Bondi shows heroes still far outnumber 'enemies within'

It has been reported that the younger man, named as Naveed Akram, had links to Isis and had been identified as a potential threat by the Australian authorities in 2019.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Whether the authorities failed to act cannot yet be determined - but there is no room for complacency so far as Islamist terror is concerned.

There will now be months of security service review, journalistic investigation, maybe an official inquiry or two, and certainly grotesque mutterings about Muslims being an “enemy within”. But the essential facts about the Bondi attack, which left 15 dead, are already clear.

It was antisemitism pure and simple, and it fed off the oldest trope in the antisemitic world, the notion of a global conspiracy in which every Jew - no matter how irreligious or pro-Palestinian, no matter how observant or how secular, no matter how much of their heritage or upbringing could in some way be characterised as Jewish - is held accountable for decisions taken around Benjamin Netanyhu’s cabinet table.

People who happen to be Jewish are right to bitterly resent being treated like they are in the Israel Defense Forces, committing a war crime. And, by the same token, the worst way to react to such an outrage would be to try to blame all Muslims for the lives taken on a beach, many thousands of miles away, by people they do not know.

Indeed, the heroic actions taken by Ahmed al-Ahmed, the 43-year-old Syrian-born father-of-two who was badly injured wrestling a gun from one of the Bondi attackers, suggest that, rather than an enemy within, it would be more apt to speak up about the heroes within.