EDITORIAL • The massacre at the Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney—an Islamist terrorist attack in which a father and his son mowed down Jews with their rifles—was horrific, but unfortunately neither ‘inexplicable’ nor ‘incomprehensible.’ It is a logical consequence of more than two years of gradual legitimization of Jew-hatred—not in obscure internet forums, but from large segments of the left-liberal political and media establishment in the Western world.
On Sunday evening, around two thousand people gathered at Bondi Beach in Sydney for ‘Chanukah by the Sea,’ a Jewish holiday celebration with families, music, and religious elements. Then two men, father and son, armed with rifles, stepped forward and opened fire directly into the crowd.
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At least 16 people were killed in the hail of bullets, including a ten-year-old girl, a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and several other members of the local Jewish community. More than 40 people were injured, among them police officers who tried to stop the perpetrators.
Australia’s prime minister is among those who have spoken plainly and unequivocally described the attack as an antisemitic terrorist act directed at Jews, and reports mention IS symbolism and Islamist motives among the perpetrators. Others, as usual in these contexts, are making concerted efforts to downplay the motive’s background in Muslim antisemitism according to the naïve relativist doctrine that all cultures and religions are of equal value.
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The fact that a father and son carried out the attack is a dark symbol of something we’ve long been aware of but are reluctant to talk about: how antisemitic notions in some environments are passed down through generations since time immemorial, and how they can blossom into violence when surrounded by a political and media climate in which hatred of Jews—thinly disguised behind labels like ‘Israelis,’ ‘Zionists,’ or ‘colonizers’—is constantly confirmed and normalized.
From October 7th to Bondi
The literal and figurative starting shot was Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023. Around 1,200 Israeli civilians, many young people at a music festival, were murdered in ways that should have been seared into the world’s conscience: executions, rapes, torture, hostage-taking.
In a decent universe, the rest of the world would have closed ranks and unconditionally condemned Hamas, recognized Israel’s right to crush the terrorist organization ruling Gaza, and made it clear that Jews—in Israel and in the diaspora—must now be protected against a wave of Islamist violence.
Instead, we got something entirely different. At record speed, the focus shifted from the massacre to Israel’s defensive war. On the streets, Hamas-sympathizing ‘freedom fighters’ became heroes. In TV studios, editorial pages, and NGOs, the word ‘genocide’ began to be used to describe Israel’s actions—while those same organizations had long been noticeably careful with such words about Hamas and other Islamist movements. Even Amnesty International has joined the horridly vulgar rhetoric that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
This is not just semantics. When, for two years, you hammer home the message that the only Jewish state on earth is a ‘genocidal state,’ you are also signaling that those who defend it are complicit. You provide a moral license to those who already harbor deep-seated Jew-hatred: by dehumanizing Jews as genocidaires, you justify that they in turn are murdered.
This is known antisemitic rhetoric in new garb. We have heard it since the Christian church blamed Jews for the murder of Jesus—since it would be ‘fouling one’s own nest’ to blame the Romans, where the institutional church has its roots.
Slogans in the Street and Euphemisms in the Salons
The pattern is clear in Sweden and Europe. The day after the terror of October 7th, we saw celebrations, car horns, flag parades, and cheers in places like Malmö, where people with Palestinian flags openly saluted what had just happened. Since then, tens of thousands of people, the vast majority with roots in the Muslim Middle East, have taken to the streets every week under Palestinian flags—not just for a ‘ceasefire,’ but with slogans and symbols that in practice mean Israel should cease to exist—’from the river to the sea,’ maps where Israel is removed, flag burnings, and outright incitements to violence.
At these demonstrations, support for Hamas and for the October 7th massacre is often explicit. Opinion polls in the Palestinian territories, at the same time, show that a majority long afterwards believed that Hamas’s decision to carry out the attack was ‘right.’
