What we know about the Bondi terrorist attack

The Jewish community’s Hanukkah flyer invited locals to “fill Bondi with joy and light.”

Instead, father-son duo Sajid (50) and Naveed (24) Akram opened fire in an attack that’s left at least 16 dead (including Sajid) and ~50 more in hospital.

So let’s get you up to speed on eight of the reasons why this event is now rippling around the world, starting with the…

1. Location

Bondi isn’t just any old patch of sand. It’s one of Australia’s most iconic landmarks, co-located with one of Australia’s largest Jewish communities (in Sydney’s eastern suburbs).

Which leads us to the…

2. Timing

Sunday wasn’t any old evening, but the first night of Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival of lights celebrating the 164BC rededication of Jerusalem’s Second Temple.

And these two points lead us to the…

3. Victims

Several of the festival-goers killed had ties abroad, including a young Frenchman, a UK-born rabbi, a South African-born rabbi, a Ukrainian-born Holocaust survivor, a Soviet-born businessman, and a young girl from a local Russian language school.

And that leads us to some of the…

4. Responses

Dozens of world leaders have now condemned this attack, not just in its own right, or even because their own nationals were or could’ve been there (~three million tourists visit Bondi each year), but because this atrocity bears all the hallmarks of an antisemitism and jihadism that crossed borders long ago.

Yet only one of those world leaders above has also assigned…

5. Blame

Israel’s Netanyahu has laid responsibility at the feet of Australia’s Anthony Albanese, arguing this attack stems from his centre-left government’s failure to curb antisemitism after Bibi’s own earlier warnings that Australia recognising a State of Palestine would pour “fuel on the antisemitic fire”.

Australia hasn’t yet responded to this claim, though it gets to some of the underlying…

6. Drivers

Antisemitism has been around for millennia, but has surged since the Hamas attacks and subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Australia’s reported tripling in incidents even led Albanese to appoint Australia’s first antisemitism envoy, who just handed down her report this July, warning “antisemitism has become a mainstream threat”.

And barely a month later, we got a glimpse just how mainstream, as a portrait of Iran’s ayatollah appeared front-and-centre during a big Gaza solidarity march across Sydney’s famous Harbour Bridge, though prominent protesters nearby (including members of Albanese’s party) disavowed the image. But speaking of Iran…

7. Foes

You’ll recall Bondi was also home to a Jewish deli firebombing last year, which Australian intelligence attributed to Iran — Albanese quickly booted Iran’s ambassador in response.

Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin propagandist Simeon Boikov marked three years since he fled to Russia’s Sydney consulate just 3km (1.9mi) up the road from Bondi, to evade arrest for assault. We only mention Boikov because he periodically tweets antisemitic tropes in a neat illustration of what DC recently documented as the Kremlin’s century-long use of antisemitism to “discredit, divide, and weaken” rivals at home and abroad.

Anyway, maybe we should wrap with Sunday’s…

8. Heroes

The background of this father-son duo will feed into immigration debates in Australia and beyond, not to mention DC’s own new focus on how allies manage migration.

So maybe there’s poetry in the fact that one of the day’s heroes was local Syria-born shopkeeper Ahmed al Ahmed, who took two bullets while single-handedly disarming an attacker. He’s now received shout-outs from Trump and even Bibi, while a fundraiser in his honour closes in on a million dollars (with $100k alone from US investor Bill Ackman).

Intrigue’s Take

A mid-summer massacre on Australia’s most famous beach has shattered whatever was left of Australia’s sense of splendid isolation, but this still all falls in the shocking-yet-not-surprising basket: it’s been 16 months since Australia’s own domestic intel agency publicly raised the terrorist threat level back to ‘probable’ (behind ‘expected’ and ‘certain’).

It’s also been six years since that same agency (ASIO) first quietly investigated Naveed (the son) when he was barely 18 — he first popped up on counter-terrorism radars after one of his young acquaintances was arrested (then convicted) on terrorism charges.

The months of surveillance later aired in that court hearing paint a grim picture of the challenges Australia’s domestic spymaster recently highlighted, with broader relevance to just about everywhere: “the most obvious trend is that the young are getting younger”, he said — the average age folks now grab ASIO’s attention is just 15.

Yet interestingly, that same spymaster also offered some insights into the world’s path ahead: “You cannot arrest your way to social cohesion. You cannot regulate your way to fewer grievances. You cannot spy your way to less youth radicalisation.” The answer? He argues you need “whole of government, whole of community, whole of society responses.”