I grew up on Bondi.
My dad was a lifesaver at the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club for more than 40 years before he died of cancer in 2004.
Bondi Surf Bathers is the surf club in the middle of the beach, between the Pavilion and the park where Islamists shot up Chanukah By The Sea on Sunday.
The surf club had their Christmas Party on right next to it. Happy Hour was 5pm to 7pm, then Secret Santa.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah: SURPRISE.
Two Islamists jumped out of a silver sedan near the footbridge behind the club.
Immediately they were spotted by a local Russian Jewish couple 69-year-old Boris Gurman and his wife Sofia, 61. Without thinking twice, they ran at the gunmen. Boris managed to tackle 50-year-old terrorist Sajid Akram and got his rifle off him.
But Sajid grabbed another firearm and gunned the pair down. They died hugging each other on the pavement of Campbell Parade, beside a Honda draped in an Islamic State flag.
Dash cam footage of the Gurmans’ life-and-death struggle below, via journalist Rukshan Fernando.
That’s how the carnage began on Sunday night. The father-and-son team who devoted their lives to killing for Allah executed 15 random strangers on Bondi Beach, including a 10-year-old girl, Matilda, because they were Jews. They injured 40 others.
Many more people would have died but for the volunteer lifesavers at the Bondi Surf Club and North Bondi Surf Club.
They ran into live gunfire to perform CPR and treat gunshot trauma, as the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
By luck or providence the Bondi Surf Club had only just finished a first aid training course the week before, so their kit was stocked up and oxygen bottles were full. They used it all up on Sunday.
Their rescue boards became stretchers. They were covered in blood so police threw them out as a biohazard, according to a clubbie I spoke to on Thursday. They lost a lot of expensive gear. On Monday afternoon I even saw the loudhailers in a rubbish bin.
Other clubs have lent them boards but the Bondi Surf Club was still shut as of Friday. The volunteers are all traumatised. They fought desperately to save lives. Some of them were covered with blood that spurted out with every compression of the CPR. Others are suffering “survivor’s guilt” because they weren’t there.
DONATE TO THE BONDI SURF CLUBS HERE
During the attack about 200 people hid inside the surf club including a young teenager, the son of “Bondi Danny”. Danny, 45, was at the Hanukkah party with his four children. He doesn’t want to give his last name.
He told me his story Monday afternoon (video below) behind the Pavilion. We were all waiting for Avi Yemini, legend reporter for Rebel News. The entire world’s media was descending on Bondi but it’s Avi who we respect.
I live nearby, so I heard the sirens and choppers about 7.30pm on Sunday as I went to bed.
There’s often choppers and sirens now, in the two years since the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists began holding weekly Hamas support rallies in Hyde Park, whipping up hate over the war in Gaza.
It’s nothing to do with us, it’s a foreign war, but they just kept hammering it until their followers came to the Eastern Suburbs to set fire to cars and vandalise Bondi.
The choppers and sirens were going again on Tuesday night, and choppers every night for a week now. They are incredibly loud, right overhead. Campbell Parade was blocked until Thursday, the surf club and park locked down behind police tape.
It was Friday before you could walk down the promenade.
Barricades are all knocked over near the Pavilion, maybe as people fled in fear. Umbrellas from the cafe are all askew. People’s beach towels have been flapping on the fence for days now, nobody has come for them.
Monday afternoon I trudged the sand behind a bunch of Trojans, working on a nearby job. They had flowers in their hands. Their boss had sent them all down to pay their respects.
Shocked locals were putting flowers wherever they could, but soon people started gathering behind the Pavilion.
One lovely man dragged a table and chairs from his house down to the Promenade, in case anyone wanted to talk.
Dylan Verrier, 38, from North Bondi had experience supporting others in a Men’s Shed and felt he could help that way.
“I didn’t really know what else to do,” he said on Monday.
So he got a pen and scrawled his message on a piece of paper: “Here to listen”.
He had spoken to about four people before I got there - and he really was a very genuine listener.
He had been walking past the Hanukkah celebration just 20 minutes earlier. When he heard the gunshots he thought they were fireworks - but then they kept going.
Dylan reminds me of everything good about Bondi.
This is the Bondi I know. Dylan was just like that rainbow below.
Later, behind the pavilion where people gathered to lay flowers, there were flouro-vest “mental health support” people wandering around - but they seemed official and government provided. I didn’t really want to talk to them. It’s not authentic. Locals want to talk to other locals about what happened, even people they don’t know, so they can sort out in their heads for themselves what happened. Without interference.
Slowly the people came, on Monday afternoon it was mostly Bondi residents and the Jewish community.
After some words of peace, a mournful song swelled from the crowd. It was the Hatikvah, the hope, adopted as the national anthem of the world’s only Jewish nation. It was gentle and dignified. It rippled like sadness and comfort, enveloping everyone regardless of faith. (video below)
As one, we turned to Australia’s anthem, the bright optimism of its lyrics oddly incongruous with the solemn tone. We need a sad anthem for times like this: “In joyful strains then let us sing” just doesn’t fly - but it’s all we had.
I met a teenager who was still in shock at what happened. He couldn’t cry yet because it didn’t seem real. He had been talking to one of the slain rabbis minutes before the shooting. They had been telling each other jokes.
“I just can’t believe it, he was alive and we were joking, and the next minute he’s dead,” he said on Monday.
About 16 of his friends had been shot, some of them killed, he said.
He had just walked across Campbell Parade when he looked back and saw the chaos unfold. With great presence of mind he started filming and caught some of the first shots as a big black ute sped away in panic. He has given his footage to the police.
Sadly I learnt on Monday that the courageous man seen running in to throw bricks at one of the gunmen was shot dead. He was 62-year-old grandfather Reuven Morrison, a Jewish man from the local community (pictured below, centre bottom).
Dazed locals wandered around Archer Park and the concrete bridge on Thursday after police rolled back the tape, taking photos.
They are not ghouls or tourists. They need to do this to process what has happened. It’s important to bear witness, to support and to see.
Like an open casket at a funeral people need to see it for themselves. They need to see the bullet holes in the concrete and get it straight in their minds otherwise it doesn’t seem real. It’s another planet. It’s like going to Mars, even though it’s Bondi.
The Jewish community is hosting the menorah lighting ceremonies for the remaining days of Hanukkah down behind the Pavilion at the floral tribute, and they’ve invited everyone to come. One Rabbi said on Thursday that he met a man who flew down from the Gold Coast to lay flowers. It means so much to everyone just to see that others show up and care, even if they are complete strangers.
On Friday morning Bondi hosted the biggest paddle-out ever seen for the victims, video below via AustraliaUnseen.
Eastern suburbs Jewish community under attack for two years
In Bondi we felt it was only a matter of time.
Almost every weekend since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, starting the two-year Gaza war, hate has been whipped up at protests in Hyde Park, Sydney.
They were held by the red-green alliance of Islam and leftists, supported by the Australian Greens and the New South Wales Council For Civil Liberties.
I wrote about it here, here, here, here, here, here, and especially here.
The Jewish community has had to watch as Hamas support rallies got preferential policing - a problem caused by political lobbying from groups like Islamophobia Register Australia who want the political class to turn Australia’s security apparatus away from Muslims and onto the alleged “far right”.
Sydney barrister Peter Lavacs had to fly to Melbourne to get police there to actually do their jobs and arrest the Hamas supporting thugs who beat up and intimidated Jews, as Frank Chung reported here.
While the red-green alliance commandeered the Sydney CBD almost every weekend and made a nuisance at events, the police would only move on those who opposed them.
In 2024, a Jewish man was detained outside a Sydney synagogue for waving an Israeli flag at Hamas supporters across the street, as The Jerusalem Post reported here.
Another lone Jewish man was arrested for breaching the peace - for waving the Australian flag against a Hamas support rally in Hyde Park, as Daily Mail reported here.
When I went to see British author Douglas Murray speak in March last year, I was called a “Zionist Pig” and a “B*tch” by the Hamas supporters outside who were guarded by police. Story here.
That may be why Bondi attack victims were so quick to criticise police as being too slow to respond on Sunday.
But they weren’t too slow.
It was not the fault of police. They did their best in the confusion of a surprise attack.
They can’t be everywhere all the time. If you want them to be then you are asking for a police state.
The fault is with immigration. These Islamists should not have been in Australia in the first place.
Abul Rizvi managed Australia’s migration program from 1995 to 2007 and was awarded the Public Service Medal in 2004 for his contributions to its development.
Rizvi himself says he was the architect of “strengthened” character provisions in 1998.
Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram moved to Australia in 1998 under Rizvi’s watch on a student visa. Akram’s terrorist son Naveed was born three years later in Australia in 2001.
As Clare Lehmann has written (paywalled, summary via Drew Pavlou), it was Rizvi who created a back door path to permanent residency for international students.
This policy turned our universities into visa factories for cash and flooded us with unsustainable levels of migration.
Rizvi immediately complained on Twitter and said the student visa policy changes he brought in took effect in 2001. His full response is here.
Many people here are angry that Australia’s political class has allowed and even encouraged anti-semitism to flourish.
Devastated locals Natalie Dumer (left) and her friend Inna, let it rip on Monday (video below).
Wentworth MP Allegra Spender (Teal) was there on Monday, listening, cocking her head and looking serious as several people (including me) told her we want to shut the borders. We’ve had enough Muslim migration, that community is already big and influential enough.
There’s a problem with Islam: it comes with jihadism baked into the cake. This is unique to Islam, an unpleasant ideology that is expansionist, supremacist, totalitarian and aggressively intolerant. It’s the same everywhere, and it doesn’t matter how many nice (unobservant) moderates there are. You can see the unhappy truth of this at The Religion Of Peace website which quantifies the “misunderstandings of Islam” worldwide.
