Thirteen Jews and two others were murdered in cold blood, and dozens more maimed, while relaxing, laughing, eating and singing - gathered at Bondi Beach to mark the start of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah on December 14.

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This was the deadliest terror attack in Australia's history and the deadliest terror attack against Jews anywhere in the world since Hamas' hordes murdered 1200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

October 7 left Australia's Jewish community deeply shocked - yet December 14 did not.

December 14 was the predictable culmination of a climate that had been building for years - an attack cooked over the fanned flames of an Islamist-leftist convergence that many preferred not to confront.

Islamist terrorism has targeted and taken Australian lives, at home and abroad, for more than two decades.

Concurrently, significant parts of the Australian left have embraced increasingly extreme positions on Israel and "Zionism", often divorced from both basic morality and factual reality.

October 7 proved catalytic, cementing an unholy alliance in which elements of the left were prepared to overlook the nature of their Islamist fellow travellers in pursuit of a common enemy: Israel and, by extension, all pro-Israel Jews and "Zionists", who they were determined to paint collectively as all "racists", "genocide-enablers", "baby killers", "terrorists" and modern day Nazis.

For two years, Australia's Jewish community warned that unless governments and authorities confronted these concurrent and connected trends - the normalisation of anti-Semitism, the indulgence of ubiquitous anti-Israel protesters repeatedly breaking the law, and anti-Semitic sermons by some imams - the trajectory would end in bloodshed.

Those warnings were........

© Canberra Times