admin
On the evening of December 14, 2025, a brutal terrorist shooting tore through a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, leaving a dozen people dead and dozens more wounded as families and children celebrated the festival of lights. Witnesses watched in horror as two gunmen opened fire from a footbridge, turning a peaceful community event into a slaughter. The attack has been declared a terrorist incident and has shocked Australians and free people everywhere.
It has emerged that one of the suspects was already known to Australia’s domestic intelligence service, ASIO, though officials insist he was not considered an “immediate threat” — a weasel phrase that offers cold comfort to the grieving. Security agencies must explain how a known individual could still be able to mount such a deadly, targeted attack on the Jewish community. Ordinary citizens deserve straight answers, not bureaucracy and weasel words from officials who seem content to tinker at the margins.
Meanwhile, political leaders in Canberra who have spent years preaching softness on security and immigration now offer pieties and photo-ops while Australia’s Jewish families count the dead. We should not accept platitudes from leaders who failed to protect a community gathering on the first night of Hanukkah; accountability isn’t partisan, it’s necessary. If one of the attackers was on a watchlist and still walked into Bondi with weapons and IEDs in tow, the focus must be on structural failures and corrective action — not hollow condemnations.
Amid the carnage, ordinary Australians displayed extraordinary courage, with at least one bystander — identified in reports as Ahmed el Ahmed — tackling and disarming a shooter and saving countless lives at the cost of his own blood. This is the kind of heroism that reminds us why self-reliance and bravery matter, and why citizens who are willing to act can be the difference between life and death when the state falls short. We should honor and protect such heroes, not criminalize or second-guess them in the days after they saved their neighbors.
Reports say improvised explosive devices were found in a vehicle and the weapons included shotguns and rifles; the carnage at Bondi is the deadliest terror-style attack in Australia in decades, and the Jewish community has been left reeling. This surge in targeted antisemitic violence follows years of heightened tensions globally, and it exposes the limits of rhetoric without robust security measures. Governments must recognize that evil does not negotiate — it is confronted, disrupted, and stopped.
Hardworking Australians — and people of conscience everywhere — must demand decisive reforms: real intelligence follow-through, tougher consequences for radicalization, and security that protects vulnerable communities, not just press statements. We owe it to the victims and their families to replace complacency with clarity and competence, and to stand openly and unapologetically with Jewish Australians against antisemitic terror. If our leaders won’t act like guardians of the public, then the public must insist on leaders who will.
