Australia's Oct. 7 happened in the most unlikely place -- a balmy summer's evening in the most iconic beach in the country, known for laid-back surfers, Instagram influencers, fitness freaks, hippies, billionaires, leather-skinned locals and decidedly haram topless sunbathers.
Bondi Beach is a bustling inner-suburban crescent of golden sand on the Pacific where $30 million houses nestle among 1960s blond brick walk-ups crammed with Irish and British backpackers who sling cocktails and wait tables at the buzzy eateries along Campbell Parade.
On Sunday, this slice of paradise became the latest battlefront of the anti-Jew bloodshed that has seized the world since Israel was attacked by Palestinian terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023.
And it is all so sickeningly predictable.
Unchecked antisemitism, cowardly appeasement, lax policing and foolish immigration decisions half a century in gestation have coalesced in multicultural southwestern Sydney, an hour's drive from Bondi.
Add to the mix, strict gun control -- for law-abiding Australians, but not for the homegrown Islamist terrorists and gangbangers who only last month were shooting 50 rounds from an AK-47 at a house in the suburb of Casula, just 6 miles down Cowpasture Road from Bonnyrigg, where the alleged gunmen lived.
It was the perfect cocktail for violence to erupt.
In the two years since the Hamas attack on Israel, synagogues in Sydney have been firebombed, kosher restaurants vandalized, cars outside Jewish homes torched and rancid antisemitic graffiti has become ubiquitous along the Bondi promenade: "Kill Jews" is the mantra.
Every weekend for at least two years downtown Sydney is shut down by Palestinian protests.
In August, tens of thousands of people waving Palestinian flags and wearing now-fashionable keffiyehs marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand Israel "stop the genocide" in Gaza. They were accompanied by the Sydney mayor, the former state premier, Labor members of parliament and assorted local celebrities.
The point was to badge a beloved Sydney icon with their hateful cause, just as they did to the beautiful Sydney Opera House on Oct. 10, 2023, when a mob waving Palestinian flags invaded a peaceful memorial service for the thousands of Jews murdered, raped, tortured, kidnapped and traumatized by Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel days earlier. Interrupting their grief was the antisemitic hatred that has taken root in Australia: "F-k the Jews," the invaders shrieked. "Allah Akbar." "Globalize the intifada."
Well, we saw exactly what "globalize the intifada" means in Bondi on Sunday -- a father-and-son terror tag team, with Arabic names and shotguns, calmly picking off innocent Jewish families at a Hanukkah celebration.
In 10 unmolested minutes as police sirens whined from afar, Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed Akram, 24, slaughtered at least 15 innocents and injured at least 40, including a Holocaust survivor, two cops and a child, in the deadliest terrorist attack in Australian history.
One of the men reportedly is "known" to police and had been assessed by counterterrorism experts as posing a "low level" threat. Sydney's Daily Telegraph also reported that he had "Islamic fundamentalist" views.
"It is sickening," said a Jewish friend, whose daughter had to run for cover when the killers opened fire. "Unfortunately it's 100% unsurprising . . . Our country is filled with radicals who are quite capable of this, and our government is doing nothing to combat it."
That's an understatement. If anything, left-wing Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Cabinet have appeased antisemites and been hostile to Israel.
When Albanese was finally shamed into appointing an "envoy" for antisemitism six months ago, he simultaneously appointed an envoy for Islamophobia, even though it's Jews who are being attacked and vilified.
Much like the Minnesota Democrats, the Australian Labor Party is engaged in a cynical political ploy to pander to its Muslim bloc of voters, who outnumber Jews seven to one.
In September Albanese flew off to the UN General Assembly and formally recognized Palestine as a state, joining the UK, Canada and France.
As Trump said at the time, the stunt only emboldened Hamas at a crucial time and threatened to sabotage hostage releases.
Last year, during a Middle East diplomatic trip, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited Gaza but refused to visit the sites of the Oct. 7 massacres in Israel.
Australia's Immigration Minister, Tony Burke, who has been busy organizing visas for Gazans, was just busted having a secret meeting with officials to repatriate "ISIS brides" from Syria asking them to make sure the media didn't find out.
Burke represents the biggest Muslim electorate in the country, in southwest Sydney, home to the notorious Lakemba mosque; where the senior imam once suggested women who don't wear hijabs are asking to be sexually assaulted.
"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside . . . and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat?" Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly said in a Ramadan sermon in 2006. "The uncovered meat is the problem."
This was after Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from southwest Sydney had preyed on at least 70 girls and young women whom they called "Aussie pigs" and "sluts" because they were not Muslim.
"You deserve it because you're an Australian," victims were told.
Unlike in England, the racist Muslim gang rapists went to jail; the 21-year-old ringleader with a sentence of 55 years (later reduced on appeal), and the epidemic ended.
But justice only prevailed because of the refusal of one courageous prosecutor and a couple of tough judges to bow to the stifling political correctness of the time which pretended the gang rapes were just like any other crime with no religious or racial motivations.
The few journalists who reported the truth were labeled Islamophobic and accused of lying about the facts to create a "moral panic."
Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen resisted the pressure to sanitize victims' accounts, and her reward was to be heckled as a "racist" by feminists at a conference on violence against women.
But it was the last stand in Australia against the "Islamophobia" lie that social engineers around the world use to demean anyone who speaks honestly about the cultural and religious fault lines in the migration-happy West that led to 9/11 and endless social disruption.
Fast forward another two decades, after record immigration and refugee resettlement placing daunting pressures on house prices and social integration, with cops frightened to offend Labor's favorite voting bloc and authorities condoning unrelenting antisemitism, what did they expect would happen?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Albanese on Sunday, saying he had warned him four months ago that his cowardly actions would fuel antisemitism.
"You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action," he said. "You let the disease spread, and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today."
Albanese did not respond. His initial statement about the Bondi Beach massacre did not mention Jews or terrorism, but he must have realized his countrymen will no longer tolerate Islamist Jew hatred.
In a later press conference, he described the massacre as "an act of evil, antisemitism, terrorism . . . An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian."