Australia’s ‘Hanukkah Massacre’ Is Worse Than You Think

Daniel Pomerantz

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during a press conference at the Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, June 17, 2024. Photo: Lukas Coch/Pool via REUTERS

Chabad’s “Hanukkah by the Sea” event near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, turned into a bloody massacre on Sunday: 15 murdered and dozens more injured, as of the latest update.

Far from being an isolated incident, this nightmarish display of terror is only the latest symptom of a dangerous and systematic attack by the Australian government against its own Jewish population.

According to news sources, the terrorists were Sajid and Naveed Akram: a father and son of Pakistani origin who had pledged allegiance to ISIS shortly before carrying out their antisemitic bloodbath.

In one rare bright spot, Ahmed Al Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria, heroically risked his life to disarm one of the terrorists, likely saving many innocent lives in the process. Al Ahmed survived several gunshots and is recovering in hospital.

In the aftermath of this modern day pogrom, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement in which he made no mention whatsoever of Jews, antisemitism, Hanukkah, Islamic extremism,terrorism, or ISIS.

Albanese referred to the massacre merely as “shocking” and “distressing,” and said that his thoughts were with “every person affected.”

Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utterly excoriated Albanese, accusing him of “pouring fuel on this antisemitic fire,” and noting that he had sent Albanese a letter last August, warning of the very conditions that had brought about this attack, a warning that had gone unheeded.

In tandem with the Israeli Prime Minister’s vigorous public scolding, Albanese held a press conference, in which he finally condemned the Bondi attack as antisemitic.

However, Albanese continued to avoid any mention of Islamic extremism, despite Australian law enforcement having already publicly confirmed that the terrorists had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terror organization (ISIS), and that they were carrying an ISIS flag in their vehicle.

According to reports, the Mossad had been warning Australia regularly for months about terror plots against the local Jewish community. Local police deny there were specific warnings about this particular attack, but Israeli leaders from all sides of the political spectrum countered that Australia had ignored “countless warning signs.”

Australia’s national failures are reminiscent of the Dutch pogrom of November 2024, in which local Muslim attackers violently hunted Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam — after Dutch police ignored urgent warnings from Israeli intelligence.

The conditions for a similar massacre are currently shaping up in New York City, where the incoming mayor responded to a highly threatening antisemitic protest by accusing the local Jewish community of “violations of international law.” (I previously addressed both topics in depth at The Algemeiner).

For the past two years since the October 7 massacre, not only has Australia seen a massive rise in violent antisemitic attacks, but local Jewish leaders have consistently objected to the government’s permissive atmosphere toward attacking Jews, such as failing to apply appropriate penalties and needed protections.

Examples include frequent and enormous marches calling to “Globalize the Intifada” (a phrase that the United States Congress officially recognizes as a call for violence against the Jewish people), public calls to “gas the Jews,” as well as Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state last September, a move widely regarded in the Arab world as a reward for the October 7 massacre.

Like most countries with free speech protections, Australia also has numerous federal and local laws against incitement, which authorities have routinely failed and refused to enforce in protection of Australia’s Jewish communities.

Prime Minister Albanese has promised to respond to the massacre by tightening Australia’s gun laws. Ironically, Australia already has among the strictest gun control regimes in the entire world. Apparently, gun laws are not enough when a country permits and ignores massive hatred, incitement, antisemitism, ongoing violence, and affiliations with international terror organizations.

Who knew?

Given Australia’s ongoing commitment to a failing “strategy,” its continued protection of Islamist extremists, and its continuing systematic neglect of Jewish safety, it is safe to assume that this is only the beginning of more attacks to come.

Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.

After Bondi Attack, the West Must Face the Reality of ‘Migration Jihad’

Jonathan Sacerdoti

A woman keeps a candle next to flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone

“They don’t move from the Arab world to Europe. They move the Arab world to Europe.” So said Professor Mordechai Kedar when he spoke to me for an extended interview as part of my podcast series. That episode was published the very day the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, was attacked. The massacre only confirmed his words. Migration, as he described it, does not merely transfer people from one place to another. It carries cultures, ideologies, and systems of meaning with it, and those systems do not remain inert; they spread and even flourish.

