In the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach terror attack on a gathering to celebrate the start of Hanukkah, Australia’s leaders should be facing some very tough questions about their failure to fight antisemitism.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese failed to heed multiple warnings about the rising tide of hate — including from human-rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky (himself wounded Sunday), who spoke out Dec. 1 after graffiti reading “F–k Zionist Israel,” and “Israel has blood on their hands,” appeared on Bondi Beach overnight.
And Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu wrote Albanese months ago, thundering that his call to recognize a Palestinian state “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire” and “emboldens those who menace Australian Jews and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets.”
That hate has been growing ever-worse since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2022, atrocities.
Just two days after those terror attacks, well before Israel’s counterattack began, a mob of roughly 1,000 rallied at the Sydney Opera House in support of Hamas.
The event was rife with antisemitism, reportedly even with a chant of “Gas the Jews”: one speaker denounced Israel as a “colonialist” state that “will only be overcome by greater violence.”
And various Aussies have been delivering such violence ever since.
Last December saw an arson attack on an Orthodox synagogue in Melbourne; January brought a Sydney synagogue defaced with swastikas and three firebombings in a single week.
That same month, police found a trailer packed with explosives and a list of Jewish targets just northwest of Sydney.
Antisemitic graffiti has grown common, as well as attacks on Jewish-owned shops; a group of nurses made global headlines for cutting a video where they announced they wouldn’t treat Jews.
In the year leading up to Sept. 30, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry counted 2,062 antisemitic incidents across the country.
But somehow the Aussie elite think Jews are the problem; early this year, feminist activist Clementine Ford doxed some 600 members of a Jewish WhatsApp group, forcing many to move in the wake of death threats and vandalism against their homes and workplaces.
In August, Albanese blamed Iran for the Melbourne synagogue-burning and an attack on a Sydney kosher restaurant, and expelled Tehran’s ambassador and three other diplomats.
But Albanese the next month chose to pander to his domestic Jew-haters, joining a pack of left-wing leaders of Western governments in announcing recognition of a Palestinian state — a stance that, as Netanhayu warned, encouraged “the Jew hatred now stalking your streets.”
Australia’s Jewish community of about 120,000 certainly doesn’t think Albanese’s government has done enough to protect them; Arsen Ostrovsky had moved backto the country precisely to raise alarms about the rising threat.
Indeed: Authorities believe the shooters are Naveed Akram, 24, and his father, 50; one of them was apparently on a security-service watchlist — yet that didn’t prevent the duo from legally acquiring a stash of firearms despite Australia’s strict gun-control laws.
Of course Australia’s far from alone; Saturday’s deadly mass shooting at Brown University targeted the classroom of a Judaic Studies professor.
The only bright spot in all this is shopkeeper Ahmed al-Ahmed, who disarmed one of the Bondi killers before being wounded by the other, a heroic feat that allowed police to swoop in and take down the shooters.
Expect to hear a lot about him, and very little about how badly Albanese failed Australia in the runup to the Hanukkah horror.
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