On hearing the news of the beachside murders at Bondi on Sunday, Justinian put down his pen. All the stories we wanted to file seemed irrelevant.

There is still a feeling of dissonance, particularly as the tragedy has become politicised in a manner that is as dishonest as it is ugly.

Former PM Scott Morrison was hanging about at Bondi Beach on Monday (December 15) waiting to be interviewed.

His moment of irrelevance arrived when he told the ABC that there was a direct line between the Albanese government’s failure to implement what Jillian Segal wanted and the mass murder of Jews at the beach.

His former ministerial colleague Josh Frydenberg has been making ever more inflammatory charges – that it’s all down to the government’s “abandonment” of Jews and failure to stem the 300 percent rise in antisemitic incidents since the Gaza war.

It’s as though he’s back on the stump, running for office.

Frydenberg, along with others, knows full well that antisemitism and Israel’s war in Gaza are handmaidens, and to suggest that the heightened atmosphere of anti-Jewish sentiment came out of thin air is nothing less than disingenuous.

Benjamin Netanyahu firmly believes that Australia’s recognition of Palestine as a state has inflamed antisemitism in Australia, while shills at the Murdoch press are positively joyful about the opportunity to lay personal responsibility for the terror attack at the feet of Anthony Albanese.

If Dutton had been in charge, things would have been much better – surely?

A letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald kindly reminded us that while Netanyahu attacks Albanese for not doing enough to protect the Jewish community, “yet on his watch, on October 7, 2023, Israel suffered its worst-ever tragedy”.

Amid the noise, there are some important and rational contributions, including from two journalists, both Jewish.

David Leser in The Sydney Morning Herald is sceptical about Jillian Segal’s proscriptive and punitive approach to tackling antisemitism.

It’s a “strategy that, in this Jewish man’s opinion, holds terrifying implications for how justifiable criticism of Israel will be further conflated with antisemitism”.

Leser suggests we pause to think about the men in black shooting innocent Australians and Ahmed al Ahmed running towards the gunman and disarming him.

Michael Visontay is another Sydney journalist and commissioning editor of the Jewish Independent. In an interview with The New Yorker soon after Sunday’s attack he drew some neat distinctions between Judaism in Sydney and Melbourne – although Jews in both cities predominantly are descendants of Holocaust survivors, which has shaped the “cultural and religious antennas very, very strongly”.

He believes that Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood was in response to Israel’s policy of starvation in Gaza.

“That is what triggered Netanyahu to lash out at the Australian government and accuse it of fostering antisemitism – a connection that was tenuous at best.”

Tellingly, he does say that it has become almost impossible “to separate the arguments of legitimate criticism from the toxic messaging. So many Jews have not seen the criticism as legitimate because they’ve got this view of, ‘Well, they just hate us, and this criticism is indistinguishable from hatred’.”

Contrary to most of the overheated rhetoric from political point scorers, which includes John Howard’s recent call for “moral leadership”, Visontay does not believe the Australian government has failed in its response to antisemitism.

He believes that Labor has also tried to recognise the legitimate concerns of the considerable Muslim community in this country.

“And that has been interpreted by a lot of people, of Jews, as being not sufficiently protective of the Jewish community.”

Sajid and Naveed Akram knew they were killing Jews. Their hate was informed by radicalisation, and like all hate, it’s a product of blind ignorance.

One more thing needs to be said. A serious commission of inquiry is essential – not an “independent investigation” by the NSW Police. Commissioner Mal Lanyon has already announced that the police response was adequate.

This is not so, nor is it true of ASIO’s intelligence gathering and its communication to other agencies.

Let’s not forget that Lanyon runs a Police Force that approved a neo-Nazi rally outside Parliament House in Macquarie Street on November 8, 2025.