Jews are being attacked worldwide just for being Jews
Tragically, there is little new about the savagery in Australia during a Hanukkah celebration except for the weaponry and the locale.
For more than 2,000 years, Jews have been the targets of attacks, ridicule and ostracism across the world. Christian leaders in Europe taught that Jews were to blame for the crucifixion of Christ, triggering countless pogroms. And some Muslims, embracing their ancient scripture, contended that Muslims needed to kill Jews to usher in a Day of Judgment.
Still, for its sheer inhumanity, the antisemitism that drove a father-son pair of Muslims to kill 15 people on the Bondi beach has appalled people the world over. And, because of the massacre’s connections with the so-called Islamic State, the attack has triggered alarms about the persistence of ISIS.
But the sentiments that drove 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed, 24, to wantonly slaughter 15 men, women and children just for publicly being Jews are deeply rooted and, tragically, are on the rise. This is both in Australia and elsewhere.
As Time reported, Australia is home to 28 million people but only about 117,000 Jews. And yet, figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) show that antisemitic incidents in the country have reached historically high levels, at “almost five times the average annual number before October 7, 2023.” The group documented 1,654 anti‑Jewish incidents across Australia between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 30, 2025, in addition to 2,062 incidents nationwide the year before.
The Bondi beach attack is part of a worldwide phenomenon, according to Deborah Lipstadt, former Special Envoy for monitoring antisemitism during the Biden administration.
“Since October 7, there have been burnings of synagogues, arson of synagogues on five different continents, including in Australia in Melbourne,” she told NPR. “There have been persistent attacks on Jews eating in kosher or Jewish-style or Israeli restaurants. There have been attacks on Jews walking on the streets, including in Manhattan and in parts of – other parts of New York City. There is something going on that’s not happenstance. I don’t want to suggest … that there’s some sort of giant conspiracy, but there is an effort, which was exemplified by two events, one in Australia and one on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The one in Australia was on October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, where, in front of the iconic Sydney Opera House, protesters march[ed], chanting, you know, globalize the intifada – which most Jews interpret as harm Jews everywhere – from the river to the sea. Some say they chanted, gas the Jews.”
Across the United States, the Anti-Defamation League last spring reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024. This represented a 5 percent rise from the 2023 tally, a 344 percent increase over the prior five years and an 893 percent rise over the prior decade “It is the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents 46 years ago,” the group reported.
Even as people were reeling from the Dec. 14 Australian attack, young Hasidic Jews from Chabad on Dec. 15 were assaulted on a New York subway train by a pair of men who had been spouting antisemitic comments. The NYPD is investigating and U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said on X that her department will investigate the “horrific” incident. As The Times of Israel reported, Jews are targeted in hate crimes in New York City far more than any other group, according to NYPD data.
And recall that last spring an apparently mentally ill man set fire to the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, targeting Gov. Josh Shapiro during Passover. In statements to police, the assailant tried to justify the attack by connecting the Jewish governor to the Gaza War. A search warrant quoted the attacker as telling police he “will not take part in his (Shapiro’s) plans for what he wants to do the Palestinian people.”
Jews are being attacked just for being Jews. Overwhelmingly, they have nothing to do with Israeli government policy and clearly they are not military targets. They are just Jews who don’t hide their faith or practices.
Nearly a decade ago, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance came up with a concise working definition of antisemitism. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” it suggested. “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The group included a host of examples. Among them were “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” And, tragically: “Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.”
The first example about statehood has generated lots of heat, both among Jews and among others. After all, such Jewish groups as the Satmars are anti-Zionist for religious reasons (having to do with believing that the Messiah will be the only one who can reestablish Israel), but how could they be considered antisemitic? Moreover, plenty of people, including tens of thousands inside Israel, oppose the current government of Israel — and decry racism within the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — without hating either the country or Jews.
But about the second example, harming or killing Jews, there can be no ambiguity, as we continue to get horrific examples with an awful regularity.
The Bondi beach massacre fits into far too long a string of atrocities. As the details of what motivated the Akrams slowly emerge, we are learning about how the pair supported ISIS. They traveled last month to the Philippines, where ISIS remains active, for instance. And, at home, the younger Akram followed an imam who preached antisemitism.
