Bondi Blindness

The Bondi Beach shooting in Sydney, Australia where fifteen people were killed at a Hanukkah gathering by a father and son later linked to Islamic State should have left no room for ambiguity. It an act of Islamist terrorism, not a policy puzzle. The facts were as plain as can be. Yet, Australia’s response, like that of much of the liberal West to similar attacks, immediately drifted towards safer abstractions and away from the ideology that drove the violence.

Instead of addressing the elephant in room that is Islamic fundamentalism, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s call for “tougher gun laws” was yet another classic instance of intellectual evasion.

This evasion has now become systemic. Even after the 9/11 attacks, instead of learning any hard lessons, jihadist violence across the Western ‘liberal’ world is endlessly contextualised, softened and relativised. Antisemitism is reclassified as grievance. Islamism is dissolved into sociology. Naming the ideology behind attacks is treated as impolite, and even dangerous. Liberalism, anxious not to offend the ‘religion of peace,’ has trained itself not to see.

Small wonder that media reports in such countries contort themselves to avoid even stating the perpetrator’s religion.

That moral timidity has had consequences. After October 7, 2023, Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians should have ended all pretence. Instead, large parts of the liberal commentariat rushed to explain, excuse or even celebrate it. Hamas was rebranded as ‘resistance’ against ‘fascist Zionism’ while antisemitic chants were waved through as political expression.

The same blindness governs the West’s indulgent treatment of Pakistan. India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishanker once remarked that Pakistan’s GDP is measured by its exports of terrorism. Western liberals objected to the phrasing while ignoring the substance. From Mumbai in 2008 to a long trail of attacks and plots since, Pakistan’s entanglement with militant groups is one of the least disputed facts in contemporary security analysis. Yet Western capitals continue to court Islamabad when convenience demands it, lowering moral standards to fit strategic need. Even leaders otherwise hostile to liberal pieties have played along.

At the same time, a crude false equivalence is imposed on India. Hinduism, a civilisational faith without a history of global violent proselytization, is routinely yoked to Islamist extremism. Narendra Modi is denounced as a ‘fascist’ with mechanical certainty, while jihadist movements are discussed in the language of context and care. This is not moral symmetry but intellectual fraud.

The post-Bondi debate has already descended into irrelevancies. Was the younger attacker Australian-born? Did the father arrive decades ago on a student visa? Did welfare payments play a role? These questions are distractions. Citizenship is not a vaccine against extremism. Integration is not a bureaucratic status but a moral contract, one that the liberal West has been reluctant to enforce. And each time such ‘liberal’ societies downgrade ideology and avert their gaze, they ensure that the next lesson will be delivered the same violent way as the last.