Antisemitism and Violence: An Insoluble Problem

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, December 18, 2025

 

These days, the authors of books and magazine pieces are supposed to provide neat solutions to the problems they describe. There is, in almost every contemporary political article or tome, a section that contains an agenda, a call to action, or a roadmap. The ever-expansive subtitles on such offerings often declare as much up front, promising a comprehensive guide to “How We Can Stop It” or “What We Must Do About It,” or, in those works that tend toward self-help, a pledge to arm readers with steps they can work through at home.

 

This piece will not do that. Indeed, it cannot. It is more akin to a Russian novel. It is fatalistic, impotent, and despairing, because, in this instance, the topic requires fatalism, impotence, and despair. On Sunday, December 14, 2025, an Islamist father-and-son duo attacked a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 innocent people and injuring another 42. The terrorists used rifles to inflict their damage, and they fired more than 100 shots combined before they were finally taken down by police (one was killed, the other is alive). Per Reuters, the incident was merely the latest in “a string of antisemitic attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars” in the country.

 

Within a few hours after the news from Sydney broke, the condemnations and condolences stopped, and the political infighting began. The gun-controllers demanded gun control. The immigration hawks demanded immigration hawkery. The Muslim apologists demanded Muslim apologetics. Everyone, as ever, fell cleanly into their roles.

 

And I . . . well, I had no idea what to say. I mean that quite literally. As a conservative, I am most definitely not of the view that there is some pat solution to all of our problems that, if implemented with vigor, will lead us into sunlit uplands. But, usually, I at least have a handful of thoughts. Here, I did not. I have no idea what to do about the dismal rise of global antisemitism, and I have no idea what to do about the scourge of mass killings, either. Put them together, as the perpetrators did in Australia, and I am bewildered beyond words.

 

First, to antisemitism, on which topic I have apparently spent most of my life being unforgivably naïve.

 

In 1990, when I was six years old, a Jewish boy named Daniel told me about the Holocaust during recess at school. His grandparents, he said, had been “gassed to death by the Germans,” and their bodies had been “burned in ovens.” I did not believe him. It sounded insane. Six-year-old boys are wont to invent all manner of crazy stories to impress one another. A few weeks earlier, my best friend, Max, had told me that his house “exploded,” and I had received an extremely strange look when I offered my condolences to his parents. So I reflexively assumed that this was another one of those. Why, after all, would anyone want to kill people simply because they were Jews?

 

When I got home, I learned that Daniel had understated the case. I don’t know if my parents had been planning on teaching me about the Holocaust at such a young age, but that day, my many questions forced them into it. By the end of the evening, I knew that it was not only Daniel’s grandparents who had been targeted, but 40 percent of all of the people who, like them, were Jewish.

 

Despite the devastating nature of the topic, the tone of my parents’ instruction remained optimistic. It had happened, yes. But it had been stopped, those responsible had been punished, and today, it was regarded as an abomination so egregious that the lessons it relayed had been permanently learned. Such an attitude was usual with my parents, who typically accompanied their moral injunctions against bigotry with the implication that, while some unpleasantness remained at the margins, most of it was a thing of the past.

 

That was my operating assumption, too — at least, it was my operating assumption until October 7, 2023. For the first 40 years of my life, I’d never met a genuine antisemite, and insofar as I’d seen antisemitism, it was from people — mostly online people — who cherished their positions on the fringe. But, suddenly, that wasn’t true. Suddenly, I saw antisemitic sentiments being expressed quite openly by people in elite positions within our society. And instead of those people being reprimanded by the vast and censorious “safety culture” apparatus that had been constructed to superintend all public discourse, I saw their transgressions being assiduously ignored. Now that Jews were the target, it seemed, all of the mores of the previous decade and a half had been instantly thrown out the window. That was curious.

 

Over the next two years, things only got worse. On both the political right and the political left, conspiracy theories involving Israel or “global networks of Jews” were mainstreamed and monetized. A monstrous lie — that Israel has been engaged in a “genocide” — became de rigueur, both in the West and beyond. In turn, physical attacks on Jews increased. So bad did this tendency become that, 35 years after my parents suggested to me that such things were a feature of the past, police in the British city of Birmingham felt it necessary to bar fans of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a game against Aston Villa, on the grounds that their presence would be so provocative to local antisemites that safety could not be guaranteed. That “arc of history” we hear so much about does not seem to be bending much at present.

 

As for the mass killings? I cannot think of a more intractable public policy problem. It is often assumed that my position on this question is informed by my support for the Second Amendment, and my corresponding skepticism toward additional gun control. But that is incorrect. I could be against all gun laws per se, or in favor of the mass confiscation of firearms, and, assuming that human nature remained constant, my conclusions in this area would remain identical. In my estimation, it is possible to reduce quotidian crime in a given city or state, because, as study after study has shown, most crime is predictable. We know the problem areas, we know the problem people, and we have a pretty good idea of how to address both of those things. In the case of mass public killings, however, we are mostly flying blind. Such incidents are rare, geographically random, and perpetrated in most instances by figures who had no previous criminal record. In consequence, we have no idea what to do, whom to do it to, or when to do it.

 

The prime minister of Australia responded to the attack in Sydney with a vow to pass “tougher gun laws.” This, if it is achieved, will do nothing. There are already 4 million guns in Australia — about a million more than there were before Australia passed the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) that is often held up as the model gun-control law by restrictionists here in the United States. My read of the available data is that the NFA did very little of anything except slightly reduce suicides. But, whether I’m right or wrong about that, the attack that was perpetrated on Bondi Beach is simply not the sort of thing that can be prevented by a few impulsive tweaks to the law. Once a country has guns within its borders, those who wish to do harm will find them. Over the last 20 years, we have seen mass shootings in Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Canada, the Netherlands, and beyond, and in those cases where guns weren’t available, we have seen attacks carried out with knives, bombs, cars, trucks, and vans. It is of course true that if one could snap one’s fingers and make all the guns disappear, there would be no attacks staged with guns. It is also true that one can do no such thing, and that, even if one could, the sort of person who sees an advertisement for a Hanukkah event and eagerly imagines rows upon rows of dead bodies will find another means.

 

I understand that this analysis is dispiriting, and that it is much more satisfying to pretend that, with a policy change here or an appeal to public decency there, we could swiftly put an end to these atrocities. But if being a conservative means anything at all, it means accepting the world as it is rather than as one would like it to be. By nature, I am an optimistic and cheerful person. Here, though, I am filled with inadequate despondency. I do not know what to do about the resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred, or about the instruments with which it is transmuted into barbaric violence. For now, then, it will have to be sufficient merely to throw up my hands and mourn.