Sadly, this is not new. ISIS propaganda has often called on followers to murder Jews, seeing them as locked in a global, apocalyptic war against Islam. The group’s English-language magazine, Dabiq, has derided a worldwide “Jewish-Western conspiracy” to destroy Islam and referred to an Islamic prophecy that describes an end-times battle where Muslims will fight and kill Jews. It also has portrayed Israel and the Jews as controlling the West, particularly the United States, a trope long echoed by far-right figures in the U.S.
ISIS’s followers have often acted on its teachings. Recall the May 2014 Jewish Museum shooting in Brussels, where four were killed, and the January 2015 kosher supermarket siege in Paris, where four died as part of a series of attacks. And remember the March 2016 Brussels bombings, where suicide bombers targeted Jews and Americans, killing more than 30 people in an airport, and a January 2016 attack in Marseille, where an ISIS backer tried to decapitate a Jewish man wearing a kippah. More recently, in March 2022, ISIS claimed responsibility for a spate of shootings in Hadera in Israel that left 11 dead.
Beyond these flagrant assaults is a worrisome trend in both right-wing and liberal circles in the U.S. of hostility to Israel. That is a feeling — or contention — that all-too-easily masks that longstanding history of hatred of Jews.
On the right, some are embracing antisemites such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Podcaster Tucker Carlson warmed to him and Donald J. Trump defended Carlson for that (recall that Trump had hosted Fuentes for dinner at Mar-A-Lago). As The New York Times reported, Carlson in an interview with Fuentes attacked Republicans who backed Israel, calling them “Christian Zionists” who had been “seized by this brain virus.”
Then there are odd characters, such as right-wing media figure Candace Owens. She accused critics of colluding with “Zionists” to discredit her, as The Washington Post reported. Podcaster Steve Bannon, moreover, derided Fox News host Mark Levin as “Tel Aviv Levin” and claimed to love Israel and Jews, even as he argued that the country was not an ally of the U.S.
Meanwhile, on the left, such figures as the anti-Zionist Mayor-elect of New York, Zohran Mamdani, are getting a hearing. He claims to oppose Jewish statehood because it disadvantages Israeli non-Jews, as Jewish Currents reported. In an October debate, Mamdani said he “would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion.” One wonders whether he would deny Italians, Irish or British people the right to their nations as he would deny Jews of all races theirs.
Then there are Democrats who’ve long criticized Israel, while claiming not to be attacking Jews. They include Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by the House in 2023 for her rhetoric about the Gaza War, and Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar, who was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for similar sentiments.
Of course, one can argue – as Jewish critics of the Netanyahu government, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont do – that there’s a distinction between opposing policies of a government and hating Jews.
“Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people,” Sanders said last spring in addressing Benjamin Netanyahu. “But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.”
The problem, however, is that it’s far too easy for antisemites to dress up their hatred of Jews in political terms. That gives them easy cover to claim they just dispute a government’s policies, drawing a distinction between a nation’s people and their leaders. How convenient.
And there can be little doubt that Jews, whatever their politics, face a creeping normalization of antisemitism. It’s apparently only “potentially divisive” now for U.S. Coast Guard members to flaunt swastikas and nooses, for instance. That’s a dilution of a longstanding policy that forbade such hate symbols.
“What’s really disturbing is, at this moment, when there is a whitewashing of Nazis amongst some on the far right, and Churchill is painted as the devil incarnate when it comes to World War II, to take the swastika and call it ‘potentially divisive’ is hard to fathom,” the former Biden official and historian, Lipstadt, told The Washington Post. “Most importantly, the swastika was the symbol hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and gave their lives to defeat. It is not ‘potentially divisive,’ it’s a hate symbol.”
What seems to be a growing tolerance of antisemitism – masked or otherwise and shared by some on both sides of the political spectrum – bodes ill for increasingly endangered Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Clearly, the strategists at ISIS don’t draw fine lines among Jews and politics. They believe that an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, a 10-year-old girl from Ukraine and many others, all just celebrating Hanukkah on a beach in Sydney, are legitimate targets in their antisemitic apocalyptic fantasies. They are the modern incarnations of a couple millennia’s worth of inexplicable hatred and misery.