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Police teams take security measures in the area where a terrorist attack, which targeted the Jewish community on the first night of Hanukkah (Chanukkah), occurred at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia on December 14, 2025. [Claudio Galdames Alarcon – Anadolu Agency]
Pro-Israel social media influencers have been caught spreading false information about the identity of the man who disarmed a shooter during a deadly attack in Bondi Beach, Australia, falsely claiming that the hero was Christian, despite confirmation that he is a Syrian Muslim named Ahmed Al-Ahmed.
The fabrication appears to have been designed to prevent a Muslim being credited with an act of extraordinary courage. Ahmed Al-Ahmed, who confronted and disarmed the attacker with his bare hands, was initially described in media reports as a fruit stall owner in the shopping centre.
Among those peddling the lie was Laura Loomer, a far-right commentator and pro-Israel activist who posted: “The media keeps saying the man who disarmed the Muslim terrorist in Australia today is also a Muslim who owns a fruit stand. Credible reports suggest the man is actually a Lebanese or Coptic Christian. Don’t fall for the propaganda.”
The media keeps saying the man who disarmed the Muslim terrorist in Australia today is also a Muslim who owns a fruit stand.
Credible reports suggest the man is actually a Lebanese or Coptic Christian. Don’t fall for the propaganda.
Another pro-Israel social media figure, Eyal Yakoby, similarly posted: “BREAKING: The hero who disarmed one of the shooters in Australia is reportedly a Maronite Christian. A true hero.”
BREAKING: The hero who disarmed one of the shooters in Australia is reportedly a Maronite Christian.
Both claims were false. Ahmed Al-Ahmed’s cousin, Mustafa Al-Ahmed, confirmed to Australian outlets that Ahmed is a practising Muslim from the city of Idlib, Syria. Community members and friends also corroborated his identity.
Social media users have pointed out that the refusal by pro-Israel influencers to accept that a Muslim man could be a selfless hero reflects the deeply ingrained Islamophobia that underpins much of pro-Israel discourse. Rather than recognising the bravery of a Muslim man who risked his life to save Jews, they attempted to rewrite his identity to align with their ideological agenda, which consistently vilifies Muslims.
Some pointed out that the disinformation campaign highlights how Islamophobic rhetoric is quickly weaponised. Rather than celebrating a Muslim hero who put himself in harm’s way to protect others, influencers with large followings used their platforms to erase his identity and falsely assign it to a Christian.
Observers have also pointed to a pattern whereby Muslim acts of heroism are downplayed, denied or co-opted, while Muslim perpetrators are amplified to reinforce racist stereotypes. The incident in Bondi is now being cited as a textbook example of digital erasure in service of anti-Muslim narratives.
Ahmed Al-Ahmed has not yet spoken publicly but is reportedly recovering from injuries sustained during the attack. Community leaders have called for him to be honoured for his bravery.
While the mainstream media has now corrected the record, critics note that Loomer and Yakoby’s posts remain live and continue to be shared.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors in protective gear remove hazardous materials from a home destroyed in the Eaton Fire on March 26, 2025 in Altadena, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“We’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools, and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy,” said one co-author.
“The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth.”
That’s the first line of the abstract for an article published Monday by top scientists who reviewed “the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis.”
The new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change highlights the diverse impacts of “every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle” and stresses that the “industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decadeslong, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out” its deadly products.
“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action,” said co-author Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in a statement. “Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops.”
“The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”
While the researchers focused on the United States, “as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises,” their review—including proposed “science-and-justice-based solutions” for an economywide effort to “forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth”—applies to the whole world, which is quickly heating up due to emissions from coal, gas, and oil.
The article features sections on the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss and extinction, petrochemical pollution, and industry disinformation. Each section lays out the “problem” and “solutions.”
The climate emergency section includes details such as “the production and combustion of oil, gas, and coal are responsible for nearly 90% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and approximately 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions,” and “failures in political will to implement necessary climate action have made the 1.5°C benchmark nearly impossible to achieve without overshoot,” referring to a primary goal of the 2015 Paris agreement.
Although the current U.S. administration has demonstrated its alliance to the fossil fuel industry—including with President Donald Trump’s recent energy emergency declaration—the scientists still emphasized what’s possible in the country.
“In the USA, powerful policy levers are available to governments and civil society at the local, state, national, and international levels to phase out fossil fuels and transition to a clean, renewable energy economy,” they wrote. “These levers include regulation (e.g. applying and enforcing existing laws), legislation (e.g. polluters pay laws, fossil fuel subsidy reform, land use laws limiting drilling), and litigation (e.g. holding fossil fuel companies accountable, defending existing law).”
They also warned that “last-ditch efforts to prolong the fossil fuel industry are proliferating. These include counterproductive false solutions, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would perpetuate fossil fuel use while capturing only some of the resulting emissions, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels.”
The public health section notes that “air pollution from fossil fuel combustion accounts for 8.7 million (equaling 1 in 5) premature deaths per year worldwide and 350,000 premature deaths per year in the USA. In a single year, air pollution from oil and gas production in the USA resulted in 410,000 asthma exacerbations, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and 7,500 premature deaths in 2016.”
Co-author David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday that “we’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy.”
“Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past.”
The paper points out that “climate change is increasing incidence of physical and mental health impacts and mortality through multiple pathways: worsening extreme events including heatwaves, severe storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires; shifting ranges of disease vectors; threats to food security; and displacement and forced migration, which restrict access to healthcare and other basic services.”
“These harms, though broadly felt, also disproportionately impact marginalized communities which are already disproportionately burdened by other socioenvironmental hazards, as well as susceptible populations including young children, people with certain disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, and older adults,” the publication continues.
University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies Robin Saha, another co-author, said that “decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences.”
“For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries,” Saha added. “The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”
The paper’s other co-authors are Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, Boston University’s Jonathan J. Buonocore and Mary D. Willis, Trisia Farrelly of the Cawthron Institute, William Ripple of Oregon State University, and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Nathan Donley, John Fleming, and Shaye Wolf.
“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” declared Wolf, the paper’s lead author and the center’s climate science director. “Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past. Clean, renewable energy is here, it’s affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy.”
