Few landmarks in Australia have the cultural resonance that attaches to Bondi Beach. Its name connotes the best of Australian hedonism – a stretch of sand and ocean rollers at the eastern margin of Sydney that has long been its favourite playground. Even the steam tram that once connected it with the rest of Sydney – the Bondi Tram – acquired its own cultural significance. (I’m trying to avoid the use of the word ‘iconic’ here, but it’s hard). That service, originating in down-town Sydney, ran to the top of the hill overlooking the ocean, whence the line branched, to serve the beaches of Bondi and Bronte. This bifurcation earned it the name Bondi Junction – to many, simply ‘the Junction’..

Bondi Beach’s hinterland, the eponymous suburbs of Bondi and North Bondi, and the adjoining suburbs of Dover Heights, Belleview Hill, Rose Bay, Double Bay and Woollahra are customarily known as The Eastern Suburbs. For well over a century, and in increasing numbers since World War 2, Jews migrating to Australia have settled in the Eastern Suburbs. These people came to a country which was as free of antisemitic bigotry as they were ever likely to find. I’m not Jewish, but have lived in Sydney for half a century, and have seen, until recent years, little overt antisemitism. The Eastern Suburbs may have been favoured by Jews, but they were never a ghetto. Jews and gentiles lived comfortably side by side.

Lebanese migration to Australia goes as far back as the 19^th century, when Lebanese Christians, fleeing Ottoman oppression and sensing commercial opportunity, began settling here. They were typically urbane, cosmopolitan people, and readily assimilated into Australian life.

With the outbreak of Lebanon’s protracted civil war, a fresh wave of Lebanese immigration began, chiefly from rural Lebanon, and especially from the Bekaa Valley. These were Muslim refugees, and a succession of Australian administrations was warned that, unlike their predecessors, these were people with a tradition of tribalistic lawlessness, who had little understanding of western liberal values, and viewed what they did understand with contempt. These warnings were ignored, especially by Paul Keating, a Labor Prime Minister who saw in this cohort a source of natural left voters. The resulting influx has given Sydney a rancorous, primitive, medievally Islamist community, centred around the western Sydney suburb of Lakemba, habituated to violent crime, resistant to assimilation, and offering a warm welcome to arrivals from elsewhere in the Islamic world.

As in practically every part of the post-Christian West, polite opinion refused to recognise the baleful prospects of this cultural cancer. Indeed, to the extent that it was aware of exceptions like Hungary, it condemned them for their illiberality, and the leaders as crypto-fascists. It’s not as though the hate-preachers were not growing ever more brazen, using language that, had it come from members of any other group, would have resulted in their prompt prosecution for incitement to violence. Our political leaders refused to take their threats and incitements at face value, and by Orwellian inversion conjured up ‘Islamophobia’ and a supposed ‘far-right threat’ to create the illusion that they were ‘doing something’.

The same polite opinion has proved as resistant to reality as it has everywhere else in the Western world. Even when Islamist atrocities were perpetrated in Australia, the bien pensants insisted that the perpetrators were deranged followers of a perverted interpretation of Islam, when the slightest familiarity with Islam, had they chosen to acquire it, would have revealed that they were obeying a doctrine for which the Koran contained abundant scriptural justification. The fact that the hero who tackled one of the gunmen was a Syrian-born fruiterer with the impeccably Muslim name Ahmed al Ahmed has been rapturously seized upon by multi-culti progressives desperate to find reasons to exonerate ‘mainstream’ Islam from the crime committed in its name. Ahmed is indeed a hero, but his identity merely deepens the tragedy that Australia has brought upon itself.

Of course, the Australian Muslims who are ready to commit violence in obedience to their faith are outnumbered by those whom the elites love to call ‘moderate’, who just want to rub along in Australian life. Not as greatly outnumbered as the elites would have us believe, and when I say “Australian life’, I’m not talking about the true integration envisaged by the enthusiasts for ‘a multicultural Australia’ – the real outliers in Muslim Australia’s Muslim population are not the violent jihadis, nor the peaceable but assimilated majority, but that small minority who have genuinely embraced Australian cultural values, made friends outside the Muslim community, and consciously discarded their ancient tribal enmities. A courageous few of these are prepared to publicly denounce their violent coreligionists, but they are indeed few. In the middle the bulk of the Muslim community sits in sullen silence, either tacitly sympathetic, or too frightened of the consequences should it speak up. The baby and its bathwater are all but impossible to distinguish, and it’s not at all clear to me why Australians should be put to the trouble of attempting to do so, all the while bearing the mortal risk that comes with failure.

That risk was made ineluctably clear in a succession of increasingly lethal incidents. October 7^th, which a government with a proper moral compass and a spine to go with it would have taken as the cue to stop appeasing Australian Islamism and start cracking down on it, instead brought a cataract of nauseating victim-blaming, while the ABC fell over itself to find excuses for the perpetrators, regurgitating uncritically any old tosh, however improbable, that they were fed by the propaganda department of Hamas. Meanwhile, the tempo of Judeophobic violence increased, dramatically, with car bombings, arson attacks, bomb threats and graffiti. It could not have been clearer that this would sooner or later end in real bloodshed, yet the government reacted to each outrage with glib twaddle about Australian values (which unite us), antisemitism (no place for) and vague allusions to the mythical ‘far-right extremism’ that seems to be a salient feature in the landscape of the progressive mind, although evidence of it out here in the real world remains scant.

