(theshot.net.au)
Breathe, slowly.
It helps.
Cry if you need to.
All of this hurts.
But please understand, before we go any further, that living without truth just ensures that we all die twice.
Screaming into the void in the informative fashion we sometimes call journalism, the hardest part of work these last few years has been knowing, feeling in my bones, that my son is exactly as human as the thousands and thousands of children murdered in Gaza. And exactly as human as Matilda, 10, murdered at Bondi Beach while celebrating her Jewish faith with her Jewish family on the first day of Chanukah.
Like the world’s mother during this moment of imperial depravity, the reason Ms Rachel has resonated globally is because she speaks an inherent truth that, once understood and embodied, is very difficult to unlearn: as adults, the children are our responsibility. All of them. And we are not doing well enough by them.
Australia is in mourning. We are in shock.
White Australia has been allowed to believe “this doesn’t happen here” for a while now. Aboriginal Australia understands implicitly that “this doesn’t happen here” has never really been true, but would probably concede there’s been fewer mass shootings of late, this last hundred years compared with the previous one, anyway. Many of us are too young to remember the day Martin Bryant massacred 35 people at Port Arthur in 1996.
The Bondi carnage will take time to process. We must grieve with compassion for the 15 lives taken by two extremist nutjobs, the dead ranging from 10 to 87 years. We stand in solidarity with Australia’s Jewish community, yet again feeling the brutality of antisemitism. We stand arm in arm with Bondi, with Sydney, with emergency workers, with blood donors, with surfers and runners and shoppers and parents of scared children that like going to the beach. This is Australia, devastated on so many levels, for so many of us, beyond the justice words could ever bring.
The killers were apparently trained by ISIS in the Philippines, this apparently known to ASIO as far back as 2019, and one of the men was the legal owner of six guns. I have more questions than answers.
And while I understand the desire for quick action, if we are to recover in a healthy way, it is so, so crucial that we process this without fear, or hatred, or bloodlust fogging our minds.
Let me learn ya something real important that is true in both our personal lives and our politics: in moments of deep vulnerability like this, abusers gain control by rushing you, haranguing you, destabilising your perspective with gaslighting, and applying pressure for a quick decision while you’re not thinking clearly.
The dead had barely hit the ground before internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, for not supporting Israel’s genocide with enough gusto. “I sent PM Albanese of Australia a letter in which I gave him warning that the Australian government’s policy was promoting and encouraging antisemitism in Australia. I wrote, your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire. It rewards Hamas terrorists.
“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia. You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action. You let the disease spread. And the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.” The corporate press marched in eerie unison, dancing to an identical tune.
For the sake of our democracy, we cannot be led through these deadly waters by opportunistic vultures, nor by authoritarian psychopaths that routinely use tragedy to stomp the boot down ever harder, all under the guise of safety and “freedom”.
With haste that should come as a warning to us all, in the wake of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration rushed the USA PATRIOT Act (2001) into existence. The bill’s name speaks both to the cynical cleverness of establishment warmongers, linguistically positioning any opposition as unpatriotic, and the frenzied jingoism and fear in the air at the time, ever exploitable in the shadow of mass shock and death.
The USA PATRIOT Act, a tortured acronym that stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”, became the basis for the flourishing surveillance state swallowing the very notion of privacy in the West. It was the legal foundation that allowed the NSA to listen to every single American phone call, the beginning of a two-decades’ long legislative descent of a captured democracy into a full-blown fascist shithole, one run by pedophiles at that.
ICE would not exist today, would not be rounding up brown people and deporting them or sending them to camps like an American gestapo, without the PATRIOT Act.
With Prime Minister Albanese flagging a wholesale acceptance of Jillian Segal’s “Combatting Antisemitism” report – specifically the adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism, which equates all criticism of Israel (and there’s plenty to fucking criticise!) with antisemitism – we are facing our own PATRIOT Act.
The ramifications of this moment fill me with dread.
Antony Lowenstein, journalist, author of The Palestine Laboratory, and Jewish Australian said: “I am distraught. I am angry. I am deeply deeply frustrated with what I already see as the weaponisation of this attack by many members of the political elite in Australia and globally, and many in the media. What really saddens me – and I say this as someone who is Jewish – Jewish organisations and politicians have made a direct link and connection between yesterday’s attack and pro-Palestine marches, and criticism of Israel in the last two and a half years since October 7… This idea, somehow, that peaceful protest in Australia against Israel’s genocide is somehow unacceptable. Many Jewish people are involved in those protests.”
Nasser Mashni of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network shared these sentiments. “This report does not deliver safety. It delivers sweeping new state powers that undermine democratic freedoms and silence dissent, particularly opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Some of the report’s recommendations, like cracking down on hate preachers, make perfect sense to all of us. But I have precisely zero faith this will be applied universally and without grotesque hypocrisy. I say this because our televisions have been awash all this week with fawning praise for Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of the victims at Bondi, a “humanitarian champion” according to the “news”, the Sydney Morning Herald describing him as someone who “danced with joy and defiance”. Schlanger helped his local community; the part being left out is that at the same time he helped to torture another. He was a Chabad emissary, a sect of Zionism with deep ties to Israel’s illegal-but-still-state-policy “settler” movement and wanted war criminals like Ben Gvir.
