Two months ago I wrote: “If they didn’t understand it then, they never will: the next October 7 will be in Europe.” I got the location wrong.
This time they struck Australia, the Brave New West, the country convinced that the world is an endless summer afternoon, lulled by geographic isolation and its presumed multicultural harmony, and which today went to sleep after the most serious terrorist attack in its history. It discovered that it is not immune to the long shadow of Islamization that devours the West.
“Australia is the most successful multicultural country in the world.”
This description appears on the website of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. That it is multicultural is a fact (one third of the population was born abroad). That it is successful, much less so.
Bondi Beach, Sydney, one of Australia’s most famous beaches.
While a Jewish event for the Festival of Lights was taking place, twelve people were killed in an attack on them carried out by two Islamic terrorists, one of whom was a university student.
And Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese cannot even bring himself to mention Jews once. Multiculturalism truly is a mental illness.
The videos are chilling and recall beach massacres such as Sousse, in Tunisia (where the victims were British tourists), and Bali, in Indonesia (where, in that case, Australians themselves were killed in large numbers).
Australia-this archipelago of eternal Peter Pans raised among beaches and Sunday barbecues-has cultivated a lineage of adult-children, optimistic by constitution, cocky by habit, convinced that the world is a big playground with soft rules and benevolent referees. The Westerner who has developed a naïve trust in others: the neighbor is always a mate, the different one a future friend after a beer, danger something that happens on television.
But Islamic integralism is not a playground bully: it is an ontological abyss that demands submission or death.
And it was not hard to understand that it would end this way.
If you are among those Australians who think the real problem is Pauline Hanson wearing a burqa in Parliament, well, expect more massacres in the future: after all, you keep voting for this.
A night of terrifying violence for Melbourne’s Jewish community.
Australia is the scene of threatening anti-Zionist and antisemitic demonstrations for the past two years. From the crowd chanting “where is the Jew” in front of the Sydney Opera House as well as “gas the Jews! Allahu Akbar.” less than forty-eight hours after the October 7 massacre, to the discovery of a car full of explosives destined for a Sydney synagogue, we have now advanced to organized terror. They were not saying “ceasefire” then, but “burn the synagogues.”
But nobody stopped them then and so they didn't stop there.
There was an attempted arson at the residence of the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (the highest Jewish body). Then a Jewish bakery was vandalized.
In July, the Israeli restaurant Miznon was attacked amid shouts of “death to the Israel Defense Forces.” A synagogue door was set on fire.
In December, the Adass Israel synagogue was set on fire in the city’s southeastern district, and hours later cars owned by a Jewish shopkeeper were vandalized and torched. Inside the synagogue were the first worshippers for Shabbat, who managed to escape from the back. One of them suffered burns. The building was severely damaged, with sacred Jewish books and furnishings destroyed.
Meanwhile, a Jewish daycare center in Sydney was set on fire in January, after the synagogue had been burned in Melbourne.
In February, two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, were suspended from their duties after declaring during a live stream, while on night shift at the hospital, that they would kill their Israeli patients. For the first time in the West, healthcare workers openly declared their intention to kill patients based on nationality.
Australia is the country that hosts the largest percentage of Holocaust survivors outside Israel, and antisemitism is now out of control.
Among them and the rest of Australian Jews there is a sense of abandonment in a country where multiculturalism has always been a party.
Daniel Aghion, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, recalled that similar episodes do not affect other ethnic or religious groups linked to international conflicts: “We do not see Russian or Sudanese restaurants attacked, only Israeli ones, run by Australian citizens.” Milette Shamir, vice president of Tel Aviv University, at an academic event at the University of Sydney, was greeted by a crowd that tried to drive her away, forcing her to barricade herself for a long time together with her staff.
Three years ago, the leaders of Australian Jewish communities asked me to explain what was happening in Europe. They titled the meeting “Europe’s Multicultural Volcano,” because they knew it would happen to them too within a few years.
Sunny, open, and multicultural: a melting pot where Asians, Europeans, and Middle Easterners coexisted in a symphony of barbecues and cricket, protected by the ocean like a divine moat. Australia, the lucky country, heir to the British colonial dream, had reinvented itself as a bastion of liberal progress.
It welcomed waves of migrants with open arms. Since the postwar period, millions of immigrants have reshaped the social fabric, transforming a land of convicts and pioneers into an ethnic mosaic. Yet this idyllic narrative ignores the brutal reality: not all cultures blend. In Sydney, neighborhoods like Lakemba or Auburn teem with mosques and communities where integration is an illusion, and where young people nourished by online preachers harbor resentment toward the host West.
The West continues to believe that being nice is enough to disarm fanaticism, and that openness is a sufficient shield against those who consider openness a weakness to exploit.
On social media, German MP Joana Cotar reminds us: “The terrorist attack in Australia is the Intifada that is regularly invoked during the demonstrations you proudly attend wearing the keffiyeh, dear green left-wing lunatics.”
The followers of this new antisemitic magma do not give the Nazi salute, do not goose-step, and do not wear black shirts. They march at ‘peace’ rallies in colorful T-shirts and friendship bracelets between peoples, alongside those who shout “Allahu Akbar.” A monster grown among those who do not know they are fragile, yet continue to turn the other cheek and believe that dialogue can enchant those who have already chosen death as their final argument.
In Sydney there had just been the stabbing of the Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during an Orthodox mass.
First the Assyrian Christians, then the Jews of Bondi, and who knows tomorrow. People weep, but multicultural tears do not wash away the blood shed by radical Islam for the political cowardice of those who are too innocent to recognize evil when it does not wear the uniform of a cartoon villain.
The lucky West must awaken, or its sun will soon set in a twilight of terror.