I remember it like yesterday. The airmail letter came from Bondi Beach. Over 40 years earlier, my childhood school friend Chris, spending a year in Australia, wrote excitedly of enjoying Christmas Day wearing shorts at a barbecue on Bondi Beach. I could feel the sunbeams and hear the surf in the aerogram of that innocent era, forever instilling within me an image of a joyful and relaxed Australia. I would not think of that moment again until today when I saw the grieving crowds gathering to mourn on Bondi Beach, the Sydney sunshine magnifying the pain, horror, and dystopia of our present reality.

I finally visited Bondi Beach 10 years ago when I was generously hosted by the Jewish community of Hadassah Australia. I found Australia to be a place of awe-inspiring beauty, jaw-dropping coastlines, astonishing November Jacaranda trees, and an innocence which had persisted well into America’s second decade of the Global War on Terror.

During that visit, I met members of the Australian press, foremost Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean who invited me to become a columnist here at The Spectator Australia as well as a regular broadcast contributor to Sky News Australia on his show Outsiders. Though 15,000 miles away, the Bondi Beach massacre of Australia’s Jewish people – a diabolical act allegedly of lethal Islamist eliminationist antisemitism – is therefore particularly painful and personal for me when I think of all my Australian friends.

In this, the largest massacre of the Jewish people since October 7, (with more loss of life than the biggest mass shooting of Jewish people in US history that occurred in the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue attack), I recognised what many Israelis had warned me of during the two years in which I reported from Israel’s defensive war that followed October 7: the West would not understand what Israel faces until they faced similar atrocities. Tragically, Australia’s suffering brings the West closer to this terrible insight.

One of the alleged perpetrators has been named by police as Australian citizen Naveed Akram. His father and alleged co-shooter, Sajid Akram, migrated to Australia in the 90s and is not a citizen. The father held an AB firearm licence and acquired six legal weapons.

Reports allege, based on information from a senior counter-terrorism official, that the pair travelled to the Philippines in November where they underwent training in a region known for Islamist militants.

Terrorist actions – if confirmed by investigators – are likely motivated by Islamism and Islamist antisemitism. Islamic State ideology has been alleged by counter-terror and police as their affiliation.

Antisemitism is the single most lethal hatred known to man – it always leads to lethal genocide.

Islamist antisemitism masquerades as religious creed, legitimised in many democracies as legitimate religious expression of some Muslim minority groups.

Worse, within pluralist democracies, it is weakly challenged for fear of the cudgel of Islamophobia wielded as political and judicial shield and perversely as some kind of fraudulent moral equivalent to antisemitism. There is no such moral equivalence. Anti-Muslim xenophobia is contemptible and punishable as discrimination and hate crime in democracies everywhere. But anti-Muslim Xenophobia is far from interchangeable with the concept of Islamophobia which shields Islamists from scrutiny and critique.

Expect charges of Islamophobia to rise when legislators and the public seek answers and responses.

Since October 7, London (where I was raised), New York (which has been my home for decades), and many other Western iconic cities now not only tolerate but fete and celebrate blatant Islamist antisemitism in the name of pro-Palestinian advocacy. The October 7 atrocities – the single largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – unveiled the profound rot and hatreds that have been flourishing, unabated and unchallenged, in our so-called civilised Democratic societies. Western universities are tantamount to ‘madrassas of radicalisation’ as terrorism expert Dr Anat Berko has observed to me on more than one occasion.

On a recent visit to Iraq, I inquired about Muslim Brotherhood ideology – the mothership of Islamist ideology – in the region. Regional leaders laughed explaining I would see much more of it in my own neighbourhood at Colombia University in New York.

My Muslim friends in the Middle East (both civilians and military commanders – including those that have waged outright war against Islamist jihadist armies – are astounded at the way radical Islam has flourished openly in our Western capitals and iconic cities.

