The murder of 16 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney‘s Bondi Beach was not the only violence committed by Islamists last weekend. An ISIS member murdered two Iowa National Guard members in Syria, and Muslims attacked a Hanukkah concert in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, in Germany, five men, all Muslim migrants, were arrested after plotting to drive a vehicle into people at a Christmas market.
These are not random acts of violence committed by lone wolves. They are part of a coordinated and ideological campaign of Islamofascist violence against Judeo-Christian civilization. Western leaders have a duty to be clear-eyed about the nature of these threats, call them what they are, and take steps to address them. More gun control and cultural sensitivity training, which was what the Australian government’s pathetic response amounted to, are not the answer.
The older of the two shooters at Bondi Beach entered Australia on a student visa from Pakistan in 1998. He legally changed to a resident visa three years later. Despite spending over two decades in Australia, he clearly never assimilated. Nor did his son, who helped him commit the murders. It is unclear how the Pakistani migrant and his son amassed their arsenal of more than six weapons in a country with such strict gun control laws. But their atrocity shows that gun control is not a sufficient or even a relevant answer.
What we know is that anti-Jew violence has been increasing in Australia, and instead of confronting it with force, Australia acquiesced to Islamist terrorism last autumn by recognizing a Palestinian state. It was a reward for Islamist terrorism two years earlier, on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas and Palestinian civilians attacked and murdered some 1,200 people in southern Israel.
“Our figures for antisemitic incidents are off the scale,” Daniel Aghion of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry told SkyNews, adding that it’s “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.”
In the past year alone, a synagogue in Melbourne was set on fire, and a day care center was also burned.
“It’s not random,” said Jillian Segal, special envoy to Combat Antisemitism, regarding the Bondi Beach shooting. “It is an attack on the Jews of Australia. It’s an attack on Australians as well.”
Just hours later, more than 10,000 miles away, another Jewish community came under attack at a Hanukkah concert in Amsterdam’s Museumplein. Hundreds of Muslim migrants waving Palestinian flags set off red and green smoke bombs while trying to overwhelm a police barricade. Dozens were arrested thanks to the strong police presence, and no Jewish people were hurt, which is not what happened earlier this year when Muslim migrants hunted Jewish fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv through the streets, injuring more than 30 people and sending five to the hospital.
Meanwhile, in Germany, police arrested three Moroccans, an Egyptian, and a Syrian who planned a “vehicle attack … with the aim of killing or injuring as many people as possible” at a Christmas market near Munich. Christmas markets throughout Germany have been delayed or pared back after a Muslim migrant drove an SUV through the Magdeburg Christmas market last December, killing six people and injuring 300. Many German cities have been forced to add hardened infrastructure to repel car attacks and increased surveillance, all because of the threat from Muslim migrants.
AN ACTIVE, ENGAGING, AND HONEST NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY
Jews worldwide should not have to live in fear because they are Jewish. Christians in their home countries should not be forced to fortify their religious events. The answer is not censorship or speech codes. The answer is to recognize that some cultures are incompatible with Western values, and immigration from those countries should be limited or ended entirely. Additionally, governments such as Australia’s, but also many others, should realize that giving in to terrorist demands, notably recognizing a Palestinian state, only encourages more violence.
Western governments have spent years pretending that these attacks are isolated, culturally inexplicable, or solvable through better rhetoric and tighter speech codes. But they are none of those things. A civilization unwilling to name the ideology attacking it cannot hope to defeat it. Securing borders, limiting migration from hostile cultures, enforcing assimilation, and responding to terrorism with strength rather than appeasement are not acts of intolerance; they are acts of self-preservation.
