BONDI RULING SHAMES US ALL

AUSTRALIA is shamed. A NSW court last week banned construction of a synagogue at Bondi, to save locals from getting accidentally hurt if the Jews are shot or bombed.

After this decision by the Land and Environment Court, what’s next? Send Jews back to the ghettos to keep us safe?

What a victory for the jihadists trying to kill them.

This disgrace started when the Friends of Refugees from Eastern Europe decided to build a synagogue on tennis courts at Wellington St, Bondi.

Waverley Council, which ironically includes several Jews, resisted, worried at first by a design with apartments at the back. That design was then modified; a planned blast wall — a defence against car bombs — was made smaller and less obtrusive. And when Waverley Council still failed to approve the project, FREE appealed to the Land and Environment Court.

The council now claims it was the court alone that rejected the appeal, on the grounds of the danger to the neighbours.

But Commissioner Graham Brown made clear in his findings that the council’s barrister had queried the “suitability of the site having regard to impact on safety and security ‘of future users of the synagogue, nearby residents, motorists and pedestrians’.”

Brown agreed: “It would seem that a more sophisticated risk assessment process could be required for matters such as a potential terrorist threat.”

A council spokesman later added “risks to neighbours and passers-by were not sufficiently addressed” in the plans.

Sure, people may worry that the synagogue or Jewish school down their street could be blown up, sending stray shrapnel into their house. But where does such thinking lead us? Doesn’t it mean no synagogue, Jewish school, Jewish charity or even prominent Jew can live in your street without building defences for all their neighbours and passers-by?

No one could afford that. And why punish the target rather than the source of the threat?

No mosque has been shut down for being the meeting place of jihadists. Why do we ban the synagogues that are the targets but not the mosques that are the threats? Taken to its logical conclusion, this decision means we’d force Jews to abandon a public presence, or keep to a ghetto so terrorists kill only them.

Shame on Waverley Council for telling Jews they’re on their own against a growing menace to their right to even exist.