Fifteen Jews have been maliciously killed on Australia’s most iconic beach. They were shot by two men, armed with assault weapons, who had obviously been training to kill. The men were father and son. The son, named Naveed Akram, is still alive in hospital. The father, Sajid Akram, was killed by police at the scene.
The victims are Jews. They were celebrating the beginning of Hanukkah together at Bondi Beach, Sydney’s most famous seaside spot. Along with the now 15 dead, dozens are injured. Footage is circulating — some of the shooters rapid firing on the crowd, some of bloodied men and women receiving treatment at the scene by members of the public. Children are amongst the dead. One Holocaust survivor is reported to have been killed. Another victim of the October 7 attacks was amongst the injured at Bondi.
The details of this attack, and the precious lives taken, deserve to be scrutinised. This mass shooting is a tragedy that will change Australia inexorably. We will never be the same. But what will our leaders do in response?
As far as I can discern, it took almost a day for any mainstream media organ or major party politician to utter the M-word since the Bondi shootings. We don’t need to speculate anymore. Naveed attended Sydney’s Al-Murad Institute and studied the Koran. He was also on a terror watchlist back in 2019, when he had ties to an Islamic State cell. His father is believed to have immigrated from Pakistan.
One wonders what lies beneath this anti-Semitism
The massacre was declared a terror attack by Australia’s security agencies, but no motivation has been named, apart from “anti-Semitism”. One wonders what lies beneath this anti-Semitism. Did these men dislike bagels, perhaps? Again, no mention of the M-word. Until late on Monday, that is, when the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, along with usual niceties about the gunmen being driven by “an extreme perversion of Islam”, announced that he would act to tighten gun laws and stamp out anti-Semitism. I’m sure Australians everywhere, particularly those of Jewish extraction, will sleep peacefully once those pesky gun laws are further tightened.
Albanese has been predictably weak in his public responses. He stated early on that the attack was on Jews, to be sure, but then proceeded to say it was an attack on “all Australians.” Which is it, Prime Minister? Did particular people, motivated by particular religious beliefs, mow down dozens of “Australians” with firearms? In one sense, that is true. But the reality is that this was an attack by Muslims on Jews, not on Australians per se. Albanese won’t say this out loud, though. He would rather dabble in vague abstractions.
Interestingly, the Prime Minister has not been entirely lost in abstractions since the October 7 Hamas attacks. His government has been openly critical of Israel’s military response to Hamas. The Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, has led Australia to formally recognise the so-called “state” of Palestine. The government has also looked the other way as some Australian-based imams preach inflammatory doctrine in their mosques.
Australians have cottoned on to what is happening to our society. They did so before the Hanukkah shootings. They’re not stupid. They read the news. They see the social dysfunction and terror attacks in the United Kingdom. They read about the Pakistani rape gangs, and UK government’s complete lack of response. Those who visit see how Britain has been transformed, in mere decades, from a place where Australians would gladly move, to a place Poms are fleeing.
Australians see Keir Starmer respond to Muslim terror by clamping down on “Islamophobia.” We see the UK Government’s flaccid reaction to Muslim attacks, including those carried out by migrants and members of second and third-generation migrant families. We look at Australia’s immigration policies and realise that we have taken the same medicine as the Motherland.
In recent months, the so-called “far right” has surged in the federal political polls. A minor nationalist right-wing party, named One Nation, has almost caught up to the mainstream centre-right Liberal Party in their primary vote. Like many minor parties, One Nation is basically a rabble. The party is reportedly organisationally-inept, and it operates via the will of a cause célèbre, Senator Pauline Hanson. They are not, in other words, a party of government.
Nevertheless, Senator Hanson, is looking increasingly prescient. Just the other day, Hanson wore a burka in the Australian Senate, resulting in her being disciplined by the presiding officer with several days off work. Hanson’s broader point has always been that Muslim culture is not compatible with Australian culture; if she isn’t allowed to wear a burka in the Senate, why should others wear it in public? It is a security risk, after all.