If I could ask one question of the Prime Minister right now, I would like to understand his definition of “hate preachers that promote violence”, because signing missiles that fall on children and hanging out with a genocidal army would absolutely fit the bill if he was of any other religion. Explain it to me like I’m a child, please.
Likewise, ensuring Zionists oversee our education curriculums will have a tragic impact on the critical thinking abilities of our children. We absolutely should teach the horrors of antisemitism and the Holocaust, but for it to be apolitical, this needs to be taught alongside a broader explanation of all types of racism and all genocides: from Germany to Australia, Congo to Palestine. Otherwise, we need to accept this for what it is: an attempt to squash one type of racism, while excusing and weaponising another.
On that horrific Sunday last weekend, Ahmed Al Ahmed, a Syrian-born refugee, a Muslim man, a 43-year-old fruit selling Australian tackled and disarmed one of the shooters, like an absolute fucking hero, copping two bullets in the process of saving an unknowable amount of lives.
It will be years before today’s children understand just how relieved every Muslim in the entire world is right now, that the story actually was “complicated” this time. In basic news’ maths: two bad Muslims with a gun, one good Muslim without one. This punctures corporate media’s preferred villain arc, a tale of a scary religion versus a good one, coats it with nuance, with reality, with the fact the world isn’t as flat and binary as racists and genocidal empires want you to believe it is. This narrative of bad Islam versus good Judaism is a story that is comforting to the Western psyche because it assuages guilt surrounding yet another violent, racist colonial landgrab.
This is why Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Ahmed Al Ahmed was Jewish, citing his “Jewish heroism” while neglecting to name him. The motives are obvious enough at this point that even Daily Mail readers could smell the shit. An alternative backstory was created for Ahmed, and spread by disinformation merchants like X’s establishment rimming AI, Grok, which claimed Ahmed was in fact a white Christian dude named “Edward Crabtree”. Again, this happened for reasons so obvious joining the dots feels patronising.
Jillian Segal, Australia’s “Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism”, blamed the Bondi deaths on peaceful protesters against Israel’s genocide. “This did not come without warning. In Australia, it began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House. We then watched a march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, waving terrorist flags and glorifying extremist leaders”.
At Bondi, a distraught Josh Frydenburg, ye of perpetual political potshots, laid the blame for the 15 murders squarely on Prime Minister Albanese’s shoulders, saying: “It is time for him to accept personal responsibility for the deaths of innocent people including a 10-year-old child. It is time our prime minister accepted accountability for what has happened here. And it’s time our leaders stood up and led at last.”
Mainstream reporters tried not to orgasm.
Latika, Freydenberg’s speech is actually terrifying.
We truly have the worst reporters in the world. They do not help us in a healthy, truthful, honest way to understand what’s happening; they disguise the sickly machinations turning behind our political theatre. They are simple, thick, racist, ahistorical, bootlicking dipshits that lie and screech more than they think and feel and they are shaping the narrative with grotesque opportunism.
“Stop the protests,” Frydenberg said. “For two-and-a-half years, we have put up with daily protests which have become incubators of hate.”
This is the antidemocratic push we have witnessed in the US and the UK coming home. To misquote the Simpsons, that Imperial throwing stick has boomeranged on us.
This is the Project Esther playbook, authored by the same Heritage Foundation responsible for Project 2025, outlined in a rare piece of actual journalism from the New York Times as, “The foundation’s proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress.” They claim this can be done within a timeframe of two years.
This is that, right here, right now, and more of us need to be able to see it for what it is before it is too late.
Anti-genocide opposition is being stomped down across the American empire. Not content with locking up more than 800 anti-genocide protestors in a single weekend – octagenarians and Quakers and medically blind priests included – the UK is set to outlaw the phrase “globalise the intifada”. Intifada means “resistance”, it does not mean “kill all the jews”, as is being widely misreported.
Well at least they’re no longer hiding the fact that they literally want criticism of Israel to be illegal in Australia. Just coming right out and saying it. https://t.co/TJBo4JOANy
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 18, 2025
This is a dark moment for all of us. We must not make it worse by choosing to live with the genocidal lies and the oppression of hyperwealthy ghouls. We must choose truth, protect our peace and our rights, and seek justice for all humans everywhere. Despite the forced narrative, we all know that we matched across the Harbour Bridge, filled the streets of Melbourne and blockaded Elbit Systems, not with hate in our hearts but with love. This movement is an anti-racist rejection of the dehumanisation that leads to mass slaughter. Conflating it with extremist killers to serve the needs of a genocidal apartheid ethnostate is a betrayal of our democracy.
I held my son extra tight this week. He doesn’t know why, other than that he is loved. I shield him in a way I do not shield you. He is already scared enough of tornadoes, quicksand and “wolves with red eyes”, I do not want him scared of the beach. If parents across Australia of all faiths, ideologies and origin points didn’t feel something similar this week, I’d be shocked. This hurts. And those who would use this tragedy to push for more division, more hatred, and more control will build a world that will not be kind to the dreams of all our children. Judge people by their behaviour, not which tribe they belong to. Empathy, patience and truth. Everything else is unhelpful.
Caption: Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins and Bilal Rauf, special adviser at the Australian National Imams Council, hug at a vigil in Hyde Park