From darkness into light

In the days since the Bondi massacre, Islamic State channels have praised the killings as a “source of pride” while not claiming responsibility, a propaganda move designed to widen fear and harvest attention.

The first duty of public speech is to honour reality. This attack was aimed at Jewish Australians. It belongs in the long, appalling story of antisemitism – an old hatred that survives by disguising itself as “concern”, “common sense”, “just asking questions”, or, most cynically, patriotism. If we cannot name antisemitism when Jews are attacked at a Jewish festival, then we are failing the minimum standard of moral literacy. Grief without clarity is abandonment.

But there is a second duty, and it is equally non-negotiable – to refuse the conversion of grief into scapegoating. Almost instantly, some voices, often the same ones who treat complexity as weakness, began pressing the familiar button – “Muslims”, “migrants”, “outsiders”. A crime becomes a pretext. A wound becomes a weapon. A tragedy becomes a recruiting poster for the politics of suspicion. These are a civic toxin. They corrode the very conditions under which a plural society can remain a society at all.

Islam is not ISIS

Here is the intellectual pivot we must insist upon, calmly and relentlessly – ISIS is not Islam. ISIS is a political cult of death that speaks in stolen religious language, like a counterfeiter printing sacred words on counterfeit notes. It does not represent Islam, it exploits it. That distinction is a matter of description. And it is not Muslims who are scrambling to invent it after the fact, Muslim scholars have been repudiating ISIS in sustained, detailed, tradition-grounded ways since the beginning. In 2014, for instance, more than 120 Muslim scholars and leaders issued a substantial open letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, condemning ISIS practices and ideology as violations of Islamic law and ethics. This was theology used as resistance, aimed at breaking the spell ISIS tries to cast over the vulnerable and the enraged.

So, when we say the alleged Bondi attackers were “radicalised” and “extremists”, we are choosing accuracy. Radicalisation is a process of ideological hardening, moral narrowing, and political intoxication, in which the world becomes a single story and violence becomes a sacrament. The extremist does not simply believe, he believes in the right to annihilate. He does not merely belong; he belongs by destroying the belonging of others. That is why ISIS praised Bondi – not because it “expresses Islam”, but because it expresses the ISIS project of polarisation, Jews afraid, Muslims blamed, the rest of us angry enough to fracture.

At this point, some will say – “But if they called themselves Muslim, doesn’t that matter?” The answer is – it matters in the way that self-description matters to an investigator mapping a pathway into ideology. It does not matter in the way a bigot wants it to matter, as a licence to treat millions of ordinary Muslims as morally implicated. We should be extremely wary of turning civic judgement into theological adjudication, of deciding who is a “true Muslim” as if our role is to patrol spiritual authenticity. Yet we can still state the moral truth the public is grasping for – whatever labels the alleged perpetrators carried, the kind of violence ISIS praises has been repudiated by mainstream Muslim scholarship and institutions as a betrayal of Islam’s ethical constraints.

The quickest way to expose the poverty of scapegoating is to apply the simplest test of ethical consistency – ask how we behaved when the perpetrator looked like the majority, or like a familiar minority, rather than a convenient “other”.

When Martin Bryant murdered 35 people at Port Arthur in April 1996, Australia did not respond by treating “white men” as a suspect class, or “Tasmanians” as a cultural risk, or Christianity as an explanatory toxin. We did something sterner and more intelligent – we held an individual responsible, and we changed conditions that made mass slaughter easier. The Port Arthur massacre is widely recognised as the catalyst for the National Firearms Agreement and sweeping reforms of licensing, registration, waiting periods, and restrictions on certain weapons. That is what seriousness looks like – accountability plus structural reform, not demographic blame dressed up as analysis.

When James Gargasoulas killed six people in Melbourne’s Bourke Street attack in January 2017, we did not watch the surname and begin drawing conclusions about Greeks, migrants, or ethnicity. The public conversation, for all its rough edges, instinctively understood the distinction between a person and a people. We looked to policing, to drugs, to mental health, to failures of supervision and systems, again, the move from stigma to specifics.

And when Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, committed the Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019, killing 51 people, New Zealand did not reframe the atrocity as “Australian-ness” made murderous. The New Zealand state did not treat Australians as a suspect category at the border. Instead, it prosecuted the individual and pursued reforms aimed at risk – firearms regulation and the wider architecture of violent extremism. New Zealand’s own public history record identifies the killer as a self-proclaimed white nationalist and sets out the scale of the slaughter.

In the wake of the attack, New Zealand moved to tighten firearms rules, the country’s post-Christchurch trajectory is now commonly discussed in terms of reforms that forced many to surrender prohibited weapons, not in terms of blanket punishment of whole populations. It also spearheaded the Christchurch Call, an international initiative aimed at reducing terrorist and violent extremist content online, a recognition that modern atrocities are designed not only to kill, but to circulate.

This is the point the “knee-jerk” reaction refuses to learn – the moment we stop distinguishing between an extremist and a community, we stop doing security and start doing superstition. We descend into the reduction of the citizen to the category, and the substitution of evidence with atmosphere. It then becomes a danger to everyone, because a society that normalises collective suspicion eventually needs new targets to keep the machinery running.

There is a tragic irony here. Those who scapegoat Muslims in the name of protecting Jewish Australians often end up harming both. They inflame a general atmosphere of ethnic blame in which antisemitism itself can mutate and thrive. They shift attention away from the real work of protecting Jewish institutions, confronting online radicalisation, and disrupting networks of incitement.

They also hand ISIS what it wants, the proof-text of a society that seems to say to Muslims, “You will never be part of our society, you will never be welcome” That phrase is the strategic centre of gravity of modern jihadist propaganda. ISIS recruits by offering a story about belonging. It tells a young Muslim in a liberal democracy: your citizenship is conditional, your loyalty will always be doubted, your faith will always be treated as a suspicion, and the next headline will be used to re-open the case against you. In that sense, Islamophobia is part of the ecosystem terror tries to cultivate.

That is why ISIS is so quick to praise atrocities even when it does not formally claim them. The praise is a provocation; a spark dropped into dry social tinder. If public debate then slides from evidence to ethnicity, if politicians and commentators treat “Muslim” and “migrant” as explanatory categories, ISIS is handed a usable exhibit. It can point to the backlash and say: we told you; coexistence is a lie; they will never accept you; you will never be one of them. This is recruitment oxygen. The extremist needs only to make alienation feel more believable than citizenship to recruit people to its cause.

ISIS propaganda is designed to feed on polarisation because polarisation compresses identity into a single story. It drives people into defensive tribes, turns neighbours into symbols, and makes the ordinary, patient work of belonging feel naïve. When we scapegoat, we extend the terrorist’s reach beyond the crime scene and into the civic fabric itself.

A Wiser Australia

So, what would a wiser Australia sound like right now?

It would speak in two voices at once, without the childish demand that we choose only one. It would say, without hesitation, that this was an antisemitic atrocity and that Jewish Australians must be protected. It would also say, without apology, that blaming Muslims and migrants is morally incoherent, something we did not do after Port Arthur, something we did not do after Bourke Street, and something New Zealand did not do after Christchurch. The principle is not complicated – individuals are accountable, communities are not. The principle becomes complicated only when prejudice enters wearing the costume of “concern”.

And perhaps the deepest wisdom, harder than any policy, rarer than any slogan, is simply this – a plural democracy is a moral achievement. It depends on our capacity to refuse the oldest human shortcut – the scapegoat mechanism, the urge to cleanse anxiety by selecting an “other” and calling it explanation. Our common humanity is the only discipline strong enough to hold a modern nation together when it is frightened.

Australia is, in the most literal sense, a country of arrivals, with one profound exception – First Nations peoples, whose continuing cultures predate the state and who endured an assimilation demanded of them by newcomers who never imagined they might be transformed in return. That history should make us wary of any politics that confuses belonging with sameness, or security with purity. When fear tempts us to draw a thick line between “real Australians” and the rest, we are repeating an old moral failure under a new headline.

Bondi has left us with sorrow we cannot unmake. But it has also left us with a choice we can still make. We can let extremists set the terms of our civic life, antisemites by terrifying Jews, and Islamophobes by blaming Muslims. Or we can answer with something sterner and more luminous – a commitment to protect the targeted, punish the guilty, confront the ideology, and refuse the degradation of collective blame. That is civilisation.