Every time you think Magoo couldn’t get any more stupid or duplicitous (or both), he comes right out with something that not even the Babylon Bee could make up as satire. Not The Bee is the Bee’s non-satire sister-site, the site for reporting stuff that sounds like it should be satire, but, incredibly, isn’t.
Australian PM warns about “right-wing extremist groups” after Muslim father and son shot up Hanukkah event.
Nope, not satire.
Oh, but Albanese wasn’t done. Far, far from it.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said there was no evidence the father and son gunmen who opened fire in a deadly terror attack on Bondi Beach had been radicalised.
Is he really that stupid? Or is he such a colossal liar that he thinks we won’t notice yet another whopper? Either way is not a good look, especially the prospect that we have a PM who is so spectacularly uninformed that he doesn’t even know what his own security agencies are saying.
A gunman who was known to ASIO, and his father who had six firearms, carried out the nation’s worst terror attack, which left 15 innocent people dead at a Jewish celebration in Bondi […] police look at potential links between gunman Naveed Akram and the notorious Al Madina Dawah Centre. It is understood the links date back several years.
Police have also revealed that Akram and his father Sajid visited the Philippines, a country that has pumped out generations of foreign militants, from jihadist adventurers in Afghanistan to the Indonesian Bali bombers and Islamic State wannabes.
Yet, incredibly, ASIO were asleep at the wheel.
Authorities said the father, who arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, had a legal gun licence and owned six firearms. Mr Albanese said his son was investigated by ASIO in 2019 because of his associations with other persons of interest but ASIO found no indication that he posed an ongoing threat. It is believed those associations related to sympathisers of the Islamic State terror group, including convicted terrorist Issac El Matari. But Naveed Akram was not reassessed by ASIO after 2019 and was not on an ASIO watch list when the shootings occurred.
The government did not comment on how red flags were not raised by the combination of a multiple-gun-owning father and a son who had once been investigated for his association with suspected Islamic extremists.
Just to rub it in, video shows that the murderers draped their car in the ISIS flag before going on their rampage.
But, hey, apart from all that… no evidence whatsoever.
Still, you can’t entirely blame security forces for being asleep at the wheel, when they’ve got so many jihadis to watch, and fewer and fewer resources to do it with.
The Australian Federal Police senior leadership was warned last year that severe staff shortages were making it impossible to keep track of terror suspects, with one senior AFP officer telling the Australian that even if one or both of the Bondi Beach suspects was on a watch list, it is likely not enough could have been done because of the manpower restraints.
The Australian is aware of a three-page report written in May 2024 by the three commanders of the Counter Terrorism command, outlining the potentially disastrous impact of low staff levels within the command, and containing data to support the claims of dangerously low staffing levels in the critical area of counter-terrorism.
Yet in another way there is blood on the Albanese government’s hands. Albanese’s Finance Minister, Katy Gallagher, demanded that the AFP make ‘savings’ which amounted to taking $100m from the Federal Police budget. A budget which already sees staffing dangerously over-stretched.
An AFP team is responsible for monitoring suspects who are on a watch list or have come to attention via a threat or risk assessment, but the number of those who need to be monitored is untenable with available resources, a senior AFP officer told the Australian.
“The ratio is something like, for every person – and they’re not all sworn police doing it – in those teams, they’re responsible for 20 or 30 people on the watch list […]
In the AFP’s counter-terrorism group, of around 380 positions in command there are some 100 unfilled vacancies, he said.
At the same time, the government flooded Australia with thousands of Hamas supporters from a place where anti-Semitism runs at 98 per cent, the highest in the world.
How did anyone think this was going to end?
