Jewish tradition distinguishes between the type of criminal who hides under the cover of night and one who conducts his evil acts in broad daylight. The latter fears neither man nor God.
The massacre at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration, carried out while it was still daylight, was Australia’s largest mass shooting in three decades. It has become an article of faith that the country’s notorious restrictions on private gun ownership had more or less solved the problem. So why did Bondi Beach happen?
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese doesn’t know. He has signaled at further restricting gun access, and the fact that one of the shooters had a recreational gun license hints at the direction such laws might take. So does the report that the father-son terrorist duo owned six guns.
Is the problem here that a man with no criminal record had a hunting license? If so, what other recreational hunting licensed mass shooters has Australia had to deal with? Is the problem the number of guns they owned? That seems a strange assumption considering that the two shooters appeared to use one gun each for the Bondi Beach slaughter and had brought along explosive devices as well.
This is not to say that Australia’s strict gun laws didn’t “work” but that a weakness in those laws isn’t the reason for Bondi Beach. The Hanukkah massacre in Sydney wasn’t random. It shows every sign under the sun of being yet another planned, deliberate globalizing of the intifada.
Violent anti-Semitism finds a way to break through cultural norms, legal restrictions, and other flimsy guardrails. This exception to Australia’s lack of mass violence is not about regulations; it is about the victims.
Literally everyone saw this attack, or something like it, coming. Australia’s problem has been out in the open. Anti-Semitism has been conducted daily in the daylight, for fear of neither man nor God—nor, certainly, of Anthony Albanese.
The storm clouds that gathered over Oz these past two years have not been animated by sudden evidence of nihilism among Australia’s recreational hunters. They have been animated by a wildfire of anti-Jewish bloodlust and a feckless, pathetic political class. Perhaps in addition to gun laws, Australian legislators can pass new restrictions on the number of cowards allowed in their ranks.
The idea that anti-Semitism can be defeated by laws is not evidenced by history. Perhaps it cannot be defeated at all; as long as there are Jews, there will be Jew-hatred, and there will always be Jews.
But history does tell us ways the danger can be lessened or increased. First and foremost, anti-Semitic acts get a boost when anti-Semitic rhetoric is pronounced or even tacitly encouraged by the government. And there is no question the government has given credence to false anti-Israel narratives about the war, including by rewarding Hamas with “recognition” of a Palestinian state. We know that Israel did not intentionally starve Gazan children; Hamas did. We know that Israel did not target hospitals but rather targeted terrorist forces who had turned hospitals into instruments of war. We know that the “journalists” killed in Gaza were very rarely journalists. We know that Hamas and other terrorists were systematically murdering hostages and then blaming their deaths on the IDF. We know that wartime conditions in Gaza were by the design of Hamas.
And still, it was Israel that the Australian government was focused on punishing for the above.
It is also true that the government simply watched, unmoved, as a cascade of incidents and attacks escalated to this point, even as the anti-Semites made their intentions plain. In Australia, the focus wasn’t a fight over euphemisms and whether “intifada” means this or that in the original Arabic. In Australia, they just outright threatened Jews without hiding behind anti-Zionism: rallygoers just after Oct. 7, for example, were seen and heard shouting what sounded like “Gas the Jews!” Their defense was that they only said “where’s the Jews.” Notice that everybody agrees on the word “Jews.”
The bipartisan consensus expressed by leading Israeli figures is that Australia’s government is culpable in this atrocity, and the Jewish state will be sending Israelis to help in person as well as a reported political delegation to say what needs to be said on the ground. Good.
I’ll leave the efficacy of proposed gun laws to Australia’s firearms experts and political scientists. But Australia’s role in enabling the globalization of the intifada is not a local issue. It is a borderless delinquency. Jews weren’t the ones who globalized the intifada, and we certainly cannot abandon Australia’s Jewish community to a political class and government that watches as its anti-Semites go Jew-hunting in the light of day, seeing no one and nothing to fear. Albanese should not go a day without hearing the voice of the world’s Jews heap shame upon him and everyone who shares his unfitness for high office.
