As a Jewish man, our tradition is that my job is to teach my children how to swim and a profession. We can explore what that means on a deeper rabbinic level, but simply to give my children the skills that they will be able to protect themselves from danger, and live and be productive, self-sufficient members of society.
Reading reports of the father-son duo, Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24, who perpetrated the antisemitic murder in Sydney, Australia, on the first day of Chanukah, I was shocked to think that either the father had the evil idea and invited his son, or his son was so indoctrinated that he invited his father to join his shooting orgy. Either way, the father failed, and his son was raised in the rot of this failure.
Thankfully, Sajid, the father, has arrived in hell. Hopefully, Australia has a death penalty, so Naveed, the son, will be swiftly reunited with his dad. People will rush to cite permissive gun laws as the cause of the massacre, but the truth is it's the permissiveness of the pervasiveness of radical Islam. This, more than guns, must be outlawed and eliminated.
Unfortunately, we see such father-son evil more and more as a consequence of widespread radical Islam. We see it in the Sydney rampage. We see it with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Islamic Republic all spreading their tentacles of evil with Israel and Jews in their crosshairs. We also see it throughout Africa and around the world, where Christians are persecuted as part of a multi-generational family tradition.
And we see it among Muslims themselves, with fathers and sons murdering their daughters and sisters in what are perversely called "honor killings." There is no honor in these premeditated murders, and there is no honor for a father who raises his child to live by this evil creed.
Whoever had the horrific idea to carry out this massacre will be revealed, but it almost doesn't matter. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once noted that we will only have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate ours. That must be widened to all of extremist Islam. By raising their children in this death cult, they are not loving parents but guilty of child abuse.
More evidence of this was demonstrated in the article, "IDF airs interrogation clips of terrorist father and son confessing to rape on Oct. 7."
Among the most vile reports since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and savage massacre of 1,200 people, and kidnapping of more than 250, last year, Israel revealed video confessions of a father-son team, Ahmad and Abdallah Radi. Breaching Israel's border in an orgy of hate and destruction, Ahmed shamelessly brought his son Abdallah to participate in the murderous rampage. Both father and son were captured. In separate interrogations, Ahmad and Abdallah confessed to murder and rape. In fact, they raped the same woman before Ahmad, the father, executed her.
In the wake of this and the Sydney massacre with a different Islamist father-son team, the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (CSNY) song, "Teach Your Children," came to mind. It's a song about passing on values from one generation to the next, emphasizing the importance of teaching children well, helping them grow into their best selves, to create a better future individually, as a legacy from one generation to the next.
If Sajid or Ahmad only had an ear for classic folk rock and not jihadi hate, maybe they'd have set a positive example, rather than transmitting to their sons evil genocidal hatred.
CSNY sang, "You, …Must have a code you try to live by…Teach your children well…And feed them on your dreams." Today's jihadi fathers live by a "code" of evil. Rather than feeding them on the dreams of building and doing something positive, becoming productive members of society, their vision and goals are exclusively to destroy Israel, to slaughter Jews.
The lyrics continue, "The one they pick's the one you'll know by." Basically, CSNY is saying that a father's legacy lives on through his children. Unfortunately, Sajid or Ahmad has transmitted a legacy of geocidal hate, fueled by extremist Islam founded in the Muslim Brotherhood, which has become illegal in parts of the Arab world and, hopefully, soon, in the U.S.
CSNY's chorus implores parents to move beyond the struggles of the previous generation (their father's hell did slowly go by), and the importance of nurturing children's dreams so they can live fulfilling lives.
Parents have a responsibility to imbue their children with good values, but also that children have the responsibility to choose the correct path, regardless of what they inherit from their parents.
"Teach Your Children" is a call to action for passing on life lessons, compassion, and hope to future generations.
These horrific stories of the father-and-son teams Sajid and Naveed and Ahmed and Abdullah remind me of another, less hopeful, classic American folk-rock song, Harry Chapin's 1974 hit, "Cats in the Cradle." After a life of neglecting his son by having "lots to do," the father realizes his neglect has come back to him, singing woefully, "My boy was just like me."
This is the model by which the Islamic terrorists live. It's up to them, the parents, to teach their children well, to have an active presence, to show them right from wrong, and to correct them when they go astray. It's never a father's role to teach a child to massacre, rape, sexually mutilate, and murder, or to shoot up a holiday celebration anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
Rather than worshiping an evil ideology and a god who celebrates that, maybe they'd do well with a little 1960s classic folk-rock to change their future. Barring that, and for the self-preservation of Western society, the rot of extremist Islam must be outlawed and uprooted.
Australia and the permissive Western countries, which have contorted to open their doors to extremist Islam and not stand firmly against all it threatens, enabling the evil to grow and see its horrific outcomes continuing, must change course, be brave and bold, and eliminate this threat from within before they are consumed by it.