Terrorism and Moral Evasion
On December 14, 2025, two armed men carried out a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach during a Jewish community celebration. Jewish people attending a Hanukkah celebration were deliberately targeted in a public place. Fifteen people were murdered, including a ten year-old girl. Dozens more were wounded. The event was officially treated by Australian authorities as terrorism.
These facts are not in dispute.
What is in dispute, and what now demands moral clarity, is why this happened, and what must be done to prevent it from happening again. The government has blamed the terrorists’ actions on online radicalisation and guns, failing to recognise that these are tools and means, not root causes. They have used this to justify restricting freedom further, while refusing to name the real enemy. So, what are the root causes? And what are the solutions?
The first task of a rational society after experiencing a tragedy is not consolation, but identification.
The Fundamental Cause:
Terrorism is not a psychological accident. It is a political act.
The Bondi Beach massacre was not the product of generic “alienation” or abstract “hate.” It was the result of an ideological commitment: the doctrine that mass slaughter is morally required in service of a religious-political end.
That doctrine has a name: Islamic totalitarianism.
This term does not describe Muslims as such, many of whom are targeted by terrorist groups in the Middle East precisely for their insufficient commitment to the original doctrines of Islam.
Those doctrines, including many passages from the Qur’an, unambiguously command mass-scale violence and the establishment of a theocratic dictatorship, a Caliphate.* They describe an ideology that fuses religious authority with state power, rejects individual rights, sanctifies violence, and treats Jews and secular societies as enemies to be annihilated. It is a text carried forward from the Middle Ages and unrestrained by Enlightenment-era secularisation. Christianity, via the Bible, was once practiced with the same warlike fervour in Medieval Europe, but it was (thankfully) largely pacified by the Enlightenment and the separation of church and state. This is the reality liberals and conservatives alike will never admit.
The term “extremist” is an anti-concept. It disguises the fact that religions do not advocate their own political disarmament and are therefore irreconcilable with individual rights. The so-called “extremists” are distinguished not by excess, but by consistency: they act on the original texts, not on the softened, Westernised evasions devised to make those texts socially tolerable.
The public record is clear on the wider context in which this ideology has been tolerated. Since October 7, Australia has seen open demonstrations glorifying Hamas, chants calling for violence against Jews, and a persistent reluctance by political leaders to draw moral distinctions between liberal societies and theocratic terror movements.
These are not isolated data points. They form a pattern: a refusal to name an enemy, for fear of giving offence.
An ideology that openly endorses religious law over secular law, collective guilt over individual rights, and holy war over peaceful coexistence does not become benign by being politely misunderstood.
Appeasement is not compassion. It is moral abdication.
“When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels — and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.”
– Ayn Rand
Non-Fundamental Causes
1. Institutional Paralysis in Policing
In an active terror scenario, time is the moral currency. Every minute of delay increases the number of victims.
The Bondi attack revealed a problem that has been growing for years: a policing culture constrained less by law than by fear - fear of media backlash, fear of retrospective inquiry, fear of being judged for decisive force.
Police already possess the legal authority to use lethal force to stop an imminent threat. The issue is not legality; it is moral confidence.
A society that trains its protectors to hesitate while civilians are being murdered has already inverted its priorities.
High-risk public spaces require permanent rapid-response capability, clear rules of engagement, and unambiguous institutional backing for officers who act decisively to stop mass violence.
Force used to stop murder is not brutality. It is justice in action.
2. Appeasement of Known Would-Be Terrorists
Public reporting has raised serious questions about prior intelligence awareness of at least one of the attackers, including earlier interest from security agencies related to terrorist activity.
Attempting to affiliate with a terrorist organisation is not an expression of opinion. It is an announcement of intent.
A rational government treats such intent as a matter of national security, not as a social problem to be managed after the fact. Monitoring is not enough. Preventive action is required when credible alignment with terrorist organisations is identified. Everyone in the country connected with terrorist organizations must be imprisoned or deported. One of the terrorists was known to ASIO since 2019 and deemed “not a threat”. Everyone who accepts that religion (or a secular ideology, like Marxism) should be spread through violence is a threat, by definition.
Tolerance applies to peaceful, civilised disagreement. It does not apply to those preparing mass murder.
3. The Disarmament of the Innocent
Australia’s approach to self-defence rests on a contradiction: violent actors will ignore the law, while peaceful citizens must comply absolutely, even when compliance leaves them defenceless. Does the government believe that a person willing to commit mass murder is not willing to commit the lesser crime of illegally acquiring a firearm?
Firearms are heavily restricted. Even non-lethal defensive tools, including pepper spray, are broadly prohibited. The result is predictable: law-abiding citizens are rendered passive bystanders in moments when seconds matter.
The act of one bystander, who disarmed an attacker, is heroic. It is also an indictment of the institution that exists to protect us from violence. This man, at great risk to his own life, seized the initiative our government had abdicated long ago when it failed to categorically oppose religiously motivated Islamic terrorism (yes, contrary to the ABC veteran journalist Laura Tingle’s claim, the attack was religiously motivated – an Islamic State flag was found in the perpetrators’ car).
A free society does not require its citizens to risk martyrdom in order to save their civilisation. The right to self-defence is not a concession granted by the state; it is a moral corollary of the right to life - and the means of self-defence must be legalised.
Conclusion: A Moral Line Must Be Drawn
The Bondi Beach massacre was not an incomprehensible eruption of evil. It was the logical consequence of an ideology that rejects individual rights, glorifies violence, and seeks political power through slaughter.
The stated goals of Islamist totalitarian movements are not hidden: the destruction of Jews, the enslavement of women, the murder or forced conversion of atheists, and the replacement of secular law with religious dictatorship. These goals are written into charters, preached openly, and enacted wherever such movements gain power (as in Iran, which sponsors terrorism everywhere).
The proper response is not ritual mourning or technical tinkering.
It is a moral declaration.
A free society has the right to exist.
It has the right to defend itself.
And it has the obligation to identify and oppose ideologies that seek its destruction.
To refuse to make that judgement is not tolerance.
It is surrender by default, by evasion, and ultimately, by blood.
* Critics often respond that such passages are being “taken out of context.” Don’t take my word for it. Consider instead the judgement of an undisputed Islamic authority: Iran’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. He understands the “context” perfectly well, and has repeatedly invoked it to morally sanction the lethal suppression of dissent, including the killing of dozens of minors during the regime’s crackdown on Iranian protests in 2022–2023.