Antisemitic Mass Murder at Bondi Beach Robs Us All of Our Common Humanity

The mass murder shooting targeting the local Jewish community gathered at the “Chanukah by the Sea” event on Gadigal land at Bondi Beach on Sunday, 14 December 2025, was a sickening hate crime that’s now being investigated as an act of terrorism, after a father and son from the city’s west callously gunned down 15 strangers and injured over 40 more, at a religious event at the iconic Australian site.

The two shooters were Muslim men, who have links to a local Islamic State cell. The heightened fixation around visas brought on by the US Trump administration, means that we already know that the 50-year-old father Sajid Akram was a Pakistani national long-term resident of Australia, while his son, Naveed Akram, 24, is Australian born.

Further the hero of the Sunday evening tragedy Ahmed Al Ahmed, who tackled Naveed and disarmed him of his significantly sized rifle, which ended the killing spree, is a 43-year-old Muslim man, who migrated to Sydney from Syria in 2006.

New South Wales police commissioner Mal Lanyon designated the incident a terror attack on Sunday night, which provides officers with the special investigative powers contained in the Terrorism (Police Powers) Act 2002 (NSW), and it further led to the state’s Joint Counter Terrorism Team commencing its investigation. The JCTT is staffed by NSW police, AFP, ASIO and NSW Crime Commission officers.

In attempting to blame Australian PM Anthony Albanese for the premeditated assault on local Jewish people, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been his regular dickhead self. The wanted war criminal, who’s overseen one of the worst atrocities ever, the Gaza genocide, claimed he’d warned this would occur, and he suggested that somehow local pro-Palestinian protests are a key cause of the crime.

Albanese and NSW premier Chris Minns are spruiking new gun control laws, as the 1996 National Firearms Agreement and its 2017 updated version, permitted Sajid to legally own the four firearms he and Naveed used and were later located at the scene. The then Howard government implemented the 1996 NFA in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people.

The mass murder marks the deadliest mass shooting since Port Arthur. The local Jewish community has suffered devasting losses, which have come on the back of it being hounded by numerous property damage attacks targeting Jewish properties over the summer of 2024/25.

But the Bondi Beach massacre too involves an assault on the entire Greater Sydney community, and indeed, people living right across the continent, as the mass murder has sought to undermine the shared humanity that unites us all.

Gold standard gun laws tarnished

“An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian, and every Australian tonight will be like me, devastated by this attack on our way of life,” said prime minister Anthony Albanese on Sunday, in the wake of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach. “There is no place for this hate, violence and terrorism in our nation. Let me be clear – we will eradicate it.”

NSW premier Chris Minns suggested at a presser beside Albanese on Monday, that his state will be overhauling its gun control regime, which is governed by the Firearms Act 1996 (NSW). Minns also explained that there was no practical reason for Sajid to have owned his guns. And ideas regarding reforms involves a cap on the number of guns owned and a law that only citizens can hold licences.

The 1996 established NSW gun control regime set out in the Firearms Act provides that adults can apply for a gun license that will allow them to obtain firearms under a tiered category licensing scheme. An owner must obtain a permit for each gun, yet there is no limit for the lower A and B categories of which Sajid was a licensee.

Sajid had been licensed for 2 years. The likely reason he was allowed to obtain four firearms legally was for shooting practice. Despite his holding a category B license, or the second least restrictive category, the shotguns and bolt-action rifles that he had for shooting practice are highly deadly weapons that it makes little sense for suburban households to have under the bed.

In the wake of its rollout, the 1996 NFA was long considered the gold standard gun control regime globally. Mass shootings were a rising concern over the 1980s and 1990s, whether that be in terms of the 1987 Hoddle Street massacre, the 1991 Strathfield massacre or the mass shooting event that brought it all to a head: the Port Arthur massacre. The NFA brought all these mass killings to an end.

The National Firearm Agreement was subsequently overhauled by the Turnbull government in 2017, following the 2014 Lindt Café mass shooting in Sydney. But it was released unannounced, and then Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon and former Gun Control Australia chair Sam Lee told Sydney Criminal Lawyers that pressure from the NSW and other gun lobbies had resulted in a laxed updated NFA.

