It has now been one month since two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl.
It was an attack that everyone saw coming, except perhaps Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, whose policies rationalizing and appeasing radicalism encouraged greater violence, targeting, and demonization of Australia’s besieged Jewish community. By recognizing a Palestinian state after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Albanese and Wong signaled a willingness to reward terrorism. They signaled to their own domestic extremists that antisemitic terrorism works.
The extremists got the message. In 2025, arsonists set fire to a Jewish child care center in Sydney. In early 2025, multiple synagogues were defaced with swastikas. Several synagogues also burned. Pro-Palestinian activists posted the names and details of several hundred Jewish artists, musicians, and academics online to encourage a boycott. The antisemitism grew so blatant that two nurses thought little of posting on TikTok about how they would kill Jewish patients who came to their Sydney hospital.
Through it all, the Jewish community in Australia grew increasingly strident in its demands to get Albanese to take its safety and security seriously and to convince Wong her moral equivalence toward Israel and Hamas was encouraging extremists. Australia’s leaders ignored the complaints and preferred to turn a blind eye and cultivate their most radical constituents or virtue signal on the world stage. This is why anger was so great when Albanese showed up at a memorial. The crowd booed the prime minister, but cheered New South Wales Premier Chris Minns.
In the weeks that followed the Bondi Beach attack, Albanese’s focus has centered more on sidestepping blame and avoiding political embarrassment than on reversing the rot his own policies have cultivated. He resisted establishing a Commonwealth Royal Commission, basically an independent overview, to investigate government actions in the run-up to the massacre.
While he finally succumbed to pressure and, on Jan. 8, appointed a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to investigate “the prevalence, nature, and drivers of antisemitism in Australian institutions and society,” this step is akin to describing the burning building after the arsonist has struck. When the commission releases its report next April, Albanese may calculate that the outrage surrounding the Bondi shooting will have dissipated.
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To show not only Albanese, but also like-minded leaders such as those in the United Kingdom and Canada, that the United States attaches a real cost to antisemitism, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should add Australia to their Countries of Particular Concern list of countries that violate religious freedom. By repeatedly and cynically failing to protect the Jewish community, Australia clearly fits this bill and should join Cuba, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Russia, among others.
The response to Australian outrage should be simple: Reform. Multiculturalism does not supplant the rule of law. Those engaged in violence should rot in prison or be expelled from Australia; they should not be indulged.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.