Part II

Part I dealt with a lie. Part II deals with a misdiagnosis.

In the wake of Bondi, grief has been channelled toward a particular conclusion: that Jewish safety requires the suppression of dissent, the conflation of Jewish identity with Israeli state power, and the rapid expansion of punitive authority in the name of protection.

This is not just wrong. Illogical, counterfactual and inept. It is dangerous.

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Spectacle, uncoupling, and the pathology of protest

The Bondi massacre arrived already saturated with images. In the age of the omnipresent selfie lens, a type of electronic panopticon, the attack is recorded from so many angles, replayed instantly, and reframed almost as quickly as it occurs. As with other unimaginable acts of terror, the spectacle displaces the act itself, as Guy Rundle suggests. What fills the space are stories of heroism, survival, courage, and resilience. Necessary stories, perhaps, inevitable stories, certainly, but ones that nonetheless push the event’s dark core out of focus.

Spectacle invites narrative management. And when violence is overdetermined by imagery and commentary, the pressure to impose meaning becomes overwhelming. Glib analysis stampedes in before further evidence can be gathered, let alone weighed. Causality is guessed, then asserted. Suddenly a type of lynch-mob bobs up; especially, John Howard, Sussan Ley, Josh Frydenberg and Scott Morrison, whose verdicts are fanned by an avid MSM and Murdoch echo-chamber unlike any other. Political uses upstage grief and blur and reshape the crime.

Bondi’s poitical uses harden long before its purpose, place or mechanics are understood.

In the aftermath, this process induces a wilful blindness. Rather than debate the substantive moral claims being made by people all around the world against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, those claims are cordoned off. The event that generates the protests is treated as irrelevant. Protest itself is redefined as a self contained phenomenon, detached from any global referent, to be managed as a problem of influence, fashion, and emotional plague.

This manoeuvre creates an absurdly circular theory of causation. Students influence students. Marches influence encampments. Encampments influence slogans. Slogans influence individuals. Individuals influence violence. At no point is the originating event required to be examined. The razing of Gaza is removed from the frame, replaced by a closed loop in which dissent is explained only by its own visibility.

This is not analysis. It is cynical displacement. By uncoupling protest from the global violence it responds to, authorities and lobbyists convert a moral and political reckoning into a problem of social management. Protest becomes a pathology. Anger becomes infection. Solidarity becomes threat. The question is no longer whether the claims being made are true or urgent, but whether they are destabilising. Threaten “social cohesion” a phrase that’s been around since Gough Whitlam and now means whatever you want it to.

(“Social cohesion” is the language governments now use to describe the behaviour they want from the public; trust, compliance, calm and orderly behaviour, while avoiding responsibility for the conditions that undermine it.)

The irony is stark. The same public health language now being tentatively adopted to understand violent extremism is simultaneously misapplied to delegitimise dissent. Protest is treated as a contagion to be contained, while the conditions that produce it are rendered unspeakable.

In this way, spectacle does not merely obscure violence. It licenses a politics in which response is policed and causes are erased.

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The complication no one wants to discuss

Rabbi Eli Schlanger is rightly mourned as a victim of terrorism. Nothing justifies his murder. Nothing diminishes the horror of families gunned down while celebrating a religious festival.

But the late Rabbi was not merely a religious figure. Schlanger often spoke in ways that aligned with pro‑IDF sentiment and the broader project of Zionist state-building, at least as his critics understood it. In October 2023, he travelled to Israel in a Chabad delegation supporting Israeli forces. He visited soldiers near the Gaza border, organised morale events, and publicly aligned himself with Israel’s military campaign. Weeks earlier, he had urged Australia to retract recognition of Palestinian statehood, calling it a betrayal of Jewish people and of God.

There is no evidence the attackers knew any of this. There is no indication Schlanger was targeted for his politics. The Akrams murdered indiscriminately.

But the political exploitation of his death cannot be understood without acknowledging how aggressively some Jewish leaders and organisations have fused Jewish identity with Israeli state violence, then demanded that governments treat criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

That fusion has consequences.

