There are some days when it’s a struggle to report the news. This is one of those days.
I won’t go over the broad-brush details of the Bondi terror attack: you’ll have read more than enough of that elsewhere in the past two days. Instead I’ll examine a couple of specifics.
First: this wasn’t ‘the day that changed Australia’. Anyone who thinks that just hasn’t been paying attention the last two years. Even October 7, 2023, wasn’t a day that changed Australia: it was the day that the grim changes that have been inflicted on Australia announced themselves with a resounding bellow.
When the streets of Western Sydney responded to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust with spontaneous and joyful celebration, there was no denying that Australia had changed – and not for the better. The message was driven home with even more brutal clarity two nights later, when a Muslim mob, with Greens politicians beside them, stormed a vigil for the October 7 victims at the Sydney Opera House, chanting ‘Gas the Jews!’ The only person NSW police arrested that night was a Jewish-Australian carrying an Israeli flag.
That was when there was no longer any doubt how grimly Australia had changed. Naked anti-Semitism on the march in the place where modern Australia began, with only the feeblest response from the political class. Or, worse, the political class tacitly supporting it. The police were worse than useless: more determined to persecute the victims in order to mollify the perpetrators.
But the signs were there long before that. Bondi has long been the epicentre of the Sydney Jewish community. Yet, in 2017 that community was refused planning permission for a synagogue, because of local government fears that it would be targeted for terror attacks. This was long, long, before October 7.
Why were an Australian council so afraid of anti-Semitic terror that they’d refuse a synagogue? Why Sydney? What had changed so dramatically in Sydney that Jews were told to keep out of sight? Who did Waverley council think would be so incensed by the presence of a synagogue that they’d resort to heinous violence?
Answer all those questions and you’ll know exactly how Australia has changed.
The nature of that change only became more brutally obvious over the last two years. Weekly marches proudly brandishing the images and slogans of anti-Semitic hate. Politicians ducking for cover. The government having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into acknowledging the surge in anti-Semitism – and even then, grotesquely minimising the scale of anti-Jewish hate by reflexively adding “…and Islamophobia”.
Escalating violence against Jewish – not specifically Israeli, laying bare the obvious lie that ‘pro-Palestine’ activists weren’t motivated by anti-Semitism – targets. Two Sydney nurses bragging that they would kill Jewish patients. Multiple doctors and senior public health officials caught out repeating anti-Semitic slurs. Prominent arts luvvies circulating a ‘Jew list’, doxxing Jewish-Australian creatives. Firebombings at synagogues and Jewish businesses. Police and politicians trying to wriggle out by denying that a bomb hoax was motivated by anti-Semitism. Politicians bellowing the slogans of anti-Jewish hate in parliament.
The change was baked in years ago. All the Bondi horror has done is lay it bare for all to see, with no room for denial.
