According to press reports, one of the survivors of the Bondi Beach terror attack said four police officers just “froze” during the 20-minute rampage on Sunday that killed 16 and injured dozens more.
“For 20 minutes. They shoot, shoot. Change magazines. And just shoot,” the witness told reporters. “Twenty minutes, there was four policemen there. Nobody fires back. Nothing. Like they froze,” he said of the slow response.
It’s hard to imagine four Israeli policemen “freezing” while two terrorists are shooting at civilians. But there’s a logical reason for that: Israel can’t afford to be in denial about the threats it is facing.
Since its birth in 1948, Israel was put on notice that it was not welcome in the neighborhood and that its enemies would do everything possible to destroy it. That has instilled a sense of hyper-realism among Israelis about taking these threats seriously and defending itself at all cost. The massacre of Oct. 7 caused such trauma precisely because Israel violated its most sacred principle of self-defense.
The West, and especially Europe, has no such sacred principle. Unlike Israel, it has failed to take the threats to its civilizational survival seriously. Slowly, inexorably, it has allowed those threats to fester internally, while losing its own sense of self.
The elephant in the room has always been radical Islam, an ideology that seeks to dominate and eventually replace the societies it enters. As the West grows weaker, the Islamists only grow bolder.
Remember that glittering New Year’s Eve celebration on the Champs-Élysées in Paris that drew more than a million revelers last year? In the face of migrant terror, the proud French decided to cancel it this year.
That is weakness.
“More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past… it has lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy,” Douglas Murray wrote eight years ago in his book “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.”
We see a similar weakness in Australia.
As Gregg Roman writes, “For twenty-six months, the warning signs accumulated. For twenty-six months, the Albanese government treated a developing terrorist campaign as a community relations problem.
“The trajectory was unmistakable. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas’s massacre in Israel, a mob descended on the Sydney Opera House, burning Israeli flags and chanting threats against Jews while police advised the Jewish community to stay away rather than dispersing the crowd. That failure to enforce basic public order established the permissive environment for everything that followed.”
You can be forgiven for rolling your eyes when Australian Prime Minister Antony Albanese now spews out the obligatory verbiage we hear after terror attacks: “An act of evil antisemitism, terrorism, that has struck the heart of our nation…An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
Yeah, well, Mr. Prime Minister, those are heartfelt words after the fact that provide little solace for those who perished. Better would have been to take real action ahead of time against a real threat that you knew existed.
One of the outrageous ironies of our time is that the country that is most reviled—Israel—has the most to teach the West about that little thing we call survival.
“The victims may have been Jews, but we will recover, rebuild, and grow stronger,” Liel Leibovitz posted on X following the Bondi attack. “But the nations that gave in to an insidious, murderous ideology never will. Nearly a century after the Holocaust, Jews are strong and the Jewish state is thriving, but Europe is holding on for dear life, awash in violence and un-freedom, a shadow of its former self.
“And in a decade or two, Jews will be ever stronger and the suicidal West will have been devoured by the benighted jihadis it so cheerfully let in.”
The last thing Europe wants to hear right now is that it has important things to learn from the Zionist state.
But if it cares about its future, not least how to train police officers dealing with a terrorist attack, it will make the call.