Unlike the numerous and extreme tough-on-crime laws that NSW and a majority of other Australian jurisdictions have passed over the last two years, especially in terms of cracking down on youths, gun control reforms are usually welcomed by Australian communities.

That is except for those locals who appear to consider the agenda of the US National Rifle Association somehow applies here.

Working it to advantage

“On 17 August, about four months ago, I sent prime minister Albanese of Australia a letter, in which I gave him warning that the Australian government’s policy was promoting and encouraging antisemitism in Australia,” Netanyahu said following the Bondi Beach massacre on Sunday.

“Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fires,” he continued on with his Hasbara or propaganda. “It rewards Hamas terrorism. It emboldens those who menace Australian Jews and encourages the Jew hatred now stalking your streets.”

The Bondi Beach massacre was clearly a targeted attack upon the Sydney Jewish community, making it antisemitic in nature or comprising of hatred towards Jewish people for merely being adherents of the religion of Judaism.

There is no suggestion whatsoever that Palestinian locals or their allies in the ongoing antigenocide movement had anything to do with Sunday’s mass shooting.

However, the labelling of people as antisemitic has been used by Israel to stifle criticism of the nation’s human rights abuses against Palestinians since the late 1960s. So, whilst undeniable Jewish hatred fuelled the Bondi killings, terming it as antisemitic in the present is complicated as people marching to call for an end to the mass killing of Palestinians, are too being framed as antisemitic.

“This did not come without warning,” Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal said in a 14 December 2025 statement.

“In Australia, it began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House. We then watched a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge waving terrorist flags and glorifying extremist leaders. Now death has reached Bondi Beach. These are Australian icons. Targeting them is deliberate. This is not random. It is an attack on Australia.”

Segal has been obsessed with implementing her plan to combat antisemitism, which at its heart seeks to install the IHRA working definition of antisemitism into the nation’s institutions that includes criticism of Israel, which, therefore, serves to block criticism of Tel Aviv’s apartheid regime that for decades now has been systematically perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians of the land.

The issue for civil society right now is that the tragedy of the Bondi Beach massacre will be used to further the agenda to stamp out criticism of Israel, despite its mass commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Gaza Strip over the last 26 months.

The antisemitism envoy above cites the 3 August march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge by more than 100,000 locals, as akin to the Bondi Beach massacre, when the civil society procession of three months ago, involved calling on Israel to stop killing innocent Palestinian children, women and men en masse in the Gaza Strip. To correlate this with a massacre is straight out bastardry.

Indeed, on being asked whether his government would be implementing Segal’s plan to combat antisemitism in the wake of the mass shooting, Albanese advised that it “will continue to act on implementation of the plan”, and he then listed the numerous ways in which the envoy’s post-truth agenda, which propagates fraudulent ideas of prejudice towards Jews, is now impacting publicly.

Maintaining our commonality

The footage capturing the mass shooters at Bondi Beach is frightening to watch, as the two men are seen to casually and randomly fire their massive rifles in the vicinity of the Bondi Beach bridge, which appears to carry on a long time unhindered at the globally renowned Australian site.

The profile image of Naveed Akram, now remanded by NSW police, standing on the bridge with rifle in hand is haunting because he appears like a regular person one walks by on the footpath every day.

The shooters were seen to step out of their car with rifles in hand and commence mass murdering people at the beach on Sunday evening, as over 1,000 congregants were gathered for the first night of Hanukkah.

Despite the apparent lengthy time the shooters had to fire and suggestions that NSW police officers were slow to respond, retired counterterrorism detective Peter Moroney explained on a Monday podcast that there were 9 minutes between the first and last shots being fired, and he considered that once officers arrived on the scene, they did throw themselves straight into the firing line.

That the attack comprised not only an assault upon the Jewish community, but further, it involved an attack on the nation of Australia, is an idea that is being progressed by many. And certainly, when our multicultural society has long thrived on its diversity, the Akrams’ targeting of a particular religious group with their murderous assault, has presented an opportunity to further deepen social divisions.

So, now is the time to dive deep into our common humanity, to recognise the strength in our shared diversity and to resist any temptation to further progress violent division.