Blasting a Broken Record—This Time, Bondi Beach

The Festival of Lights just plunged Australia, and its beleaguered Jewish community, into darkness Down Under.

One thousand Aussies gathered on Bondi Beach for the lighting of the menorah on the first night of Hanukkah. An Israeli intelligence officer told Fox News that his Australian counterparts were on notice about the probability of a Hanukkah attack. The Australian Jewish Association posted on Facebook, “How many times did we warn the Government?”

Doubtlessly, Australian intelligence agencies, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, ignored those warnings. Five Australian policemen were reportedly watching nearby and did nothing. One of the shooters was known to the police—not for shoplifting, but violence against Jews.

All these Australian officials had long trivialized the colossal rise in antisemitic hatred that was occurring in Australia ever since the global license to kill Jews was implicitly issued on October 7.

Australian officials had long trivialized the colossal rise in antisemitic hatred that was occurring in Australia ever since the global license to kill Jews was implicitly issued on October 7.

Two terrorists with assault rifles, one named as Naveed Akram, positioned themselves on a bridge and for more than ten minutes engaged in target practice against a mass of defenseless Jews. As many as 15 Jews were murdered while another 29 were rushed to local hospitals.

Within the shooters’ line of sight was also a petting zoo and a bubble station for the kids. Surely those guided by the depraved slogan “By any means necessary” will psychotically insist that the Bondi Beach murders were “necessary.” Israelis who refuse to dismantle their state and move from their ancestral homeland justify the killing of Jews wherever they happen to be—including at a petting zoo.

Police recovered improvised explosive devices from a vehicle at Bondi Beach. The terrorists had apparently hoped for their killing spree at the beach to continue somewhere else in Sydney.

Prime Minister Albanese announced soon after the shooting that “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.” Even on such a tragic day, that statement is laughably hollow and contemptible. The past several years have not been pleasant for Australian Jews—and Albanese surely knows that.

Whether taking orders from Allah or Iran, Islamists torched a kosher cafe in Sydney’s Bondi suburb in October 2024. There was an arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December 2024. Over the past 12 months, synagogues in Sydney and Melbourne have been targeted with arson and graffiti. A day care center and an Israeli restaurant were attacked, as well.

Meanwhile, mobs of screaming, marching Muslims have repeatedly taken to the streets, making it known that they prefer a Jew-slaughtering intifada any day over rooting for the Collingwood Magpies Australian rules football team.

Here’s two sidenotes: Shootings are rare in Australia, a nation with among the lowest gun-related deaths in the world. And Australia has more Holocaust survivors than any country after Israel. At least one such survivor is reported to be among the dead at Bondi Beach.

Radical Islam continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Where would the West be without it? France just announced that it is cancelling its annual New Year’s Eve celebration.

Most witnesses at the Bondi Beach crime scene, not surprisingly, refused to be named. Why? Because they know what the rest of the Western world has long painfully learned: Muslims do not shy away from violence, and they absolutely refuse to find fault in the bloody handiwork of Islamists.

Does incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani still believe that “Globalize the Intifada!” is an innocuous statement, and that Islamists who welcome martyrdom should not be disarmed? Do the presidents at Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley and Brown universities still believe that “From the River to the Sea”—the eradication of all Jews from the land between the coastal waterways of Greater Israel—is merely a harmless exercise of free speech and academic freedom?

Does incoming New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani still believe that “Globalize the Intifada!” is an innocuous statement, and that Islamists who welcome martyrdom should not be disarmed?

Speaking of universities, Columbia just released its final report from the Task Force on Antisemitism it had convened. It relentlessly exposes the rot within the Ivy League, emblemized by the “moral” support its faculty and students gave to Hamas almost immediately after the October 7 massacre. Anyone who blithely minimized the misery Jews experienced on Columbia’s campus should be chastened by the report’s findings.

An instructor in public health regaled his 400 students with the blood libel that Columbia’s Jewish donors used their gifts to “launder blood money.” He also denied the existence of the Jewish state. Those who complained were chastised as “privileged white students.”

Malevolently antisemitic professors believed that Columbia had provided them with lecture rooms not to teach but to demonize the Jewish state and intimidate Jewish students.

An Israeli professor’s class on Zionism (the only one on campus that did not vilify Israel) was overtaken by masked students. A professor told an Israeli student who once served in the IDF—in front of her classmates—that she was a murderer. Another instructor mocked an Israeli student, “You must know a lot about settler colonialism. How do you feel about that?” Another Israeli was labeled an “occupier.” A Jewish, non-Israeli student was told, “It’s such a shame that your people survived [the Holocaust] in order to commit mass genocide.”

And these were not even classes where Israel should be mentioned! An introductory astronomy class commenced with the “genocide” in Gaza. Similar deviations for the curriculum were reported in classes on photography, architecture, nonprofit management, film, music, humanities and Spanish. The report confesses that seemingly in every subject imaginable, professors “condone[d] (or even celebrated) terrorist atrocities, deploy[ed] antisemitic tropes, and peddle[d] bigoted stereotypes.”

One student emailed her professor to object to how Israel was being presented. At the next class he read her email out loud, mocking each of her arguments. A professor who taught a class on advocacy, openly proclaimed that “accounts of sexual violence by Hamas were exaggerated or fabricated.” A student in another class was told that the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was himself an antisemite, and that Jews from Eastern Europe were “not really Jewish.”

Is it any surprise that when the organization StopAntisemitism just this past week issued its report card on campus life for Jews in America, Columbia received an “F”? The report cited the appalling practice of “singling out” and “scapegoating” Jews and Israelis.

I have been writing and speaking out against violent antisemitism being tolerated on campus and around the world for several years now. Much of it, in fact, began long before Israel’s justified self-defense in Gaza after October 7, 2023.

If I’ve sounded like a broken record, so be it. If some readers insist that I use my weekly essays instead to condemn Donald Trump, that, too, would be a broken record, replayed by most everyone else. President Trump certainly has his faults, but standing beside Israel and defending Jews at home and abroad are not among them. What other world leader can it be said is doing that?

I am looking forward to a day when there will be a symphony of broken records.