Hanson has for years been saying things out loud that mainstream politicians have been too squeamish to say. Her attire in the Senate the other day was provocative. It was pure political theatre, true. But it was effective. She made a clear statement.
Sunday’s shooting raises uncomfortable questions for all Australians
The Bondi shootings were a different kind of theatre. From the terrorist’s perspective, attacks are as much about the show as the actual body count. Sunday’s shooting raises uncomfortable questions for all Australians. Maybe Hanson was right all along? Maybe her “racism” (as the lazy have so-often called it) was actually a kind of realism? Maybe there are cultures, religious creeds, and political views that ought to be red flags when it comes to immigration?
Prime Minister Albanese talks about the Bondi attack as one on all Australians. It was, for the Prime Minister, an attack on Australian values and the Australian “way of life”. However, Albanese doesn’t want to define these things. What are Australian values, Prime Minister?
Apparently, Australian values can be summarised as people of all creeds and cultures migrating here by the hundreds of thousands, year-on-year, and magically living alongside one another in peace and prosperity. Ergo, Australian values have nothing to do with our history as a British political and social culture. It feels as though our ruling class never tires of the “nation of immigrants” cliché, a vacuous statement if there ever was one.
The UK has run the same experiment in mass immigration that Australia is currently running. And Australians can increasingly see that it hasn’t worked in the UK. Even worse, they can see it has been a disaster. The UK is a broken country, economically gutted, in part, by welfare largesse dished out to legal and illegal migrants. The government watches on as previously coherent communities are shattered by coordinated paedophilia rings, casual sexual violence, and increasing lawlessness.
When will Australia’s major political parties admit that copying the UK has been a mistake? When will they wake up from this liberal internationalist fever dream? When will they take serious action to amend our immigration policy? When will our leaders act according to national interest rather than globalist empathy?
The fear here in the Antipodes is that, instead of deportations of terrorists and the reduction of immigration numbers, the Labor Government will clamp down on political speech and turn the Eye of Sauron to the “far right”. We have recently learned that the government is willing to deport people. They did so the other week when they sent a South African packing in record time. (He was allegedly a white supremacist.)
The previous Liberal Government was willing to deny the unvaccinated Novak Djokovic a visa during the pandemic. Candace Owens’ entry to the country was recently disallowed on essentially ideological grounds. If Djokovic and Owens were perceived to be such a danger to Australian society, then how much more people like the Akrams?
The rise of the nationalist right in Australia, which began well before the Bondi shootings, will only increase the likelihood of a government crackdown on the so-called “far right”. Rather than shadow-banning views that were mainstream in 1994, the mainstream parties need to take the right-wing sentiments emerging in our nation seriously. The Reform UK phenomenon ought to be a warning to both Liberal and Labor. I, for one, doubt very much that the mainstream parties will be replaced by any party like One Nation. Nevertheless, they risk destruction if they ignore their voters’ reasonable demands.
Here comes the shibboleth: there are lots of peaceful, kind, generous, productive Muslims who have come to Australia. Why do I even need to say this? I shouldn’t have to. However, our governing class need to reckon with the possibility that the relatively small number of “extremists” and “lone wolves” calls the whole Muslim migration exercise into question.
Australia is a home, a country, a nation. It remains one of the best places in the world to live. However, being a great place to live is not enough. Offering a nice lifestyle alone means that lifestyle won’t last long. Over three decades ago, the liberal political scientist Samuel P. Huntington stated that no country that lacks a “cultural core … can long endure as a coherent society.” Our cultural core, so long defined by our Anglo-Celtic Britishness, is rapidly being diluted. It is increasingly difficult to articulate what makes us a nation, which makes it harder for governments, whether on the left or the right, to grasp what it is they’re acting in the interest of.
Australia’s cultural core is still what makes it worth living here. We are a desirable destination largely because of what was bequeathed to us by the nation’s British and Christian colonial forefathers. We need people here who value Australia for its heritage and cultural core. People shouldn’t have to wonder if they will make it home alive when they go to Bondi Beach for a swim. Nor should Australians have to wonder whether the next Naveed Akram has just been granted a permanent residency visa.
