Why are world leaders shocked by the Bondi Beach attack?

We have had 9/11, July 7, the Bataclan, Lee Rigby, the Boston Marathon, the genocide of Yazidis, Charlie Hebdo, Boko Haram, Nice, Manchester, Rouen, October 7, Bondi. Islamist terrorists will slaughter again, and again, and then again. Leaders who continue to be shocked by this are aiding those who killed this weekend and will kill again in future.

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Micheál Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach, said he is shocked by the anti-Semitic slaughter on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, is shocked too. So is Christopher Luxon, the prime minister of New Zealand. Yet there is really nothing shocking about the Australian attack. Insanity, as the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Australia’s ABC News is reporting this morning that one of the Bondi Beach gunmen was previously investigated over his ties to a Islamic State (IS) terrorism cell. An Isis flag was also reportedly found in the car of the gunmen. Islamic terrorist attacks on innocents happen over and over again. If you’re going to be shocked by them, you’re really just unwilling to face up to the true cause of the killings.

The reason these attacks will keep happening must be named

Those who tell us that they are shocked by these attacks are often sincere. They really are surprised, every time. They tell us that diversity is our strength because that’s what they believe, despite evidence to the contrary. Weekly marches call for jihad and intifada, and the mass murder of innocents follows. But these massacres are memory-holed so quickly that they are astonished by the next one. Every time our leaders proclaim their shock, as though astonishment was a virtue rather than a confession of moral and intellectual failure.

Everyone should be angry about what led to the latest massacre, and sometimes everyone is. But the reason these attacks will keep happening – the reason men, women, and children will be slaughtered for being Jewish, or for being Christian, or for being the wrong side of the Shia-Sunni border – must be named. Those who are repeatedly shocked, those who are surprised every single time, refuse to see when the killings are the result of an anti-Semitic Islamic death cult acquiring influence and power. Instead, somehow, they attribute them to Islamophobia, colonialism, the Jews, Israel, the far right, and Elon Musk. Their suicidal empathy makes them blame everybody except the perpetrators.

There are people who aren’t shocked, and they include large portions of the Muslim community. According to polling by the Henry Jackson Society in March 2024, 39 per cent of British Muslims did not believe that Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7. Half didn’t believe Israel had a right to exist, half thought the BBC had a pro-Israel bias – and just under half thought Jews in Britain wield too much power. For many of these people, Bondi will be neither baffling nor unexpected. They will be more concerned that the killings might cause ‘Islamophobia’.

Roger Scruton said that conservatives identify with us and liberals identify with them, a formulation with a high degree of truth. This is a cultural war, but it has real casualties, and we need to recognise who is us, and who is them.

Instead, we support and facilitate and even empathise with those who detest and want to destroy us. We fail to see the value in our own history and our own culture. And we choose to delude ourselves about the qualities that exist in others.

We have Queers for Palestine, despite Palestinian society murdering those citizens it accuses of homosexuality. We have endless reminders of the glories of Islamic science, despite that light having flickered only briefly, almost a millennium ago, and even those glories were shaped by Greeks and Jews.

The Metropolitan Police has responded to the Bondi attacks by saying it is ‘engaging with the Jewish community to understand what more we can do’. It’s too late for that. Islamist attacks are a regular and sickening feature of our lives now, and if we are shocked and surprised by the next one then our stupidity is not only wilful, it is collusion.

We have had 9/11, July 7, the Bataclan, Lee Rigby, the Boston Marathon, the genocide of Yazidis, Charlie Hebdo, Boko Haram, Nice, Manchester, Rouen, October 7, Bondi. Islamist terrorists will slaughter again, and again, and then again. Leaders who continue to be shocked by this are aiding those who killed this weekend and will kill again in future.

Written by: Druin Burch

The Spectator/December 15 2025

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