In Syria, where I visited the Al Hol camp of ISIS wives and children – heavily guarded by the Syrian Democratic Forces – and in my dialogue with their commanding General, General Mazloum Abdi, I learned of the incredible risk ISIS indoctrinated terrorists pose to the entire region.

Yet the same ideology flows unabated in Australia, Britain, America and elsewhere. Political Islam is gaining such strength in the West that as an observing Muslim, I feel increasingly unsafe in the countries where I hold the privilege of nationality compared to the authoritarian states or democracies in the Middle East where radical Islam has been fully outlawed.

Bondi represents the beginning of a new phase in the evolution of radical Islamist ideology as it gains currency and confidence in an ever more castrated West which fails to defends its own ideals. The catastrophic loss of life and wounded at Bondi is both a global event, and a sentinel event.

Islamism has been nurtured here in our own bosom, tolerated as a minority religion instead of a growing totalitarianism. Islamist antisemitism is now embraced, celebrated, openly legitimised, lionised even to express antisemitic views and move to operationalise this lethal scourge. We are realising the outcome of such folly. It is time for its criminalisation and outlawing.

Jewish lives matter. Jewish lives are human lives. Jewish lives have no less value than any other human life. No matter how powerful the currents to dehumanise the Jew we must deny such demonisation any foothold. Every Jewish life all over the world has the same value as my life or yours. It is past due to criminalise antisemitic speech and antisemitic actions – not only for the safety of our Jewish citizens among us but for all of us.

It is up to each of us to defend the Jewish people. If we fail in the defence of the Jewish people, we fail our own humanity and seal our own profound dehumanisation.

Yet to every politician in Australia – words and euphemisms are not enough. British Conservative Peer Lord Stuart Polak spoke forcefully today in the House of Lords at Westminster explaining that standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’ when the Jewish community confronts ‘dead Jews’ is not enough – it is time to enforce, prosecute and criminalise the entire engine – he called to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood and the IRGC.

It is certainly time to criminalise and designated as foreign terror organisation the Muslim Brotherhood and all of its local chapters exposing the financing and backing for so much of their ideology as well as the logistics of radicalisation and terrorism.

France published a devastating report on this in June 2025. In November, Governor Gregg Abbott of Texas and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have designated the Muslim Brotherhood and its chapters in Texas as criminal organisations and terror organisations to expose the Brotherhood machine that threatens the fabric of Texas. The President of the United States has signed an executive order calling for the same, so the US government might act in prosecution and other measures.

Australia must also take a leaf out of Prime minister Georgia Meloni’s Italy, which has for the first time moved to deport a naturalised Italian Egyptian preacher for promoting Brotherhood ideology seeking to strip him of his Italian citizenship and deport him back to Egypt, where Muslim Brotherhood ideology is criminalised.

This is the kind of forceful action that is needed to preserve the democratic fabric- though Italy’s left-wing judges are currently defying these rulings.

Yet foreign Islamists are only part of the problem – much of this ideology has become absorbed by our own native-born citizens. There is nowhere to deport them to, but they must be separated from wider society, deradicalised and denied the means to promote their hatreds or act upon them. Big Tech platforms where these virulent ideas travel must now be held to the same standards as traditional broadcast media. There is precedent for this in the Rwandan Genocide – the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda prosecuted owners of radio stations preaching hatred as complicit in crimes against humanity.

If we are to save our democracy, we start by outlawing antisemitism, outlawing the vehicles of Islamist antisemitism, outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood, the IRGC and outlawing their moneyed patrons and any other entity Islamist ideologies. We have long been squarely in the cross-hairs. It is time to retaliate.

Appeasement out of fear or political expediency or greed for financial incentives offered by deep-pocketed Brotherhood patrons means that we have abandoned our nations to the ferocious jaws of Islamist antisemites, whether they are Muslim Islamists or far left Islamist sympathising antisemites.

It will not be only Australia that has died as Rowan Dean wrote to poignantly, but all Western liberal pluralistic democracies. And in that death we will have sealed our own.