Kedar’s claim is not about ethnicity or private belief. It describes the movement of social order, of moral assumptions, of ideas about authority and legitimacy. People do not arrive empty-handed. They bring with them ways of organizing life, ways of resolving conflict, ways of defining who belongs and who does not. When those systems collide with liberal societies uncertain of their own boundaries, pressure accumulates.

The Bondi shooting especially matters because it strips away the last remaining comfort. This was not Gaza, not the West Bank, not a contested border. It was a beach, during a religious festival, in a country geographically and politically distant from the Middle East. A symbol of Australia, freedom, liberty. The perpetrators identified by law enforcement, a Muslim father and son, who had taken part in “military-style training” in the Philippines in the month leading up to the attack, targeted Jews.

Kedar warned me how this form of conquest moves through ideology, through repetition, through intimidation, through the slow reshaping of public space by force and intimidation — a “migration jihad.” Islam is not a private creed, but an all-encompassing framework. As Kedar puts it, it is “not only religion … Islam is also politics, economy, and every aspect of public life.” When that framework relocates, it seeks expression. When it meets hesitation, it expands.

Europe has been living inside this dynamic for years. Jews are often the first target, but the pattern rarely ends with us. Concerts, campuses, cultural events, and public squares have become the battlefields of this unconventional war. Yet political leadership responds with ritual rather than authority: candle lighting, moments of silence, interfaith theater. Expressions of sorrow, memorial gestures, and carefully chosen metaphors replace enforcement and deterrence. In Britain, demonstrations containing explicit antisemitic incitement have been tolerated for months without clear red lines. Around the world, the language of concern circulates freely while responsibility for combating poisonous ideologies and organized dangerous networks is shirked.

Paris has just canceled its traditional open-air New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs-Élysées because authorities judged the security risks too high to safely host such a large crowd of around a million people. The event will be replaced by a pre-recorded broadcast and fireworks only. Christmas markets and other festive sites have also been flagged as high-risk targets and subject to fortified security.

So, it’s not just Jews who are under threat. In Australia the terrorists came for Hanukkah, but they’ve been targeting Christmas for years. In Berlin in December 2016, a Muslim attacker, Anis Amri, drove a lorry into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz, murdering 12 people and injuring dozens more in one of the deadliest jihadist attacks in Germany.

In Strasbourg in December 2018, a Muslim attacker inspired by ISIS opened fire near the city’s Christmas market, killing five people, in an assault explicitly framed by French authorities as Islamist terrorism.

And last week federal authorities in the US arrested several people in connection with a planned New Year’s Eve bombing plot in Southern California. The FBI and Department of Justice say the group responsible is “pro-Palestinian” in its outlook as well as anti-law-enforcement and anti-government. The individuals were allegedly preparing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to be used in coordinated bomb attacks across Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve.

But the response is weak. These days, order is no longer asserted; risk is managed. Jewish institutions are advised to remain calm while accepting abnormal levels of private security as a permanent feature of everyday life. An arrangement that should register as failure is absorbed as routine. Trust erodes this way.

Bondi shows that Europe is no longer the outer boundary of this phenomenon. Australia is now inside it. America, too, is discovering the same pressures through campus unrest, ideological intimidation, and violence that increasingly treats Jewish life as a proxy target for the wider freedoms and values it represents. The geography changes. The structure holds.

What Professor Kedar described was not prediction but trajectory. When people do not simply arrive but bring whole systems with them, the question facing Western societies ceases to be one of tolerance alone. It becomes a question of whether they still possess the clarity and resolve to defend the civic order and freedoms they inherited.