As the progressive Israeli outlet +972 Magazine has observed, the international community’s failure to restrain Israel’s actions in Gaza has allowed rage to fester, fuelling conspiratorial ideas about Jewish power, and combining to make Jews less safe.

This is the terrible irony of the present moment. The louder some insist that Jewish safety depends on unconditional alignment with Israel, the more they reinforce the very conflation that antisemites rely on.

Jews are not Israel. Most Jews do not live in Israel. Many Jews, including growing numbers in Australia, oppose Israeli government actions. Those voices are being drowned out by an orchestrated campaign to treat dissent as hatred; nuance and complexity as betrayal.

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The conflation trap

The post Bondi debate has been marked by a deliberate collapse of categories. Antisemitism, Zionism, and the actions of the Israeli state are increasingly treated as interchangeable. This is not an accident. It is politically convenient. But it is also profoundly dangerous.

Antisemitism is prejudice against Jews as Jews. Zionism is a political ideology woven from a complex of conflicting strands and needs. “A nation that holds another people in its grip for decades cannot remain morally intact,” writes, acclaimed Israeli novelist, David Grossman.

Grossman matters because he refuses easy positions. He won’t absolve Hamas. He won’t abandon Israel. He won’t stop interrogating himself. And he won’t look away from what he sees as systemic moral degradation. That combination; moral seriousness, intellectual honesty, and refusal to retreat into ideology, is increasingly rare in political discourse.

Israeli government policy reflects the actions of a particular state at a particular moment. When institutions blur these distinctions, they hand antisemites a ready made narrative while simultaneously silencing Jewish dissent.

This dynamic produces a feedback loop. Jewish critics of Israeli policy are marginalised or denounced. Antisemitism becomes harder to define clearly. Public trust erodes. And genuine threats to Jewish communities become harder to identify amid a fog of politicised accusation.

The result is not protection, but increased vulnerability.

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The Segal plan

At the centre of the post Bondi push sits Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism, delivered to government in July 2025. The plan includes sensible proposals such as improved incident tracking and better coordination between agencies. It also includes proposals that are authoritarian, unworkable, or both.

Segal’s overreach includes proposing defunding universities, inserting an envoy into public broadcasting oversight, and enforcing a contested definition of antisemitism across institutions.

That definition is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance formulation, which is contentious precisely because it can be used to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Its original author, Kenneth Stern, has warned against its regulatory use, arguing it can be weaponised to chill lawful speech.

Louise Chappell of the Australian Human Rights Institute, describes Segal’s plan as falling short of good public policy due to biased arguments, weak evidence and recommendation overreach.

The plan cites a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents. Yet any serious policy response must be able to hold two truths at once: antisemitism is real and corrosive, and the past two years have also been shaped by mass protest and political outrage at Gaza. Collapsing these into one undifferentiated category does not protect Jews. It corrodes trust and weakens prevention.

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An envoy with entanglements

Segal’s claim to impartiality is further undermined by her household being among the largest donors to Advance Australia, a far right organisation whose business model is racial division.

In June 2024, a family trust linked to Segal’s husband donated $50,000 to Advance, making it one of the group’s largest funders that financial year. Advance led some of the most inflammatory campaigns during the Voice referendum, portraying First Nations Australians as elite threats. It also spreads anti migrant and anti Palestinian rhetoric.

Segal has said she does not control her husband’s donations. That is beside the point. A publicly funded envoy tasked with combating hate cannot credibly lead that work while her household bankrolls an organisation built on stoking it.

There is precedent for this kind of appointment. When Tony Abbott appointed Tim Wilson to the Human Rights Commission, the aim was not balance but neutralisation of Gillian Triggs’ humanitarianism. Segal’s appointment risks serving a similar function: recommendations so extreme they can be rejected, while providing endless ammunition for culture war attacks.

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Violent extremism as contagion, not conversion

Underlying almost every failure exposed by Bondi is a basic category error: we still treat terrorism as an ideological argument to be refuted, rather than as a social pathology that spreads, mutates and escalates under specific conditions.

