Kneejerk reactions not enough to stop the next Bondi Beach attack

By David Fickling

 

Terrorists always have sought to use acts of senseless violence to change our societies. It’s the job of our leaders to decide whether to concede them that power, or deny it.  

That’s the problem confronting Australia in the wake of Sunday’s attack on a Hanukkah festival on Bondi Beach, which left 15 dead. The father-and-son alleged perpetrators had explosive devices and Islamic State flags in their car and had travelled to an area of the Philippines last month where groups aligned with the extremist movement have operated, according to authorities. 

 

Faced by such a targeted act of violence after years of increasing antisemitic attacks, it’s unsurprising that Jewish Australians feel they’ve been left unprotected.

 

 

“We don’t need pious words of comfort,” former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the first Jewish person to hold the government’s top economic role, said in a speech Wednesday after laying flowers in Bondi. “We need answers, we need solutions, we need action.”

 

In the wake of such a terrorist act, it’s a sadly uncontestable truth that more could have been done. Frydenberg’s call for a government inquiry into what went wrong cannot be denied. Something has gone badly wrong if, as Australian authorities have admitted, a gun license was granted to someone whose son had associated with known extremists. 

 

At the same time, there’s been significant action against antisemitism in recent years.  All of Australia’s states, as well as the federal government, have introduced laws since 2022 criminalizing the display of Nazi symbols and the flags of Islamic State, Hezbollah and Hamas. Two people in Melbourne were charged earlier this year for waving the Hezbollah flag and three more were charged earlier this month after a police campaign to root out the display of Nazi symbols.

 

A separate federal law introduced earlier this year ensures a minimum year in jail for such displays, and made it easier to convict those who advocate hate crimes. 

 

Much of this work has been a bipartisan effort. Under Frydenberg’s center-right party,  the government of New South Wales in 2016 introduced measures to counter violent extremism after an incident in which a 15-year-old shot a police officer dead, apparently influenced by Islamist ideology. They built on that program in 2020; the federal Labor government in July this year turned it into a nationwide initiative. The federal government in January announced the building of a Holocaust education center in the capital Canberra.

 

Australia has built an internal security infrastructure that’s far more extensive than most other developed countries, to the consternation of many civil liberties advocates. The country has passed nearly 100 counterterrorism laws since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York. Funding for the main domestic spy agency has nearly doubled over the past decade. Four advanced terrorist plots were disrupted over the last year, alongside nine lower-level threats. Four Iranian diplomats were expelled in August after the government found Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had directed arson attacks on a kosher restaurant and synagogue late last year.

 

The problem is that these resources are being stretched thin by the more chaotic world we’re living in. Right-wing extremism has risen dramatically in recent years, requiring tools, contacts and espionage separate from the Islamist threats that drew the most attention in the 2000s and 2010s. Add to that the need to tackle espionage and influence operations by sovereign states such as China, Iran, and Russia. That makes it harder to know where to focus, often until it is too late.

 

Still, the dilemmas faced by domestic security services are little comfort to Australia’s Jewish people who have found themselves targeted by a wave of attacks ranging from graffiti and email messages to physical and verbal assaults and, now, mass murder. These threats come from sovereign states, neo-Nazis, Islamists, and even in at least one recent case a neo-Nazi Islamist. The deputy prime minister and foreign minister have conceded that they need to do more. 

 

Yet some of the reactions being voiced by angry and frightened Australians since Sunday’s bloodshed won’t do anything to tackle extremism: a “dramatic” narrowing of immigration; the prevention of protests against Israel’s war on Gaza; and the adoption of measures to withhold government funding from universities that don’t include criticism of Israel within their definition of antisemitism. 

 

Indeed, they might be counterproductive. The world is alarmingly full of people espousing hateful opinions of their fellow citizens. The challenge for governments is to identify the few at risk of falling into violent extremism, without casting so wide a net that opinions are criminalized.

 

Such actions could prove self-defeating. Damaging trust in institutions and making extremists more wary about revealing themselves could degrade the ability to infiltrate such networks and gather information on threats before they emerge.

 

Preventing another tragedy like Bondi will involve improving the painstaking work of anti-extremism and counter-terrorism: Joining the dots better between fragmentary bits of evidence: ensuring that government agencies communicate better with each other; tightening loopholes in gun laws; guaranteeing the funding for work that’s typically dangerous, difficult, and long-term.

 

Australia has abundant resources to achieve this. Rolling back freedoms of speech won’t help.  (Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper)