Two years ago, on October 7, 2023, a crowd gathered in the city of Sydney, Australia, to celebrate the massacre of Jews that had been committed in southern Israel October 7 and to call for more such massacres in front of the Sydney Opera House. Videos from the gathering appeared to show celebrants chanting “gas the Jews,” among other violently antisemitic mantras.
Somehow, the Sydney police took the same video that seemed very clear to the rest of the world and determined that the entire world was wrong, and what was said as actually “where’s the Jews,” as if that somehow made it any better.
The Jews were found - less than ten kilometers away on December 14, 2025, celebrating the start of the Hanukkah holiday at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where two terrorists opened fire on Jewish families, murdering at least 16 innocent people as of press time.
Over the last two years, the kind of evil that was committed at Bondi Beach was coddled, excused, pandered to, downplayed, and denied by Western leaders and media outlets who refused to recognize that celebrating the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is not an act of righteous anger, but an act of genocidal hatred.
-Every chant of “Globalize the Intifada” was a call for massacres like the Sydney Hanukkah Massacre.
-When protesters took over college campuses and shouted that they wanted to see “every day” be October 7 or that there should be “10,000 October 7s,” they were calling for violence and death on an even greater scale, far beyond the horrors that were committed on Sunday.
-When people gather in front of synagogues and shout that they want to make Jews “afraid,” this is what they want Jews to be afraid of.
For two years, we’ve begged leaders, university officials, and media outlets to take the post-October 7 explosion of antisemitism seriously, only to watch as university administrations folded in the face of Nazi-level hate. Leaders across the West competed to see who could get the most votes from the “let’s kill all the Jews” demographic, and the mainstream media treated not only calls for a second Holocaust, but outright violence against Jews as legitimate free speech.
Warnings went unheeded. Antisemitism could never be condemned on its own and always had to paired with Islamophobia, even if hate crimes against Jews outnumbered hate crimes against Muslims many times over.
Jews have been constantly gaslit with the nonsense that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” even as Jews outside of Israel were repeatedly targeted, harassed, and attacked in the name of this mythological non-antisemitic anti-Zionism whose adherents call for the murder of millions of Jews every day.
There is a clear line from the chants of “where’s the Jews” in October 2023 to the slaughter of Jews just a few miles away in December 2025. That line could have been cut off had the authorities treated the problem with the seriousness it demanded instead of ignoring or even pandering to the antisemites.
What happened in Sydney is a wake-up call to the world. Stop ignoring antisemitism. Stop excusing antisemitism. Stop trying to please antisemites. Because when people march in support of murdering Jews, when people call for Jews to be made afraid outside of synagogues, when people with murder in their hearts feel that the government will either turn a blind eye to their violence or outright defend and encourage it, the only possible result is a crime like the Sydney Hanukkah Massacre.
Gary Willig is a veteran Arutz Sheva staff member.