At least 15 people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday after two alleged Islamic terrorists opened fire.
One of the suspects, Sajid Akram, moved to Australia in 1998 on a student visa before becoming a permanent resident, while his son, Naveed Akram, was born in Australia, according to Sky News. Authorities previously investigated the son “on the basis of being associated with” alleged terrorists, but authorities ultimately determined “there was no indication of any ongoing threat or threat of him engaging in violence,” according to the report.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese carefully stated in an interview that the attackers’ antisemitic “ideology” was an “extreme perversion of Islam,” but authorities haven’t released any official statement describing the motive. Even so, the truth is obvious: The terrorist attack resulted from a failure to confront the radical Islamic extremism that is inundating the West and was enabled by mass migration.
Yet within hours of the attack, Prime Minister Albanese proposed “tougher gun laws” and warned about “right-wing extremist groups.”
University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers, parroting a common left-wing talking point, said on X: “Just want to share with my American friends how the Australians respond to a shooting tragedy. Action, rather than thoughts and prayers.” But no draconian gun law would have stopped what authorities later discovered.
Police said they found “a range of IEDs” and “explosive devices” in a car purportedly belonging to the suspects, adding that the suspects planned to use the explosives to inflict “further damage,” according to Sky News. In other words, even if firearms had been unavailable, mass casualties were still the objective. The method may be interchangeable, but the intent was not.
The circumstances are hardly unique. Earlier this year a suspected radical Islamist allegedly used Molotov cocktails to light Jewish demonstrators on fire in Boulder, Colorado.
Last year an Afghan national was arrested for allegedly plotting an Election Day terrorist attack on behalf of ISIS, and just recently a different Afghan national allegedly shot and killed one National Guardsman and critically injured a second after being imported here by the Biden administration.
In Europe Paris canceled its iconic Champs-Élysées open-air concert on New Year’s Eve after authorities cited “unpredictable crowd movements,” though, as the New York Post reported, “critics loudly blamed France’s open-door immigration policies.” France’s interior minister sent a letter to state officials warning of a “very high terror threat” at open-air Christmas markets from groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, according to the Post. At least six terrorist plots “have been thwarted to date in 2025 in France,” according to the report.
In all cases, the problem wasn’t the weapon — because the weapons changed — it was radical Islamists. But that’s the truth that Australia’s leaders and leftists refuse to acknowledge.
Australia already has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Pretending this attack was the result of loose gun regulations rather than a failure to address the importation and radicalization of violent Islamist extremists is not only dishonest, it’s dangerous.
If the lesson learned from this massacre is to further restrict the rights of lawful citizens while ignoring the ideological threat that motivated it, Australia won’t have fewer attacks — it will have more.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
