Bondi Beach Attack: Nationality Focus Overshadows Patterns In Religious Extremism |
After the Bondi Beach attack, public debate immediately shifted to discuss the nationality of the perpetrators, whether they were Indian, Pakistani, or Afghan, as if citizenship could explain their actions. Some outlets even celebrated the news that they were not Pakistani. One leading newspaper ran a front-page headline: “Sydney Shooting Terrorist Our Citizen, India Admits”. This relief was even more evident on social media, where early guesses about their nationality revealed more about collective relief than about the act itself. People seemed more focused on who the attackers were, rather than on the act itself.
Yet what went mostly unmentioned was far more significant: both attackers were Muslim. The focus on nationality offered comfort, but it distracted the public from asking a more difficult question: why do such violent attacks so often come from within one particular religious community? This sense of relief exposes a deep-seated tendency to avoid, our unwillingness to acknowledge, and repeating patterns of violence.
Even if immediate reactions are excused in the name of the so-called "fifth-generation war", such patterns are visible. Contemporary acts of individual religious terrorism, especially far from active war zones, disproportionately involve Muslims, while they rarely involve Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, or agnostics. This pattern is not imagination; it is fact.
Europol’s latest EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report covering 2024 records 24 jihadist attacks, far more than any other ideological category, with 289 arrests linked to jihadist activity. This is compared to just a handful for far-right or left-wing extremism. In Australia, almost every terrorist plot or attack since 2014 has been jihadist-inspired, including nine........