After the shooting, the identity of the perpetrators, and their place of abode, was established with astonishing speed. Good police work? Or evidence that they were well-enough known to the authorities that their continued freedom is itself a damning comment on the pusillanimous response to the rising tide of Judaeophobia that has polluted our commonwealth? Well, of course it was the latter. It has been nauseating to see the outbreak of sanctimonious hand-wringing from the Prime Minister, down through the hideous hierarchy of ideological cowardice that constitutes elite opinion in Australia. Pundits who were until a week ago ostentatiously ‘standing with Palestine’ and brandishing their sad little keffiyeh are now just as eagerly repudiating the very bigotry and hatred which, if they have not actively stoked, they have appeased.

Leaders who should have smelt the putrescence back in 2023 and dealt sharply with it are now declaring their undying support for Australian Jewry, in terms drawn from that little Thesaurus of weasel words that the weak and unprincipled keep for such occasions. Like ‘Comical Ali’ assuring TV viewers that Baghdad was safe, even as American tanks could be seen in the background, there is, they attempt to assure us, ‘no place in Australia for (insert sanctimonious boilerplate here)’, despite the mounting evidence that there is, indeed, a place for violent intolerance in Australia.

Tasked by the appalling Sarah Ferguson with commenting on Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-aimed strictures against Albanese, the ABC’s Laura Tingle, whose own organisation has done much of the heavy lifting required to invigorate Australian Judaeophobia, had nothing better to say than to allude smugly to Bibi’s own alleged peccadillos, as though, like a pre-teen playground dispute, that settled the matter.

Our witless Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who may, I suppose, actually be stupid enough to fail to understand the connection between his craven decision to ‘recognise’ the Palestinian State, and the Bondi Beach massacre, reached instinctively for the making of new law, instead of determining to make resolute use of the laws we already have. It is indeed preposterous that a Muslim with known Islamist inclinations should have been able legally to own firearms, but the idea that he would have been deterred from what he did by being denied a licence, rather than either availing himself of Sydney’s black market in firearms, or simply renting a van, is fanciful.

So much for the shortcomings of those who have allowed a cohort of unreconciled jihadis into our once pleasant land, and since failed to protect us from them. What is to be done? I have scanned the Segal Report, and find it worthy, wordy, long on ‘support’ for this, that or the other, and short on resolute, interdictory action. So here’s my own agenda:

• The threat must be recognised for what it is – not merely ‘antisemitism’, with its implication that it could emanate from a variety of social groups, one of which just happens to be Islam. The unique danger posed by Islam must be confronted.
• It should be made clear to Australia’s Muslims that those aspects of their faith which enjoin them to commit violent acts in its name will no longer be tolerated.
• The Segal Report advises vetting visa applicants for evidence of Islamist sympathies. I doubt the effectiveness of such a strategy in distinguishing the baby from its bathwater. Until a satisfactory way of vetting Muslim immigrants is devised, their admission to Australia should cease. Exceptions should be made only for apostates like this Pakistani, who have exposed themselves to serious risk by their public condemnation of Islamic terror. This will be harsh on many would-be migrants who would have led blameless lives in Australia. Tough – we do not owe the world an easy life.
• It should be made clear to those Muslims who do not sympathise with violent jihadism, but have hitherto refrained from opposing it for fear of reprisal that henceforth, should they choose to assist in the war against jihadist violence, they will receive the fullest protection our law-enforcement services can provide.
• Islamic demagoguery should be ruthlessly policed. The Segal Report makes no mention that I could see of policing the mosques and madrassahs. It is to be hoped that this is a tactical omission, intended to avoid compromising existing espionage initiatives. Efforts should be redoubled to recruit speakers of classical Arabic and of the modern languages used by jihadis, able to conduct espionage in the mosques and madrassahs. Preachers and teachers caught preaching violence should be imprisoned, and deprived of the means of communicating their bile.
• Moves to restrict ‘hate speech’, while superficially appealing, should be resisted, as they will only enable the governing elites to abuse their powers to silence their critics. By contrast, the existing laws forbidding incitement to violence should be broadly interpreted, and strictly enforced.
• The practice of collocating Muslims in Australian jails must end. The ghettoes which have thus formed and served as recruitment centres for jihadis must be broken up, and Muslim prisoners kept apart from one another.
• Lastly, it must be appreciated that the immediate consequence of these measures will be an outburst of violent rage, by jihadists who sense that the jig is up. We should be prepared for this outburst, but not deterred by it.

So there you have it, Harrumpfers, my plan for reclaiming the Australia I knew in my youth. Judging by the twaddle coming out of Albanese’s mouth, it ain’t gunna happen, is it?