobbyists, Zionist politicians, Zionist police, and Zionist ‘witnesses’,” and claimed “whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue.”

The author also criticized Australian political and cultural discourse, stating that “Australian progressives have also failed to engage meaningfully with Islam, or offer any coherent analysis of its varied and disparate political formations, allowing Zionist media to fill the gap with collapsed definitions and orientalist tropes.”

He dismissed the national response to the massacre, writing that “elaborate memorials [for the Bondi victims], rolling media coverage, and international headlines” reflected a belief that “white, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief,” while asserting, “While the colonised are bulldozed into mass graves, the death of a single coloniser must shake the earth.”

Chun said in the introduction to his newsletter that it was prepared “in close consultation” with members of his broader community, including “Indigenous people across three continents and anti-Zionist Jewish comrades.”