ALSO READ: Poll shows: Strong popular support for Hamas in Gaza
The media reporting tries to soften the picture. There is talk of ‘the Palestinian struggle for freedom,’ of ‘Gaza’ as if the geographic area itself is an actor—and of ‘Israelis’ and ‘Zionists’ instead of Jews. But the distinction between the Palestinian people’s ‘righteous struggle’ and Hamas’s evil terrorism exists only as politically correct fantasy. On the streets, both in Gaza and Malmö, there is open cheers over dead Jews, open support for a movement whose charter is soaked in violent antisemitism where Jews are seen as the offspring of apes and pigs.
When a Swedish ‘Gaza restaurant’ in Stockholm puts up signs barring Israelis, and the owner rants on social media with grotesque hate against ‘Israelis/Zionists,’ it is in practice a modern version of 1930s signs that Jews would not be served—but with a new code language and from a different sender: not European Nazis, but Islamists from the Middle East, here and there.
The legacy of Adolf Hitler is kept alive by a small clique of ethnic Europeans, something that regularly gets wartime headlines in the media. What the same media rarely or never reminds us of is how Muslim leaders collaborated with the German Führer and how his Mein Kampf is still a bestseller in the Middle East today, surpassed only by the Qur’an.
The Salon Left Bears Responsibility
Within the revolutionary left, which dominates large parts of journalism after more than 50 years of ‘march through the institutions’ as urged by Rudi Dutschke, support for ‘the Palestinian struggle’ has deep roots—from hijackings, school bus attacks, and the massacre in the Olympic village in Munich 1972 to today’s Hamas.
You see it in how they write: ‘Hamas’ becomes ‘resistance movement’ or just ‘armed groups.’ ‘Terrorists’ become ‘militiamen’ or ‘fighters.’ ‘Jews’ are replaced with ‘Zionists,’ ‘illegal occupiers,’ ‘extremist settlers,’ and ‘Israelis.’
At the same time, the image of Israel as a uniquely evil force in the world is reinforced: apartheid state, colonial project, genocidaires. When human rights organizations begin using exactly the same choice of words—without considering Hamas’s, and other Islamist actors’, declared genocidal ambitions and documented abuses—the message is clear: it is the Jews who are the personification of evil.
With that climate, it is unfortunately unsurprising that violence against Jews is escalating—from harassment in schools and incitement on social media, to attacks on synagogues and Jewish clubhouses, to mass murder on a beach in Sydney.
The Nazi Bogeyman as a Red Herring
The same politicians and media figures who for years have led the way in demonizing Israel and normalizing the ‘Palestinian armed struggle’ suddenly become furious—but in a completely different direction.
A quartet of Swedish ethno-nationalists in ‘Aktivklubb’ are convicted for serious and unacceptable violent crimes against persons with immigrant backgrounds. It is serious, it is right that they are convicted, and it is legitimate to draw attention to it. But people like DN’s Niklas Orrenius and others do more than that.
They inflate a single night of violence into a symbol of our era’s greatest threat. They claim that Nazi events are ‘flying under the radar,’ despite massive media and political attention. They use the leftist activist group Expo as an impartial authority.
And they try to make the entire immigration-critical movement—including Sweden’s now second-largest parliamentary party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), and the entire Tidö government—complicit, arguing that ‘rhetoric about immigrants as a problem’ would have given Nazis a carte blanche to beat up randomly-selected people in the street.
Meanwhile, other proportions are swept under the rug: Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe, tens of thousands of Hamas supporters on Swedish streets, the documented rise in antisemitism in schools and public spaces.
The mosquito—a few dozen young extremists in a marginalized subculture—is blown up as an existential threat. The camel—hundreds of thousands or millions of people in Europe openly sympathizing with movements that seek to annihilate the world’s only Jewish state—is deliberately ignored.
The Inverted Question of Guilt
The Orrenius-journalistic logic goes something like this: Restrictive immigration policy and criticism of mass immigration → politicians ‘point out immigrants as a problem’ → Nazis feel validated → violence against immigrants.
It is a convenient narrative for exactly those circles who, over decades of irresponsible immigration policy, have enabled large groups with deeply antidemocratic, antisemitic, and honor-culture values to take root in Sweden. If anyone has damaged immigrants’ reputation, it is themselves. With realism rather than naivety as the foundation for migration and integration policy, immigrants would enjoy an excellent reputation in Sweden and Europe.
