Bruce Cotterill: Bondi terror, soft policing and why NZ needs a new security plan

This week’s column was half-drafted when it happened. I had intended a positive summary of the events of the year. After all, it was the first year in a while in which we made some political and economic progress.

But then Sunday night happened.

My kids both live in Australia. Bondi to be exact. And as we all know, someone else’s war just came to our part of the world.

Matua Kahurangi: Bondi terror - The heroes we choose to remember

This may be an unpopular opinion. However, if you are a regular reader, you will already know that we are always going to disagree on some things, sometimes a lot. That is the nature of honest discussion. Comfort is overrated. Truth rarely is.

As we all know, father and son Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram targeted a Hanukkah event on Sydney’s Bondi Beach on December 14, killing 15 people and wounding dozens in what authorities have described as an anti-Semitic terrorist attack. I often bristle at the word accused in cases like this. Multiple cellphone videos captured the horror in real time. There is no ambiguity about intent. Jews were targeted. Fifteen people were murdered.

Ramesh Thakur: Appeasement 0, Jew Hatred 15

As, slowly and painfully, we come to terms with what happened on Bondi Beach on Sunday, I divide my reactions into four parts: one question each addressed to the Prime Minister and the virulent anti-Israeli protestors, a comment on the Prime Minister’s leadership failings, and an anticipatory reaction to charges of Islamophobia.

Gary Judd KC: Bondi, Tarrant, victimhood, faith, the primitive, relativism, cultural boundaries of knowledge

The attack on members of Sydney’s Jewish community by the father and son one writer has dubbed the Bondi Barbarians is a shockingly horrific event. It is emerging that the shooters were devotees of ISIS who had just returned from Mindanao, a Muslim outpost in the predominantly Catholic Philippines. It is supposed they may have gone there to be trained for the terrorist acts committed just days after their return to Sydney. Reports indicate possession of ISIS regalia and association with known ISIS members in Sydney.

Melanie Phillips: The global intifada

How many wake-up calls does anyone need? The cliché that the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre was just that is singularly inappropriate.

Australia and the West have had one wake-up call after another. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, Australian synagogues have been firebombed; as elsewhere, anti-Israel marches have regularly chanted for the mass murder of Jews; and on campus, Jewish students and academics have been harassed and intimidated.

John McLean: Bondi Barbarians

Bad or bonkers? The role of bad ideas in abominable behaviour

I rarely comment on events outside of New Zealand, because I almost never have anything to say. Oodles of others, closer to the action and with deeper insights and inside sources, do to death big overseas happenings, including mass killings.

But in the wake of the Bondi Beach Barbarity*, I’ll offer a few thoughts from my New Zealand perspective.

Brendan O'Neill: The hatred for the Jewish State is endangering the Jewish people

After Bondi, we can deny it no longer – bourgeois Israelophobia has aided and abetted a lethal new violence.

Let me get this right – we’re expected to believe it is entirely coincidental that there has been a spike in anti-Jewish violence at the exact same time as hatred for the Jewish State has soared? We’re meant to think there is no connection whatsoever between today’s frothing bourgeois animus for the Jewish nation and the rise in disdain for the Jewish people? You’re telling us the targeting of Jews in the West is wholly unrelated to the Western elites’ ceaseless damning of the Jewish homeland as a uniquely barbarous entity?

Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Bondi attack was a race relations problem

This business of Australia tightening up its gun laws feels like it runs the risk of distracting from the bigger problems over there.

I don’t think guns were the problem on Sunday. Australia already has some of the tightest gun laws in the world.

Ani O'Brien: Bondi Terror - Can we look back in anger yet?

Tolerance must not be a suicide pact

If you were shocked by what happened at Bondi last night you have ignored every warning sign.

You might be horrified. In fact, if you are, you are human. But if you are surprised you have not been paying even minimal attention to what has been happening across Western cities for the past two years. The last twenty plus years really. This was the inevitable direction of travel.

Perspective with Ryan Bridge: Here's the worst part of the Bondi Beach terror attack

This terror attack in Sydney is what everyone else has been saying it is: absolutely horrific. Antisemitic terrorism.

Sadly, this type of attack is happening and will keep happening more frequently, according to intelligence agencies. And the worst part is that it's almost impossible to stop.