The ideological architecture that excuses, contextualises, or sanitizes violence against Jews is strikingly similar to the one that has, for decades, normalised Islamist terrorism against India. In Western discourse, Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks … are too often framed through the language of grievance, insurgency, or regional complexity rather than named plainly for what they are: pure acts of ideologically driven terrorism targeting Indians. – Raja Muneeb

The attack on the Jewish community celebrating the Hannukah festival at Bondi Beach, Sydney, that was carried out by a father and son duo, leaving thirteen people dead and around two dozen injured, did not erupt from a vacuum. It was not an inexplicable act of sudden madness, nor can it be responsibly explained away as an isolated incident disconnected from broader ideological currents. Rather, it represents the most violent endpoint of a long, cumulative process, one in which antisemitism has been normalised, laundered through the language of activism, legitimised within Western societies through their educational and media ecosystems, and amplified by social media into a moral permission structure for violence against Jews anywhere in the world.

This is not a result of a botched-up immigration policy, ethnic assimilation, or any particular faith as such. It is an argument about ideas, wherein certain forms of hatred that once were universally recognised as toxic and unacceptable have now been repackaged as political virtue, and how radical Islamist actors exploit this permissive environment to move from grievance to justification and from justification to terror.

For years now, Western societies have struggled to draw a clear line between legitimate criticism of Israeli state policy and the resurrection of classic antisemitic tropes. That line has not merely blurred but, in many spaces, has been deliberately erased. On university campuses, slogans like “River to the Sea,” once associated with violent movements, now fashionably coexist with calls for “intifada”, chants that erase Israel’s right to exist, and rhetoric that frames Jews globally as legitimate targets. This behaviour has been defended as expressions of resistance rather than being recognised as incitement to violence. What was once a fringe discourse has now been absorbed into student politics, activist coalitions, media debates, and academic forums, often without serious scrutiny of its historical and ideological baggage.

This all matters because language shapes the moral boundaries of a society. When violence is framed as resistance, when terror is contextualised rather than condemned, and when antisemitism is recast as anti-imperial critique, the social taboo against targeting Jews weakens. The effect is cumulative. Each protest slogan, each academic paper that romanticises revolutionary violence, each media commentary that explains rather than confronts antisemitic aggression, contributes to an environment in which hatred becomes ordinary and outrage selective.

Western journalism has not been immune to this shift. Sections of the media ecosystem, particularly opinion columns, activist journalism, and certain digital platforms, have increasingly adopted the framing vocabulary of ideological movements rather than maintaining analytical distance from them. Violence against Jews is too often narrated through a prism of provocation, grievance, or geopolitical abstraction, while violence against others is treated as morally self-evident atrocity. This asymmetry does not merely distort public understanding; it signals to radical actors that some victims matter less than others.

Academia, too, has largely played an adverse role. In parts of the humanities and social sciences, post-colonial frameworks have hardened into ideological orthodoxy. Complex conflicts are flattened into binaries of oppressor and oppressed, and entire populations are assigned collective moral identities. Within this schema, Jews are frequently stripped of historical vulnerability and recast as extensions of Western power, regardless of geography or individual circumstance. Once a group is dehumanised at the level of theory, it becomes easier for others to dehumanise it in practice.

Social media then completes the circuit. Algorithms reward outrage, grievance, and absolutism. Videos of protests, selectively edited conflict footage, and emotionally charged narratives circulate without context, accelerating radicalisation far faster than traditional ideological pipelines ever could. For individuals already predisposed to grievance, particularly those exposed to Islamist narratives that frame global politics as a civilisational war, this digital ecosystem offers constant validation. Violence is no longer unthinkable; it is rehearsed rhetorically long before it is physically enacted.

This is where radical Islamist ideology truly enters the picture. Groups and networks that traffic in political Islam have long understood the value of narrative convergence. They do not need to create antisemitism from scratch; they merely need to tap into existing discursive currents and redirect them toward action. When Western spaces legitimise the language of “intifada” without acknowledging its violent history, Islamist radicals misconstrue it as an endorsement. When journalists contextualise antisemitic attacks as expressions of anger, extremists hear absolution. When campuses treat calls for the erasure of Israel as protected speech divorced from consequence, radicals see an opportunity.

The Bondi Beach attack, viewed through this lens, is not simply an act of personal extremism. It is the terminal point of a broader ideological supply chain, one that begins with intellectual indulgence, passes through activist normalisation, is accelerated by social media, and is ultimately weaponised by those who believe violence is not only justified but righteous.

It is time now for Western societies to confront an uncomfortable truth: tolerance for intolerance does not remain neutral. When antisemitism is selectively excused, it does not stay rhetorical. It metastasizes into violence and terrorism. The failure to enforce moral clarity, especially within the institutions that shape young minds and public discourse, creates a permissive environment in which radical actors operate with confidence rather than fear of reprisal.

This does not require suppressing debate or criticism of governments. It requires intellectual honesty. It requires recognising that calls for violent uprising are not metaphors, that historical hatreds do not become benign when wrapped in progressive language, and that terrorism does not emerge spontaneously; it is meticulously cultivated.

Violence against Jews anywhere in the world is not a foreign problem imported from distant conflicts. It is a mirror reflecting back the ideas we tolerate, the language we excuse, and the silences we mistake for neutrality.

This same ecosystem of legitimized violence does not stop at Europe or Australia, nor is it confined to antisemitism alone. The ideological architecture that excuses, contextualises, or sanitizes violence against Jews is strikingly similar to the one that has, for decades, normalised Islamist terrorism against India. In Western discourse, Pakistan-sponsored terror attacks, from Mumbai in 2008 to Pahalgam in 2025, are too often framed through the language of grievance, insurgency, or regional complexity rather than named plainly for what they are: pure acts of ideologically driven terrorism targeting Indians.

The moral evasions are familiar. Just as antisemitic violence is frequently absorbed into debates about “resistance”, jihadist attacks against Indians are softened through narratives of political dispute, human rights asymmetry, or historical and religious resentment. The result is the same: reluctance to draw clear moral lines leads to an intellectual environment in which terror becomes explicable before it is condemned.

This parallel runs deeper than rhetoric. Islamist networks operating from Pakistan have long relied on the same narrative permissiveness cultivated in Western academic, journalistic, and activist spaces. Kashmir, like Israel, is often presented not as a complex political issue but as a moral abstraction, a symbol onto which revolutionary fantasies are projected. Indians, like Jews, are frequently stripped of civilian status in these narratives, recast instead as extensions of a state or ideology deemed illegitimate, and then subjected to brutal killings, as was the case in the Pahalgam terror attack.

This moral equivalence, where democracies defending territorial integrity are equated with terror groups that target civilians, ultimately functions as an enabler. It reassures extremists that their violence will be debated rather than universally rejected, contextualised rather than criminalised. In that sense, the ideological ecosystem that lowers the threshold for attacking Jews in Bondi is the same one that has, for years, provided intellectual oxygen to those who bomb trains in Mumbai, massacre pilgrims in Kashmir, or radicalize young men across borders.

Until Western societies confront this shared architecture of excuse-making, this habit of mistaking explanation for absolution, the cycle of so-called legitimised terror will continue to find new targets in different geographies with familiar justifications.

If the West wishes to prevent future terror attacks, it must look beyond the individual attacker and interrogate the ecosystem that made such violence imaginable, defensible, and ultimately executable. The cost of failing to do so is not abstract. It is measured time and again in blood, in severely broken public trust, and in the quiet erosion of the moral red lines that once defined the West as a civilised society. – Firstpost, 18 Decemeber 2025

› Raja Muneeb is an independent journalist and columnist.