Instead of self-criticism, the message is that the problem is not importing Islamism, antisemitism, and clan structures on a large scale—with all the serious societal consequences this brings. The problem is those who raise awareness, criticize, and want to address it. That is an argument that holds neither morally nor logically.
It is not criticism of migration that makes Islamists hate Jews or secular Europeans. Those values existed long before there was such a thing as the Sweden Democrats—and they have been well documented in broad parts of the Muslim world since the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
When Antisemitism Comes from the ‘Wrong’ Side
Reactions to antisemitism are a textbook example of double standards and ‘straining out gnats while swallowing camels.’ When the hatred comes from a handful of Swedes in brown shirts giving the Hitler salute, everyone reacts reflexively.
But when the same Jew-hatred comes from thousands-strong Middle Eastern imported Islamism, with keffiyehs and Arabic rhetoric, the tone immediately becomes more cautious. Then it is about ‘frustration’ and ‘traumas.’ The message is that we must ‘listen to’ feelings and understand that these are people who come from another culture.
Antisemitism in Malmö’s schools, in the streets, and on social media has time and again been shown to be connected to conflicts in the Middle East, and both Jewish representatives and authorities have raised the alarm. This is today, and has been for decades, a much more widespread phenomenon compared to Swedish skinheads.
Now that Bondi Beach has become the site of Australia’s worst terror attack in modern times, targeted at Jews celebrating a religious holiday, we cannot pretend that this and what is happening in Gaza, Malmö, or Stockholm are unrelated or have nothing to do with the recent years’ flood of poorly disguised antisemitism from the media and political establishment.
Words Have Consequences
This does not mean that every left-wing politician or journalist who has abused words like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ about Israel wished for a bloodbath on a Sydney beach. But it means that their words have consequences, and they need to recognize that.
When you demonize Israel in a way you would never dream of doing with other states in armed self-defense—such as Ukraine; when you excuse or relativize terrorist organizations by playing down their ideology; and when you consistently refuse to speak plainly about antisemitism in Muslim circles, you contribute to an environment where the most radicalized feel morally affirmed. You move the line of what is perceived as legitimate—from words, through agitation and hatred, to naked violence.
It is not enough now, after the Bondi massacre, to stand in a square, give a speech about ‘unity,’ and lay flowers. What is required is an honest, brutal examination of how for two years one has helped give oxygen to a hatred that now manifests itself in bullets, blood, and dead children.
On this side, there are ever louder calls for restrictions on freedom of expression to combat what they claim is agitation, hatred, and disinformation from the conservative side. They do not want to admit that their own words are often even more inflammatory. Judging from the aftermath so far, the penny does not appear to have dropped even after the terrorist attack in Sydney.
Stop Straining Out Gnats—Deal with the Camel
We must, as always since the Second World War, continue to take violence from far-right ethno-nationalists seriously. But it is high time to realize that violent Islamism and imported Jew-hatred are a far greater threat to Jews—and to open, democratic Europe.
When politicians and editorial writers respond to a handful of Swedish Nazis with full-scale moral panic, but tone down or beautify broad movements that cheer dead Jews and want to annihilate Israel, one is reminded of the saying about the mote in your brother’s eye and the plank in your own.
Bondi Beach should be a turning point: Stop using ‘anti-Zionism’ as a fig leaf for antisemitism. Stop talking about Israel as genociders and Hamas as a ‘resistance movement.’ Admit that antisemitism today is chiefly fueled in Islamist and pro-Palestinian circles—not among a few small groups of Nazis. Stand up for Jews’ right to live safely in Europe and Australia—without having to pay the price for ‘solidarity’ with Gaza.
The least we can do to honor, rather than insult, the Jewish victims in Sydney is to stop pretending. Hatred of Jews no longer primarily comes from history’s shadow figures in brown shirts. It comes from protest marches, from left-wing editorial pages, from likewise left-leaning NGOs and politicians who are quick to speak of Jewish human rights in the first instance but, in the second, play straight into the hands of Jew-hatred.
When we understand that, and dare to say it, we have taken the first step away from the path that made the Bondi Beach massacre possible.