It’s been three days since the jihad against innocent Jews at Sydney’s Bondi beach. A nation’s grief is swiftly turning to anger and Australia’s prime minister is floundering.
As more is learned about the father-and-son killers who took 15 lives and wounded many more, questions are piling up. How did the father enter the country? How did security agencies lose track of the son, who not only imbibed his father’s Jew hate, but may have been further radicalised by reportedly studying with one of Sydney’s most notorious Islamist hate preachers? How did they manage to go to a militant area of the Philippines as recently as a month ago? How did the father manage to hold a gun licence, given his own history and that of his son? How was it that, in the heavily Jewish eastern suburbs of Sydney where Bondi is, with the beach itself drawing visitors of all nationalities and beliefs, there were only three policemen nearby?
And why has Australia’s national government talked a big game on combating anti-Semitism but, since 7 October 2023, done so very little to act? Since July it has sat on a report with practical recommendations from its hand-picked ‘special envoy’ on anti-Semitism. Yet, even after last Sunday, it still hasn’t committed to implementing them.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese is an effective political leader. He is adept at playing politics, positioning himself and his Labor party on issues to their best political advantage. He is certainly able to read opinion polls, look at demographics and ride waves of change. He certainly has read better, and exploited, the locked-in progressive left biases of Millennials and still younger voters, which almost certainly guarantees Labor power into the next decade.
But on anti-Semitism, Albanese and his ministers have done some numbers. There are 100,000 Jews in Australia, and around one million Muslims. The vast majority of those Muslims live in Labor-held seats, with around 30 seats having significant Muslim minorities. Moreover, much of Labor’s progressive support base is very pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.
And so in September Australia recognised a Palestinian state, even though there is no Palestinian state in existence. Albanese’s ministers have regularly attacked the Israeli government. Australia has shifted from opposing anti-Israel resolutions in the UN General Assembly to supporting them. Gazans were admitted to Australia with minimal vetting. Isis brides were allowed home. Senior ministers, including our foreign minister, failed to visit the sites of the October 7 massacres when in Israel. Fanatical Islamist hate preachers go unpunished. An Islamophobia special envoy was appointed, despite little evidence of widespread Islamophobia since October 7.
Conversely, when Jews were threatened by an angry mob at the Sydney Opera House just after Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis, there was talk but no action. When pro-Palestine activists regularly incited mobs in city centres and university campuses, and called for globalising the intifada, same again. When Jewish property was again and again attacked and vandalised, when Melbourne’s Adass synagogue was firebombed and other Jewish centres were attacked, same again.
Even after last Sunday’s carnage, so far there is yet more talk from Australia’s government, yet more vague promises of action, and yet more tiptoeing around the cancer of Jew hate. On Tuesday, Albanese convened a crisis meeting with state leaders. He wanted to discuss urgent gun control measures. He had to be dragged by the other leaders to address the elephant in the national room, anti-Semitism.
Regrettably, it is being left to others to fill the leadership vacuum, to show the national rather than political leadership this country so desperately needs just now.
Yesterday, former prime minister John Howard, who learned how to be an empathic, uniting and inspiring national leader through the Port Arthur gun massacre in 1996, and the Islamist-perpetrated Bali bombings in 2002, made the nation sit up. While not disagreeing that gun law reform is needed, Howard stated bluntly that putting this above dealing with anti-Semitism is a ‘diversion’.
Howard singled out the current PM for allowing anti-Semitism to fester by inaction and a ‘lack of moral leadership’. He added, ‘I do not want… the focus of guns be used as a pretext to avoid the broader debate about the spread of hatred and Jewish people and anti-Semitism’.
But a truly blistering indictment of Australia’s government was delivered today, at the massacre site, by former Liberal party deputy leader and leading Jewish Australian, Josh Frydenberg.
‘We as a Jewish community have been abandoned and left alone by our governments’, Frydenberg declared angrily.
‘Our governments have failed every Australian when it comes to fighting hate and anti-Semitism. Our Prime Minister, our government, [have] allowed Australia to be radicalised on his watch. It’s time for him to accept personal responsibility for the death of 15 innocent people, including a ten-year-old child’.
The last point overreached in the heat of the moment, but Frydenberg didn’t just deliver a fiery Philippic. He set out a seven-point manifesto to eradicate anti-Semitism. He especially insisted that the comprehensive anti-Semitism action plan recommended by Albanese’s personal envoy, Jillian Segal, stop gathering dust and be implemented immediately. He proposed direct action when the government of the day as yet hasn’t.
Since Sunday, Albanese has failed to act like a statesman for the good of all. He is losing control of events. There is no sign that Albanese will, like Howard did with sweeping gun law reform in 1996, take on his own pro-Palestine and anti-Israel progressive support base, in order to assure Australian Jews they are safe, and wanted, in their own country.
Guns did the killing on Sunday evening but, as Frydenberg said today, Islamist ideology pulled the trigger. Anthony Albanese should reflect on this part of Frydenberg’s fiery speech:
‘Prime Minister, you have failed us. Your government has failed us. You sit in a chair. It’s time you earned that title. If you don’t want to do the job, give it to somebody who will’.
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