Australia was racked by a horrific mass-shooting incident on 14 December at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach that local authorities have classified as a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community. The attack took place on Sunday during a public Hanukkah celebration (akin to Diwali), on the first night of the festival.
Two gunmen (identified as a father and son) opened fire, killing 16 people (including children and a rabbi) and injuring dozens more. Local media reports describe it as religiously motivated hatred against Jews amid rising global anti-semitism linked to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza in wake of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.
Global Intifada vis-a-vis Anti-Semitism
Some commentators have suggested that this is the beginning of the globalisation of the Intifada, though there is no smoking gun to substantiate these linkages.
Australian authorities and multiple media outlets have identified the two gunmen responsible for the terrorist attack as a father and son duo—Sajid Akram (age 50) and Naveed Akram (age 24).
The father was killed during the attack and the son, who is Australia-born, was critically injured and apprehended at the scene. He is currently in a hospital under police guard and expected to face charges. Sajid Akram is reported to be of Pakistan origin and had come to Australia in 1990 as a student.
The silver lining to this tragic event is the heroism of a local shopkeeper, Ahmed al-Ahmed, ho single-handedly disarmed one of the two terrorists and survived despite being shot twice. But for his daring act, many more lives would have been lost in what is Australia's most dastardly act of terrorism.
While the predictable anti-Islam anger is already sloshing on social media and TV channels, this bravery by one individual in the face of extreme danger is a reminder that humanism exists across societies and transcends religion and ethnicity.
Terror Has No Religion, Neither Does Compassion
The Bondi Beach terror attack highlights how religious or sectarian motives (anti-Semitism in this case) are providing the trigger for mass killings across the world by those wedded to the ideology of terror. Anti-Hindu sentiment in the Pahalgam attack (April 2025) and anti-Christian attacks in some parts of Africa linked to jihadist ideology fuel such violence, often exacerbating geo-political tensions.
While investigations will provide more detail about the motivation for the Bondi Beach attack, the trend that is emerging will pose complex internal security (IS) challenges to policy-makers across the world.
Technological innovations including the use of drones and AI will only add to the intractable nature of the terror challenge to IS and the lone-wolf exigency.
Other major religion-triggered terror attacks in the recent past include the New Orleans attack (January 2025) where a driver inspired by ISIS ideology rammed a crowd on Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring many. The US' Federal Bureau of Investigation linked it to Islamist extremism. The other major incident was the Moscow City Hall attack (March 2024) wherein the ISIS-Khorasan claimed responsibility for killing 145 at the concert venue, one of the deadliest Islamist attacks in Europe.
How should nations and civil society respond to this scourge of terrorism that is likely to be a recurring IS challenge?
The Australian template is instructive and the domestic political debate over this issue has been intense, heated and often acrimonious. The 7 October Hamas terror attack on Israel and the disproportionate war of retribution that the Netanyahu government unleashed against Gaza stoked a fierce debate in the Australian polity—as it has in many other parts of the world.
Are all Muslims sympathetic to the jihadist ideology and by extension are all immigrants suspect? This kind of invalid broad-brush denunciation of both a religion (Islam) and a constituency (the immigrant) are untenable and need to be denounced. But instead, they have become the winning combination for cynical electoral success in most diverse democracies.
In many parts of the Western world, including Australia, the domestic tension over terrorism and the immigrant is palpable: the liberal spectrum that would like to uphold values of universal humanism and the normative spirit of equitable globalisation is pitted against the born-again nationalist and white supremacists who demonise the ‘other’ with no place for a dialogue.
But How to Deal with Institutionalised Terror?
The flip side is that those groups and elites who see no solution to their long festering grievances tacitly or directly endorse the path of violence (many terrorists are freedom fighters syndrome ) and this leads to a discordant cul-de-sac of polarisation, both in politics and civil society. Among major democracies, the USA, EU nations and India are grappling with this undercurrent.
Bondi Beach kind of terror attacks invariably lead to a post-event frenzy of investigation and a lengthy process of judicial determination to punish the perpetrators. But true justice for the victims remains elusive and hasty vigilantism is not the answer.
Preventing the next Bondi Beach or Pahalgam is the abiding challenge for policy makers and security agencies and this places a much higher onus on the intelligence agencies. Innovations in technology and a sliver in the despondent younger demography seduced by extremist ideologies will add to the challenge for the local police, who are the first layer. Could Bondi or Pahalgam have been prevented by greater surveillance and intelligence gathering ? There is no easy solution to prevent such terror.
Civil society will have to play a major role in the process of pre-emption and prevention and some models like that of Singapore merit review.
Restricting citizen rights, curtailing freedom of speech and muddying the democratic ethos may be Pavlovian responses but will be short-lived. An empathetic socio-religious and political eco-system that will nurture abiding societal tolerance is called for — but the prevailing global orientation, alas, is not conducive.
Depressing augury for 2026.
(C Uday Bhaskar is a leading expert on strategic affairs. He is currently Director, Society for Policy Studies. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)