Australia’s response to the antisemitic massacre in Sydney exposes the West’s enduring refusal to confront the ideology that keeps targeting members of the Jewish community.

By: Nachum Kaplan

There is a predictable and cowardly ritual that Western leaders perform after every act of jihadist violence. First comes the solemn press conference. Then the vow to “do something.” After that, inevitably, the solution is misidentified with almost comic incompetence. Guns. Knives. Online speech. Anything—anything—except the ideology that produced the murder.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has once again shown himself to be a master of this ritual. After a massacre at a Chanukah celebration at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach on the first night of the holiday, in which a total of 15 Jews were murdered and three times as many seriously injured, Albanese announced that gun laws would be tightened.

Spare me this verbiage. A father-and-son jihadist duo committed to ISIS went on a killing spree targeting Jews, and Albanese believes that tightening gun laws is what will get to the heart of the matter.

The problem is not lax gun laws. It is that Australia has ISIS adherents walking around its cities, a reality the authorities refuse to confront.

This is not a policy disagreement. It is a category error.

Put plainly, with just the right amount of political incorrectness: Australia has no issue with Jewish-on-Jewish violence or with Jewish violence against other groups. Australian synagogues do not erupt into spontaneous bloodshed, despite Jews having the same access to firearms as everyone else.

What Australia does have is a small but extraordinarily dangerous population of Islamists who believe—sincerely, religiously and proudly—that Jews are legitimate targets. They are the problem, not the guns.

By talking about firearms laws instead of jihadism, the Australian government has refused to name the threat, even though that threat is an unmistakable ogre casting a long shadow across the country.

Australia has tightened gun laws before, which is why it already has some of the world’s toughest firearms regulations. Thirty years ago, former Prime Minister John Howard strengthened gun laws after the massacre of 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania, and it did reduce certain forms of violence. But those were different times, with different pathologies. Policies that worked then will not stop today’s problem of jihadist lunacy.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s response sends a chilling message to Australia’s Jews: We will protect you symbolically, but not confront those who want you dead.

Politicians find gun laws attractive because they allow leaders to sound decisive without naming Islamism, jihadism or the global ideological ecosystem that produces men who pledge allegiance to ISIS and then hunt down Jews in Western cities. It is the politics of evasion; talking as though ISIS recruitment videos are being filmed in gun shops, with antisemitic pamphlets tucked into rifle cabinets.

The implication is that if only the terrorists had different tools, the jihadists’ antisemitic intent would somehow not exist. That is deeply insulting, as though antisemitism were an unfortunate accident rather than a deliberate, coherent and global ideological project. This habitual Western confusion—mistaking symptoms for causes—is a reason the West is losing to Islamist movements and will likely continue to do so.

ISIS is not a mood, a grievance, a byproduct of social exclusion or the result of inadequate gun buybacks. It is a genocidal movement rooted in a theology that celebrates Jewish death and sanctifies violence against unbelievers. It has doctrine, recruitment pipelines, financing networks and digital propaganda arms that operate seamlessly across borders.

Yet Australian and other Western leaders still speak as if these fanatics are not the problem, only the weapons to which they have access.

Albanese’s response sends a chilling message to Australia’s Jews: We will protect you symbolically, but we will not confront those who want you dead. We will light candles, hold vigils and issue statements, but when it comes to naming the ideology that made the massacre possible, we will avert our eyes and purse our lips.

This pattern is not new. Jews have seen it across Europe, North America, Britain, Canada and Australia. When jihadists attack Jews, the authorities’ response is always curiously oblique. Leaders speak of “hate,” “extremism” or “violence,” as though these were free-floating abstractions. The word antisemitism is often whispered. Islamism almost never is.

This is because acknowledging Islamist antisemitism shatters too many illusions and upsets too many powerful constituencies. It would force governments to confront the limits of multiculturalism, to debate immigration honestly and to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that some belief systems are not merely “different,” but actively hostile to liberal democracy and minority safety.

It also complicates the preferred narrative—a superb piece of inverted fiction in which Jews are cast as powerful oppressors rather than perpetual targets. In progressive moral hierarchies, Jews are rarely granted the status of innocent victims. Naming Islamism as the enemy would force a reckoning that many Western elites are desperate to avoid.

So instead, governments regulate objects.

Every time a leader responds this way, extremists learn that their ideology will not be challenged, that their networks will not be named and that their religious justifications will be handled delicately, if at all. The state will busy itself rearranging furniture while jihadists plan their next attack.

Here is what I want Australia’s leaders to say: Australia has a problem with Islamist extremism, and Jews are being targeted because they are Jews. There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? I didn’t even need to issue a press release or hold a media event.

Solving the Islamism problem will require acknowledging its scale and severity; deploying extensive intelligence resources against radical networks; and embracing deportations, surveillance and prosecutions where necessary.

Above all, it will require the courage to say that these ideas and beliefs do not belong—and cannot belong—in a liberal democracy.

(JNS.org)

Nachum Kaplan is a journalist, media consultant and commentator. He has 25 years of international media experience, having held senior international roles at Reuters and IFR (International Financing Review). Access his work on Substack.