Editor’s note:
This article is published in two parts.
Part I examines how the Bondi massacre was immediately weaponised for political advantage, and why claims of personal responsibility directed at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese collapse under scrutiny. Part II explores how the post-Bondi debate over antisemitism risks entrenching dangerous misdiagnoses that may make Jewish Australians less safe, not more.
Part I
The Lie Built on Graves
On Sunday evening, December 15, fifteen people celebrating Hanukkah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach were murdered in an ISIS inspired terrorist attack. The victims ranged from a ten-year-old girl to an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. Also slain, is Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who organised the Chabad community event.
By Wednesday morning, Naveed Akram, 24, had been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder and terrorism. His father Sajid Akram, 50, who carried out the attack alongside him, was shot dead at the scene. Police later confirmed that Islamic State flags had been found in their vehicle.
The grief barely had time to settle before it was pressed into service.
It is worth being precise about what followed. Rabbi Schlanger was farewelled at a funeral held at the Chabad of Bondi synagogue, attended by NSW Premier Chris Minns and former prime minister Scott Morrison. The Prime Minister was not invited. Separately, a broader community and interfaith memorial was held in Bondi, to which Albanese was also not invited. He later attended a distinct interfaith service where he spoke alongside religious leaders. These distinctions matter, because the political narrative was constructed not around absence, but around the deliberate staging of presence.
Before the first funerals were held, senior Coalition figures began laying responsibility for the massacre at the feet of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. John Howard, pioneer of modern Australian dog whistle politics, emerged to lecture the nation on racial hatred. Scott Morrison appeared at memorial events, solemn and conspicuous. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley spoke darkly of government failure.
But it was former treasurer Josh Frydenberg who delivered the most incendiary line, declaring at a Bondi memorial gathering:
“It is time for him to accept personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a 10-year-old child.”
This was not grief speaking. It was strategy.
The claim being advanced was simple and brutal. Had Albanese acted differently on antisemitism, had he implemented the full agenda of the government’s antisemitism envoy, these murders would not have occurred. Therefore, the blood was on his hands. Murdoch outlets amplified the message with enthusiasm.
This deserves to be called what it is: an outrageous lie wrapped in mourning clothes.
A timeline that refuses to cooperate
Sajid Akram arrived in Australia from India in 1998 on a student visa, during John Howard’s prime ministership. He later transitioned to a partner visa; then resident return visas. His son, Naveed, was born in Australia. Neither were on a terror watch list. Police confirm the pair travelled to the Philippines in November, raising serious questions about radicalisation pathways and intelligence blind spots.
The path that led to Bondi did not begin with Albanese. It began decades earlier, across a series of governments, and culminated in a catastrophic failure of detection and disruption by the very institutions designed to prevent mass casualty attacks.
That reality is inconvenient, because it demands scrutiny of intelligence agencies, policing systems, gun licensing regimes and online radicalisation ecosystems. So instead we are offered theatre.
Morrison attended Rabbi Schlanger’s funeral. Albanese was not invited. The message was clear enough for any political operative to decode. Judgment had been passed. Labor stood accused.
But whose judgment was this, and whose interests did it serve?
Albanese’s actual constraints
The PM’s response has been criticised as timid. In truth, it reflects the constitutional reality of the office.
Many of the measures being demanded by his critics are not merely controversial. Jillian Segal’s are constitutionally impossible without eviscerating principles of institutional independence and freedom of expression. Defunding universities for failing to meet a politicised definition of antisemitism, inserting an envoy into the oversight of public broadcasters, compelling ideological training of judges, are authoritarian measures dressed up as protection.
What Albanese has done is cherry-pick what is implementable while rejecting what is not. Segal attends education consultations but wields no defunding power. A Gonski led taskforce has been established to examine antisemitism across education sectors. Security funding for Jewish community sites has been extended. SBS will receive additional resources for social cohesion programming.
On the legal front, the government is pursuing hate crime reforms including enhanced penalties for threats and violence, national vilification consistency, and expanded capacity to list extremist organisations.
What none of these addresses is the central failure that made Bondi possible.
The questions that matter
How did two radicalised men amass multiple firearms legally? Why did a person previously investigated by ASIO retain access to long guns? How did the Akrams’ travel and online activity fail to trigger intervention? Why was a neo-Nazi rally approved outside Parliament weeks earlier, while resources for deradicalisation or advance protection of the Bondi Hanukah celebration remain threadbare?
These questions demand an inquiry. A royal commission into intelligence and security failures is not a political indulgence. It is the only serious response.
As Bernard Keane has argued, slogans about ideology do nothing to fix broken systems. Frydenberg’s line that “radical Islamist ideology pulled the trigger” is clever but empty. Ideology does not operate in a vacuum. It spreads through algorithmic amplification, grievance communities, and institutional neglect.
A deeper category error lies here. It matters. Increasingly, researchers and prevention agencies argue that violent extremism behaves less like a debate to be “won” and more like a social contagion that spreads through environments of grievance, isolation, algorithmic reinforcement and access to means.
In other words, it is not only a policing problem. It is a prevention problem, best tackled with the same logic public health uses for violence more broadly: early intervention, risk and protective factors, and harm reduction. The CDC’s public health approach to violence prevention offers the basic prevention framework, while work explicitly applying that lens to countering violent extremism is now mainstreamed in policy and research, from the U.S. National Institute of Justice to analyses of “complex contagion” dynamics in extremist spread.
But here? Crickets. And clearly, the opposition has little interest in examining these failures, because they implicate Coalition governments at both state and federal levels.
A serious response would look like this
- A royal commission into intelligence and security failures, examining why ASIO’s investigation of Naveed Akram failed to prevent the attack, how licensing systems allowed a person under intelligence scrutiny to legally acquire multiple firearms, and why coordination failed between federal and state agencies.
- An independent review of online radicalisation pathways, examining how ISIS and other extremist content bypasses platform moderation, how algorithms amplify radicalising material, and what regulatory frameworks could disrupt these pipelines without creating Orwellian surveillance.
- A genuine public health approach to deradicalisation, learning from programs in Europe and Southeast Asia that intervene with at risk individuals before violence occurs, providing alternative narratives and exit pathways from extremism.
- Honest engagement with the drivers of both antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia, recognising that the same Coalition figures now demanding action on antisemitism spent years using anti-Muslim dog whistles for electoral advantage, teaching a generation of Australians that scapegoating religious minorities is politically acceptable.
But we are not getting any of this. Instead, we are getting partisan point scoring, with Howard blazing away.
A familiar political pattern
John Howard’s sudden concern about religious hatred would be comic if it were not obscene. This is the same leader who weaponised fear of Muslims during the Tampa crisis, who lied about desperate refugees throwing their children into the ocean, who used the Bali bombings to justify laws that disproportionately targeted Muslim communities.
Those instincts did not vanish. They normalised the idea that religious minorities could be treated as electoral threats. They taught Australians that scapegoating worked.
The Akrams did not emerge from nowhere. They were radicalised in a country where anti-Muslim rhetoric has been rendered politically acceptable over decades. That cultural groundwork is precisely what ISIS propaganda exploits.
For Howard to now pose as an elder statesman while ignoring his own role in cultivating grievance requires an astonishing capacity for self-delusion.
Bondi should have triggered a national reckoning about institutional failure. Instead, it has been repurposed as a weapon.
But that is only half the story.
Because alongside the blame game sits a second, more dangerous manoeuvre. The attempt to redefine antisemitism itself in ways that risk making Jewish Australians less safe, not more.
That is the argument you are not supposed to have.
Urban Wronski Writes 