In Australia today, that air is increasingly thick with resentment and suspicion. The result is the steady escalation of antisemitic violence that culminated in Sunday’s horror at Bondi Beach, where a mass shooting during what was meant to be a Jewish celebration left 15 victims dead and 42 injured.
In a sick twist of irony, the massacre took place during Hanukkah, which commemorates the triumph of religious freedom over persecution.
Such tragedies don’t occur in a vacuum. The December 14 attack—Australia’s deadliest terror incident—was just the latest in a steady escalation of anti-Jewish hate crimes, a wave that spiked to a level almost five times what it had been in the years leading up to October 2023.
That attack came amid a government inquiry in neighboring Victoria, announced in April of this year, openly vilifying minority faiths.
A synagogue in Melbourne was set ablaze. Two others in Sydney were defaced, one with swastikas. Jewish homes were vandalized. Cars were torched or spray-painted with antisemitic slogans. And a Jewish childcare center suffered extensive damage.
These represent only a fraction of the 1,654 anti-Jewish incidents formally documented nationwide in the 12 months leading to October 1, 2025.
Every attack sent a signal. Every signal was ignored. The result: a deadly escalation that could—and should—have been stopped.
That attack came amid a government inquiry in neighboring Victoria, announced in April of this year, openly vilifying minority faiths.
No single state act pulled the trigger, but government-sanctioned targeting of religions added oxygen to a broader fire already ablaze.
All you need to know is contained in the inquiry’s very name: “Recruitment methods and impacts of cults and organized fringe groups.”
Never mind that “cult” is a pejorative term—meaning whatever the person screaming it wants it to mean—or that “cult” as a category has been universally rejected by scholars of religion.
Never mind, as well, that deploying that epithet against a religious group is calculated to inflame suspicion and hatred against its members.
In other words: “Cult” is a slur that has as much place in a civilized discussion of religion as the N-word has in a conversation about civil rights.
Anyone using it, no matter the pretext, is spreading hate.
The felony is compounded by the inquiry defining a “cult” as “a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing.” By that measure, virtually any faith community would qualify.
Such groups, the inquiry further claims, use “manipulative techniques of persuasion and control ... to advance the goals of the group’s leaders,” a description so subjective it can be invoked at the whim of any bigot.
Have you been subjected to “harmful behavior within cults” (whatever that is)? The answer is now decided by your government-empowered prejudices.
This framing of certain religions as subhuman communities to be avoided, shunned and spat upon is splattered as well into media and online spaces, where it is swiftly packaged as “public service.” Websites and social media channels warn of “CULTS ON CAMPUS.” On Australia’s highest-rated television show, anti-religious propaganda masquerading as news showcases a “documentary” entitled “Inside the Cult.”
In other words, the inquiry has not calmed public anxiety; it has furnished pitchforks.
What would you expect in such a climate of panic and suspicion?
Tolerance?
Interfaith understanding?
A renewed respect for Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Hardly.
With public discourse stripped of nuance, context and any pretense of restraint, a narrative flourishes that treats religious belief as inherently suspect, and spiritual difference as a social threat.
The inevitable outcome was the massacre at Bondi Beach.
No nation craves the anguish and death of its own. No sane government seeks tragedy and chaos. Australia’s prime minister and other leaders have all expressed shock and dismay in response to the tragedy.
But Australian government officials prepared the soil, sowed the seed and today reap a bitter, home-grown harvest of death.
The question now arises: How can we fix this so it never happens again?