Increasingly, prevention agencies and researchers argue that violent extremism behaves less like persuasion and more like a form of social contagion. This framing is not metaphor. It draws on the CDC’s public health approach to violence prevention, which focuses on defining the problem, identifying risk and protective factors, developing and testing interventions, and scaling what works. That same logic has been explicitly applied to countering violent extremism by the US National Institute of Justice, which describes extremist mobilisation as shaped by exposure, reinforcement, and opportunity, not belief alone.

Seen this way, ideology is not the cause but the accelerant. What matters are the conditions that allow it to take hold: social isolation, perceived grievance, online echo chambers that reward extremity, and access to means. Once radicalisation is understood as contagion rather than creed, policy priorities change completely, away from symbolic crackdowns and toward early intervention, environmental disruption and harm reduction.

We need sustained education, platform accountability, community based intervention programs; media restraint. It means disrupting pipelines, not simply expanding punishment.

Once radicalisation is understood as a contagion rather than a creed, the policy priorities change completely, away from symbolic crackdowns and toward early intervention, environmental disruption and harm reduction.

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Selective vigilance and the Australian record

Australia’s difficulty in confronting violent extremism is inseparable from its history of selective vigilance. Since 2001, counter terrorism policy and political rhetoric have repeatedly treated Muslim identity as a risk marker, embedding suspicion into law, policing, and public discourse. This history matters, because prevention depends on trust.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has long emphasised that counter terrorism frameworks can carry discriminatory impact, particularly when extraordinary powers concentrate on already marginalised communities. Parliamentary review material has also recorded Muslim communities’ concerns that expanded intelligence and security powers were principally directed at them, reinforcing alienation rather than safety.

That experience is not abstract. The Islamophobia Register Australia has documented sustained and gendered patterns of abuse, harassment, and violence against Muslims, often intensified during periods of heightened security rhetoric and polarised media cycles. In 2025, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, argued for a national response that confronts the long tail of post 9/11 suspicion and its corrosive effects on social cohesion.

From a prevention perspective, this is self defeating. Public health models emphasise that stigma and exclusion are not neutral conditions. They are risk multipliers. Communities that experience constant suspicion are less likely to engage with authorities, less likely to intervene early, and more vulnerable to grievance based recruitment by extremist actors.

A state that conflates Islam with terrorism while insisting Jewish identity be shielded from any political association is not practising principled protection. It is practising selective attention. And selective attention is precisely what contagion driven violence exploits.

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Law cannot do the work of prevention

The obsession with definitions and punishment misses the drivers of violence. Carefully crafted laws can set boundaries and consequences. But vague hate speech regimes invite selective enforcement, and politicised definitions invite abuse. Human rights organisations have warned that definitions that blur antisemitism with criticism of Israel have been used to chill lawful speech and to delegitimise Palestinian solidarity.

Bad tools produce bad outcomes. Weaponising accusations of antisemitism undermines the fight against actual antisemitism, because it trains the public to treat the charge itself as a political tactic.

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What the victims deserved

Fifteen people are dead. A ten year old child. An elderly Holocaust survivor. Families shattered in minutes.

They deserved intelligence agencies capable of doing their jobs. They deserved a political culture that treated antisemitism as a genuine problem requiring evidence based solutions, not as a blunt instrument for partisan warfare.

What they are getting instead is theatre built on graves. Politicians performing grief while avoiding accountability. Authoritarian proposals that offer control rather than safety. Definitions designed to win arguments rather than prevent violence.

And yet, amid the horror, something else happened.

Strangers shielded strangers with their bodies. A Muslim bystander tackled a gunman to protect Jewish Australians he had never met. Emergency workers ran toward gunfire. Thousands donated blood. Bondi filled with flowers, not slogans.

That spontaneous solidarity reveals who Australians are when they are not being manipulated.

The question now is whether our institutions will honour that instinct or betray it. Whether we will invest in early intervention and deradicalisation infrastructure. Whether we will confront algorithmic radicalisation factories and the grievance entrepreneurs who profit. Whether we will reject the weaponisation of grief and the selective suspicion that corrodes prevention.

Bondi has given us a choice. We can let it be used to deepen division. Or we can insist on honest investigation, evidence based policy, and a politics that refuses to trade in fear.

The victims deserve that much. The living deserve it too.

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