Australia’s Dangerous Naïveté

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

 

The Bondi Beach attack in Australia was shocking, but not at all surprising.

 

Some of the details were distinctive — an idyllic spot on the Pacific Ocean instantly turned into a killing field, a father-son terror squad — but the basic picture of a radicalized Muslim immigrant targeting a gathering of Jews was drearily familiar.

 

These events follow the same pattern because the fundamentalist version of Islam is, at its root, hostile to Jews.

 

Let’s say that there was a refugee flow of Unitarians, and some proportion of those Unitarians was antagonistic to traditional Christians, such that they vandalized their businesses, harassed them in the streets, and launched massive protests in favor of overseas Unitarian terror groups. In that case, we’d obviously cast a skeptical eye on Unitarian immigration.

 

Yet, this hasn’t been true of Muslim immigration. Mainstream political parties across the West that have championed this open-handed policy are, understandably, losing ground to restrictionist parties that are more clear-eyed about the realities of immigration.

 

Antisemitism comes in all sorts of varieties, whether Christian, Muslim, or secular.

 

Still, it’d startle us to learn that someone attending a fundamentalist Christian church went and shot up a Jewish event, whereas it’s not that unusual in an adherent of fundamentalist Islam.

 

Now, there are different interpretations of Islam, and it’s not the role of an outsider to say which is correct. The key point is that important Muslim authorities and countless millions of the faithful embrace a fundamentalist version, influential in war-torn areas of the broader Middle East that have sent so many refugees to the West.

 

The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood — Hamas is the Palestinian branch — was markedly antisemitic well before the establishment of the state of Israel. As one analyst has noted, its anti-Jewish agitation included “boycotts, graffiti, and physical violence.”

 

Sound familiar?

 

A rancid paranoia about the Jews runs through this worldview. The 20th-century Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb referred to “the tricks played by world Jewry so that the Jews may penetrate into the body politic of the whole world and then may be free to perpetuate their evil designs.”

 

The original 1988 Hamas charter reads like a transcript of the Candace Owens podcast, except with an armed wing attached.

 

It avers that the Jews “strived to amass great and substantive material wealth,” and used it to take “control of the world media.” They are responsible for the French and Bolshevik revolutions, indeed “most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” They founded “secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies.”

 

They started World War I and World War II — indeed, “There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”

 

The document pronounced its support for Muhammad’s prediction: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

 

On top of all of this, it is believed that any territory once ruled by Muslims (i.e., all of Israel) must be retaken for Islam, and there is a feeling of bitter resentment at the power and success that the Jewish state has been able to amass while Muslim countries in the region have been torn apart by civil strife and stifled by catastrophically poor governance.

 

All of this is a toxic brew, and yet a swath of the Muslim world is beholden to these beliefs. It is foolish to think that some element of Muslim immigrants to the West won’t share this worldview and act on it — to our great regret.

 

Australia welcomed a large influx of Muslim immigrants over the last several decades and accommodated a surge of antisemitism after October 7. The resulting atrocity at Bondi Beach was heartrending and all too predictable.