I first visited Bondi Beach on my first visit to Australia. It was winter during the June holidays, so I didn’t get into the water. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that something as horrific as a terrorist attack could occur on that beach.
These are complicated times. If this incident had occurred 25 years ago, the whole world would have condemned it. It’s the end of 2025 and trends have drastically changed. A pro-Palestine activist who had tried to disrupt a vigil held for the victims had to be removed. Another one said on Threads that Islamophobia is worse than antisemitism.
On the afternoon of 14 December 2025, violence intruded into what was meant to be a moment of religious celebration. At Archer Park, beside Sydney’s Bondi Beach, a Hanukkah gathering organised by Chabad of Bondi — drawing around a thousand people — turned into a killing ground.
Two gunmen opened fire on the crowd. Fifteen people were killed, among them a child. 42 others were injured, including at least 2 police officers. One attacker was shot dead by police. The other was arrested after an unarmed bystander who bravely tackled him and managed to disarm him. Police later revealed that the suspects were father and son.
Australian authorities were quick to characterise the attack as an act of terrorism. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. It was the first day of Hanukkah, a Jewish religious celebration. The targeting was obviously deliberate.
As it turned out, the danger did not end with the shooting. New South Wales Police later located and removed a suspected homemade bomb from a car driven there by one of the attackers. The intended death toll was much higher. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, after years of tolerating pro-Palestinian, anti-Semitic protests, reluctantly described the shooting for what it was: a deliberate attack on Jewish people.
In scale and consequence, the Bondi Beach shooting now stands as Australia’s deadliest terrorist incident, and its second-deadliest mass shooting overall — surpassed only by Port Arthur in 1996. That massacre reshaped Australia’s gun laws and became a reference point for what collective political will could achieve. Nearly three decades later, the Bondi attack forces a more uncomfortable question: in a country with some of the world’s strictest firearm regulations, what does modern extremism look like — and are institutions truly prepared for it?
The answers, as ever, arrived too late for the dead. But it’s the aftermath that is most telling.
While it’s true that having calluses in our hearts, not accepting refugees and political asylum seekers did contribute to Singapore’s security, the import of any type of immigrants, including those who can contribute to our society, is no guarantee against radicalism. Many leaders of the jihadist movement have PhDs.
Logically, refugees are people persecuted in their own countries. Logically, they ought to embrace the freedom and democracy that their host countries are offering them. Why are they seeking to destroy the system that brought prosperity through modernisation and replace it with the system that made them leave?
It seems contradictory but it really isn’t. It’s simply a case of empowering victims and turning them into the bullies who had once caused their suffering. We are only very slightly different in welcoming “foreign talent”. They not be refugees with axes to grind. They also come in smaller numbers and have undergone a selection process. However, putting them in positions of power and influence is an investment which is by no means risk free. You don’t need guns and bombs to cause damage. Not everyone who holds a pink IC and a red passport is loyal to Singapore. Our leaders and their stooges like Calvin Cheng should stop labelling the cautious ones as xenophobic.
This was happening as I’m writing this. I won’t comment much further as investigations are still ongoing. Whatever the outcome, we are not as safe as what Mr Calvin Cheng asserts just because we don’t take in refugees, asylum seekers; only “foreign talent”.