You can see it in Pew Research’s comprehensive and global survey in 2013 of Islamic attitudes to the sharia. A ridiculously large percentage of Muslims want sharia courts with legally enforceable rulings (see chart below).
This is treason, in a Western country, as it seeks to undermine and supplant the laws we pass through our parliament, replacing them with religious laws.
When large numbers of Muslims from these countries migrate to Australia, a percentage of them bring these attitudes with them, and quickly forget their oath of allegiance.
I have documented three disturbing trends on this Substack: the Australian Greens alliance with Islam here and here, Islam’s attempted colonisation of Aboriginal people, and the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties abandonment of civil rights advocacy in favour of the Palestinian Action Group Sydney here and here. This included winning them the Harbour Bridge for their propaganda protest shortly before the Gaza ceasefire. It also included lobbying for “religion” to be excised from the definition of “terrorism” so that Australia’s security focus could be turned away from potential Islamist violence and onto conservatives who they don’t like.
The NSWCCL did not respond to emailed questions on whether they would now change their stance.
Just like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Allegra Spender didn’t want to acknowledge any problem with Islam.
She posed the concept that in Australia we judge people as individuals only, therefore it’s not about Muslims - and what would I say to that. It sounds so deceptively reasonable, most fair-minded Aussies want to agree with that. It’s natural to us.
Especially as one of the heroes of the day was Muslim man Ahmed al Ahmed, who jumped one of the gunmen and wrestled his gun from him. Ahmed was a true hero, and he saved many lives. He was shot as he did so. The gratitude poured out and more than a million dollars had already been donated to him by Monday as he recovered in hospital, as Reuters reports.
But it makes no difference: Islam is incompatible with Western civilisation. Not all religions are the same.
Australia needs to shut the borders to further Muslim migration because jihadism is unique to Islam and the community is too big and too politically powerful already to effectively police. The evidence for that is Sunday’s shooting.
It’s arrogant to project Australian values onto other cultures that have vastly different moral priors, to insist we are all the same and the only enemy is “hate”.
Western civilisation is individualistic - you can be a Buddhist today and a Hindu tomorrow and if you don’t like that, well just be an atheist.
Islam doesn’t work like that. The individual submits to Islam. It comes with an inbuilt legal and political system. Muslims who leave Islam can be severely punished by anything from ostracism to death.
Plenty of Muslims ignore the worst directives of Islam, but the problem is in the texts and not just in the reader. So when you open your borders to large scale Islamic migration then these problems also come in.
When jihadis attack, they are not doing it out of “hate”. They don’t want to “sow division” or any such pabulum.
No - they do it to further the expansion of Islam in the West. They do it, because it works. They see themselves in the greater arc of Islam’s conquests.
They do it because there is a large political machine behind them that turns their violent act into political gold.
They don’t need a conquering army - this is asymetric warfare and the main weapon is the propaganda and political lobbying machine that embedded here while we looked away.
The playbook is the same every time. There is a random Islamist attack. Within a week come the stories (often exaggerated or untrue) of Islamophobia. Innocent Muslims then replace the dead and injured as the biggest victims of the attack in the public narrative. Islam becomes the victim not the perpetrator. This leads to special consideration, sympathy, funded projects to build social cohesion, funding from government for advocacy groups like Islamophobia Register Australia, preferential jobs at media houses to represent “the community”, increased levels of Muslim migration which swells electoral influence, preferential policing, and a seat at the table with power brokers.
We don’t need or want any of this - just shut the borders.
Many Muslims condemned the attack, but others celebrated it.
As ex-Muslim Harris Sultan has explained (video below) - when Western countries get serious about shutting the borders, they will start changing their attitudes.
Projecting Western moral priors onto other cultures, the false belief that all people are the same - just with different clothes, yummy food and funny accents - is the primary error from which all these problems flow.
The people who project this error are the ones responsible for jemmying open the borders for an incompatible culture to settle. It’s their fault.
This “we are all the same” bs is why Australians fail to defend the borders against an aggressive and colonising ideology. Australia’s political class refuses to recognise that Islam is colonising us, even as it bemoans our British colonial history.
Infinity multiculturalism needs to go because concepts of “good” are culturally determined and are sometimes so vastly different as to be incompatible.
That is why the world has different countries - so people who are significantly different can live under the legal structures that their vastly different cultures create.
That is why the world of Islam has 56 countries who all co-ordinate on religious lines at the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.
They have their countries and we have ours.
The surveillance state won’t work. The multicultural police state won’t work. Plans to reduce anti-semitism won’t work. Gun restrictions won’t work. Free speech restrictions won’t work. Protest restrictions won’t work.
Shutting the borders will work.
Shut the borders.
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Updated Wednesday 17 December, Saturday 20 December: added more video and large edits. 11 March 2026 - took out a stray punctuation mark.
Feel free to reuse any content with a credit. All my Substacks are free and in the public interest. Since this one discusses Islam, I’ll have to turn the comments off as it’s just too messy to moderate.