\n<\/p>\n
Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday\u2019s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was \u201chorrified and devastated\u201d but, she added, \u201cnot shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah and killed at least 15, was the deadliest in Australia\u2019s history. But events have been working up to it since October 7, 2023. Powerful forces far from Australia have responded to the conflict in Gaza by promoting anti-Semitism globally, and acts of violence like the one in Sydney are the predictable result.<\/p>\n
In the past two years, Australia\u2019s Jewish minority\u2014117,000 people in a nation of close to 28 million\u2014has come under an unrelenting barrage. Jewish schools, synagogues, bakeries, and delis have been graffitied with Nazi symbols and Fuck Israel messages. Cars and one brewery have been set ablaze in attacks linked to anti-Jewish sentiment. A pair of nurses recorded a video in which they threatened to kill Israeli patients in their hospitals or refuse to treat them. An explosive-filled trailer was found with a list of synagogues inside. Australia\u2019s Jewish institutions recorded almost 4,000 anti-Semitic incidents from October 2023 to October 2025. In March, Australia\u2019s intelligence chief said that anti-Semitism was his organization\u2019s top priority \u201cin terms of threats to life.\u201d<\/p>\n
[Read: My murdered friend Eli]<\/p>\n
Yesterday\u2019s attackers appear to be linked to the Islamic State. They are thought to be of Pakistani origin. The younger man, Naveed Akram, 24, is an Australian-born citizen. His father and co-assailant, Sajid, came to Australia on a student visa in 1998. Australia\u2019s intelligence agencies monitored Naveed for a while, starting in 2019, because of his ties to a local ISIS cell, but they apparently concluded that he was not a threat. The duo had reportedly pledged allegiance to the Sunni jihadist group and had an ISIS flag in their car. ISIS no longer controls the population or territory in the Middle East that it did at its height, in 2015, but on Saturday, its militants killed two U.S. soldiers and an American civilian in Syria.<\/p>\n
If the Sydney attack is indeed ISIS-linked, that may put to rest the line of inquiry that Israel was pursuing: Iranian involvement. The hypothesis was hardly far-fetched. In August, Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador over \u201ccredible intelligence\u201d linking Tehran to several attacks on Australian Jews. Among these were an assault on a kosher restaurant in Sydney and one on a synagogue in Melbourne. Australia then passed a law banning organizations designated as state sponsors of terror. The first entity designated under that law was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful militia that controls much of Iran\u2019s military and economy.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s foreign ministry has been quick to distance Iran from the Bondi Beach attack. \u201cAs a matter of principle, Iran condemns the violent attack against civilians in Sydney, Australia,\u201d a spokesperson posted on X. \u201cTerror violence and mass killing shall be condemned, wherever they\u2019re committed, as unlawful and criminal.\u201d (Israel has called Iran\u2019s response deceitful.)<\/p>\n
But IRGC-associated outlets have struck a different note. Tasnim<\/em>, the IRGC\u2019s main mouthpiece, headlined the news, \u201cAt Least Ten Zionists Dead on Hanukkah in Australia.\u201d It used a derogatory term, halakat, <\/em>that usually designates the death of animals, or of humans whose death is not considered lamentable. And it described Hanukkah as a \u201cZionist celebration.\u201d (The Student News Network, run by a student wing of the IRGC, used the exact same language.)<\/p>\n The conflation of Jewish religious observance with Zionism is not new. In 2019, Tasnim<\/em> condemned Hanukkah as \u201cnot a Jewish religious feast but a colonial Zionist event.\u201d Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates officially acknowledge Hanukkah (including with public displays in Dubai, in the latter\u2019s case), and the Iranian regime and its allies continually rail against them for it. In 2022, Isa Qassim, Bahrain\u2019s top Shia cleric and an ally of Tehran, tweeted: \u201cDo they want to force us to become a Jewish society?\u201d Hours before the Bondi Beach attack, an Iranian researcher whose father was Iran\u2019s envoy to Canberra in the early 1990s posted on X that Hanukkah was \u201ca satanic feast of Masonic circles.\u201d<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s hard-line outlets have veered between describing the attack as an act of righteous anger and presenting it as a false-flag operation perpetrated by Israel. In Hamshahri<\/em>, a newspaper currently run by hard-liners, an analyst wrote that \u201cgeneral anger against Israel following the genocide in Gaza could provide the background\u201d for the attack. Mehr News Agency, linked to a top regime body, ran with a similar line. But both outlets also aired the conspiracy theory. Mehr featured an analyst who explained that the event led to \u201cemotional shock, reconstructing the sympathy of public opinion in the West and reducing the pressure on Israel.\u201d He went on to reference the 9\/11 attacks as another example of a potential false-flag operation. Ali Akbar Raefipour, an influential purveyor of anti-Semitic conspiracism in Iran, claimed that he had predicted in October 2023 that Israel would resort to such attacks; he reposted Candace Owens\u2019s theory of the case.<\/p>\n Iran\u2019s direct regional influence has contracted with the degradation of its network of anti-Israel militias over the past two years of conflict. But extremism has not been eradicated from the territories Iran once dominated. Hadi Hoteit, a correspondent for Iran\u2019s state broadcaster Press TV in Beirut, asked whether Naveed Akram could really be considered a terrorist, given that he had killed only \u201cpeople who continue to support a state that has carried out a continuous genocide against the indigenous peoples of Palestine and Lebanon for 77 years.\u201d Hoteit is also a producer at Free Palestine TV, an extremist channel run by a Syrian Canadian activist whose father was a Syrian diplomat. That outlet celebrated the Sydney attack for killing \u201c10 Jewish Supremacist dual Australian citizen Jewsaders\u201d who were \u201chaving some R&R from the hard work of Genocide in the Levant.\u201d<\/p>\n The stark reality is that anti-Semitic extremism is not just the province of ISIS, and not just that of Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance. Its reach extends to anywhere Jewish people can be found: a synagogue in Manchester, England; a pedestrian mall in Boulder, Colorado. Many critics of Israel abhor such attacks. But the extreme wings of the anti-Israel movement have emboldened those who refuse to condemn even the most brazen killings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lynda Ben-Menashe, the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, expressed an apt sentiment after yesterday\u2019s terror attack at Bondi Beach: She said that she was \u201chorrified and devastated\u201d but, she added, \u201cnot shocked.\u201d Indeed, how could anyone be shocked? The act of terrorism, in which a father-and-son duo targeted Jews celebrating Hanukkah<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[20750,20749,6694,6930],"class_list":{"0":"post-37606","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-devastatingand","9":"tag-horrible","10":"tag-shocking","11":"tag-worse"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}