The Bondi Beach antisemitic terrorist attack was not a rupture. It was the final movement of a process that had been unfolding in plain sight for two years.
Hatred was allowed to circulate long before violence appeared. Antisemitic riots were treated as expressions rather than warnings. Sermons that blurred faith into racial hostility were excused as cultural differences. Authority hesitated, and hesitation was read as tolerance. Over time, the boundary between speech and action dissolved.
Violence does not need passion to erupt. It needs permission.
That permission arrived on November 7, 2025, in the form of a two-page directive issued by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The document was explicit. It called for attacks on Jews, Christians, and Western interests worldwide. It named the United Arab Emirates as a priority target, describing it as an “agent of the Jews,” and placed it alongside the United States, Britain, France, and Israel.
This was not abstract propaganda. It was a sequencing document. When ideology circulates freely, when hostility is rehearsed publicly, an order does not radicalize – it activates.
Bondi Beach became the first site not because Australia was uniquely culpable but because its Jewish community had already been rendered visible, isolated, and exposed. It was the first execution point, not the last. The text itself made that clear.
The same logic extends beyond Sydney. It leads directly to Sudan.
In the 1990s, Sudan sheltered Osama bin Laden and hosted terrorist training camps. The failure to dismantle those networks before bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan culminated in the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. The wars that followed cost over one million lives. The lesson was never learned: Ignored infrastructure does not disappear – it matures.
'Hamas of Africa'
Today, Sudan’s army operates within the same ideological ecosystem. Often referred to regionally as the “Hamas of Africa,” it celebrated October 7 and refused to condemn it. It maintains links to financiers and networks connected to Hamas. One such figure, Abdelbasit Hamza, was designated by Washington for financing Hamas’s military wing, only to be released and rehabilitated after the 2021 coup led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
The cost is visible and measurable. In Sudan’s current civil war, over 45,000 women and children have been killed through airstrikes alone. Hospitals and churches have been destroyed. Millions of Muslims have been starved. Two million Christians have been killed over the decades. This is not collateral damage; it is a system that treats entire populations as expendable.
Sudan has again become permissive terrain. Iranian drones and Turkish weapons operate alongside Sudanese forces. Houthi militants have been transferred into the country, extending an arc of instability along the Red Sea – through which 15% of global seaborne trade passes. Ceasefires are rejected not because peace is unclear but because control depends on perpetual conflict.
The same blindness now repeats elsewhere. Movements rooted in the same ideological lineage are protected in Western capitals under the banner of expression, even as their consequences unfold abroad. Texts that inspired generations of jihadists are defended as opinion. Their results are counted in graves.
Al-Qaeda’s call named its targets. Jews. Christians. The UAE. France. Britain. The United States. The document was read. It was understood. And it was set aside – until it arrived at Bondi Beach.
What happened in Sydney should not be treated as an isolated tragedy. It is a signal of what follows when boundaries erode, warnings are normalized, and ideology is mistaken for noise.
History does not punish indifference immediately. It waits. Then it arrives – first at the most exposed community, and later everywhere else.
The writer is a political strategist and global geopolitics analyst from the UAE.