AP

Australian flags fly at half mast and we grieve.

Yesterday a father and son took hunting rifles and shotguns, stood on a raised bridge, and opened fire upon Jewish families gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanukkah. We have all seen the blood-curdling footage. They murdered fifteen people and injured dozens more. As I write many victims still fight for their lives.

Hanukkah (חנכה) means dedication. It is an eight-day Festival of Lights which commemorates the reconsecration of the Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC. The Temple had been desecrated by the Greco-Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes who severely persecuted the Jews and slaughtered swine on their sacred altar. Jerusalem was finally freed by Judas Maccabeus. He established an annual commemoration of that joyful day marked by the daily lighting of candles on a nine-branched menorah.

Today Hanukkah is celebrated across the world by both the religious and secular Jewish community.

The Nazis suppressed Hanukkah from 1933, along with many other expressions of Jewish religious and cultural life. After Kristallnacht in November 1938 they made it an illegal and very dangerous festival to celebrate.

As it proved to be for our own Jewish Community on December 14, 2025, in Sydney Australia.

Among the fifteen so cowardly murdered was 10-year-old Matilda, and 87-year-old Alex Kleytman, who survived the 1940s Holocaust in Ukraine only to be slain by a massacre of Jews in 2020s Australia. He died shielding his wife Larisa from the bullets.

The reckoning has begun. Our Prime Minister has been sharply condemned for failing to deal with the anti-Jewish demonstrations that erupted here after the October 7 2023 massacre and the ensuing war. These began with that vile celebration of death at the Sydney Opera House on October 9, when a manic crowd chanted “Gas the Jews!” They continued in almost weekly protests in our capital cities, and with highly intimidating pro-Palestinian encampments on many Australian university campuses. Jewish faculty and students are harassed and traumatised by these groups to this day. Then the giant march across Sydney Harbour Bridge on August 3 of this year, witnessing Taliban and ISIS flags, calls of “Death to the IDF”, and the conflation of the Star of David with the Swastika.

On September 21 this year the Australian Government chose to recognise the State of Palestine. Hamas applauded this; it was exactly what they had hoped to gain from the October 7 atrocities.

Appeasement only ever emboldens bullies. Our government’s indulgence of these persistent intimidating anti-Jewish demonstrations helped foster an environment in which an atrocity like yesterday’s massacre came as no real surprise.

In the coming weeks we will hear a lot more about antisemitism. Semitic finds its origin in the name of Noah’s eldest son Shem, and refers to speakers of Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ethiopian. Antisemitism refers, however, exclusively to the persecution of Jews. The Nazis embedded antisemitism into their 1935 Nuremberg Laws.

I highly recommend John Anderson’s interview with Australian politician Julian Leeser, No Longer the Lucky Country for Jews. It focusses on “the disturbing return of antisemitism to the Australian public sphere” and was released just two days before the Bondi massacre.

Leeser helpfully distinguishes religious, racial, and national antisemitism. The first describes the persecution of Jews for their religious beliefs and includes the Spanish Inquisition and Muslim oppression of Jews in North Africa. The second describes the primarily European hatred of Jews for their ethno-cultural distinctives, and culminated with the Holocaust. The third describes persecution of Jews for their efforts to establish a secure democratic Jewish state in the Middle East, an effort greatly accelerated by those who fled the European pogroms before and during World War Two.

It is this national antisemitism that is such a scourge in Australia today, and which so easily devolves into religious and ethnic persecution.

Every good general takes ultimate personal responsibility for the behaviour of his soldiers. Every good coach or CEO takes personal responsibility for the successes and failures of their team or business. That is what real leaders do, which is why U.S. President Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office reading “The Buck Stops Here.”

How pitiful to hear so many Australian leaders today working to distance and exculpate themselves from the tragedies of yesterday. They say “There is no place for antisemitism in our country” whilst prosecuting policies of action and inaction which have fostered precisely this sickness. I long for our leaders to take responsibility for their governance, for the bad outcomes as well as the good.

If today’s rhetoric – “We are appalled”, “We stand with the Jewish community”, “We wrap our arms around them”, “There is no place . . .” – had been backed up by a modicum of corresponding action against anti-Jewish demonstrations on our streets and campuses, then we might not have had to hear such pabulum today.

A thousand solutions will be proposed: tightening of gun laws, funding for extra security, better terrorist profiling. All good but none of these things will really change things because none of them go to the heart of the problem.

It was Moses, Israel’s greatest prophet, leader, and legislator, who did just that in his description of the world prior to the deluge:

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways (Genesis 6:11–12).

Violence arises from corruption (שׁחת, shāchat), namely moral decomposition. It arises from hearts infected by the Fall, from walking in the footsteps of our first parents who chose to define good and evil for themselves. David uses the same word to describe “The fool” who “says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile.”

The root of all hatred, violence, and war is not religion per se, but sin, which is the absence of right and true religion, of knowing God and living according to his laws. Sinful hearts are impervious to saccharine government pronouncements, community education, and the multiplication of laws.

They can only be made new and right by the Saviour.

May the scourge of antisemitism and the wanton murder of defenceless innocents by cowards with shotguns drive us to our ultimate Help, to the One seen and described so magnificently by Isaiah, the “Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

PS: Bravo Ahmed al Ahmad. We honour your courage!