Wrzesień 1939 r.: Wojska sowieckie zajmują wschodnie tereny Polski/Źródło: polona.pl

Instytut Strat Wojennych rozpoczął prace nad liczeniem strat wyrządzonych przez Sowietów

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Instytut Strat Wojennych rozpoczął prace nad liczeniem strat wyrządzonych Polsce przez Sowietów – poinformował w Lublinie szef instytutu Bartosz Gondek. Naukowcy będą katalogować straty m.in. gospodarcze, terytorialne, infrastrukturalne. Mamy o czym przypominać, mamy co liczyć – powiedział.

Sydney’s wake-up call: When antisemitism turns deadly

Danny Danon

People attend a ceremony, held at the World Zionist Organization (WZO) building in downtown Jerusalem, in memory of victims of a mass shooting on Dec. 14 during a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

The terrorist attack on a Chanukah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach has brought a long-simmering fear into brutal reality. Jews gathering to mark the “Festival of Lights” were targeted simply for who they are. This was not random violence. It was a cruel act of antisemitic hatred—an attack on human dignity, and on the values of peace and coexistence that Australia, like all democracies, claims to cherish.

My heart is with the victims, the injured and their families, and with Jewish communities in Australia and around the world who are grieving and feeling profoundly vulnerable. What happened in Sydney should shock the conscience of the nation and demand more than just words of sympathy.

This violence did not emerge from a vacuum.

In the days immediately following the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were murdered and 251 others were kidnapped in plain sight and dragged into Gaza, a Jewish bakery in Sydney was defaced with an inverted red triangle, a symbol increasingly used to glorify attacks on Israelis and Jews. It was an early warning sign. What followed over the next 16 months, as the war against the terrorist organization in Gaza ensued, was an avalanche: arson attacks on kosher restaurants and the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, graffiti, threats and open hate speech directed at Jewish institutions and individuals across Australia.

The scale has been so severe that the head of Australia’s primary intelligence agency publicly stated that Jew-hatred had become his top concern in terms of threat to life. That is an extraordinary and damning assessment for a country that prides itself on tolerance and social cohesion, and that is home to one of the largest numbers of Holocaust survivors left in the world.

Sunday’s attack at Bondi confirmed what many Australian Jews have been saying quietly, and sometimes loudly, for more than a year—that they no longer feel safe in the country they believed would protect them.

Australia’s Jewish population is small, with around 150,000 people in a nation of 27 million, but it is deeply woven into the fabric of Australian life. Roughly a third live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi, the very area that has become a focal point for both Jewish life and antisemitic attacks. Parents now hesitate before taking their children to daycare. Jewish schools operate behind heightened security. Community events take place under the shadow of fear.

The government has not been entirely blind to this reality. Last year, Australia appointed its first-ever special envoy to combat antisemitism. But appointments alone cannot reverse a toxic, radical trend in which incitement has been allowed to flourish. Chanting “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not harmless slogans or legitimate political critiques. They are calls that normalize violence, erase Jewish self-determination and dehumanize Jews. They are not expressions of free speech in any moral sense, and they can lead to bloodshed.

The numbers tell the story starkly. In the year up until Sept. 30, there were roughly 1,600 antisemitic incidents recorded—about three times higher than in any year prior to Oct. 7. These were not just offensive words. They included a childcare center in Sydney that was firebombed and smeared with antisemitic graffiti, and the shocking case of two public hospital nurses dismissed after being filmed boasting that they would refuse treatment to Israeli patients.

Israel, for its part, expects its democratic partners to do more than express outrage after tragedy strikes. The expectation of the Australian government is clear: to act decisively against antisemitic incitement, to enforce the law without fear or favor and to restore a public culture in which Jews are not demonized or targeted.

We live in dark days, but as the message of Chanukah shows, light, hope and humanity will prevail. That message must now be matched by concrete action in Australia itself.

Because protecting Jewish life is not a favor to one community. It is a test of the moral strength of the nation as a whole.

Ambassador Danny Danon is Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

Liel Leibovitz

Alex Woz / Tablet

We’ll continue to grow stronger because we draw our courage and our resolve from that ancient covenant that charges us, always and forever, to spread God’s light.