The numbers were not a surprise.
I read about Bondi with the hiss of my radiator in Tirana in the background, laptop warm against my palms, and the faint smell of burnt coffee drifting from the kitchen. Sixteen people were gone after a Hanukkah celebration in a public park on Bondi Beach, shot while there were prayers, music, and the salty air of the Pacific all around them. The headlines said “Australia is reeling”, and I realised my jaw was clenched so hard my teeth hurt, the way they do when I’m trying not to shout at a screen.
I’m Gerd, an astronomer by training, a guy in a wheelchair who spends too much time online, and someone who has watched hate grow like mould in the corners of the internet. The glow from my monitor felt almost harsh as I read that two gunmen, a father and son, opened fire on a Jewish community gathering at Archer Park, on that strip of sand so many people know from glossy travel images and the sound of crashing waves in ads. One of them, Sajid Akram, legally owned six firearms and was shot dead by police on the grass that should have smelled of sunscreen and seaweed, not blood and gunpowder.
I wish I could say I was shocked.
Three Comfortable Lies About Hate
As I scrolled, the tiny clicks of my mouse were the only sound in the room, and three familiar ideas kept buzzing in my head like neon signs. The first one is that online hate is “just words,” some background static we can mute while we enjoy the bright, colourful feed of our digital lives. The second is that terrorism mostly comes from big dark networks, secret cells and organised plots, something you can almost smell like smoke before it erupts. The third is the lazy story that Jews and Muslims are doomed to stand on opposite sides, like two hard stones grinding together forever.
These are comforting ideas.
They tidy the world up, like shoving mess into a cupboard before guests arrive, spraying something that smells like lemon over the air and calling it clean. If hate is “just words,” then we don’t need to feel the rough texture of responsibility under our fingers when we scroll. If terrorism is always about organised groups, then the person sitting quietly on a park bench with a backpack is just part of the scenery. If Jews and Muslims are natural enemies, then we never have to face the embarrassment of our own stereotypes when we see them holding each other after a tragedy.
But then I hit a line that cut through that warm fog of self‑comfort like cold air from an open window.
The Data That Should Have Kept Us Awake
Researchers in Australia have been training AI models—basically teaching computers with a lot of human help—to detect hateful content aimed at different communities, including Jews, on social media. The work is still in early stages and hasn’t gone through full peer review, which means other scientists haven’t yet torn it apart and checked every bolt and screw, and I want to be clear about that because research is never magic. What they did, though, was simple enough to describe over a cup of coffee: humans, including extremism experts and members of the Jewish community, labelled posts as hateful or not, so the machine could learn to spot similar patterns.
They distinguished between what they called “old” antisemitism and “new” antisemitism. “Old” antisemitism is the familiar poison: Jews painted as alien, dangerous, morally rotten, haunted by conspiracy myths that cling like cigarette smoke to history. “New” antisemitism shifts its glare to Israel, blaming Jews as a whole for everything the Israeli state does, turning political anger into accusations hurled at Jewish neighbours, classmates, or random strangers online. Within Jewish communities many see this “new” version as just the same old hatred wearing a different shirt, while critics warn that this framing can blur the line between genuine criticism of Israeli policy and prejudice against Jews.
Now here’s the part that made me lean back in my chair and rub my temples, listening to the traffic outside my window as if it could drown out the numbers. In posts geolocated to Australia on X (the site we still instinctively call Twitter), “old” antisemitism went from an average of 34 tweets a month in the year before October 7 to 2,021 in the year after. At the same time, “new” antisemitism exploded from 505 tweets a month before October 7 to 21,724 in the following year. That’s not a mood; that’s a storm siren.
Those “old” posts included savage slogans like calls to “get rid of all Jews” or “kill all Jews,” as well as attempts to downplay or deny the Holocaust, with warped claims such as that if six million Jews had really been killed, Israel couldn’t exist today, or that the Nazis barely harmed Jewish people. Some posts leaned on conspiracy fantasies, like the idea that “Jews are paying to destroy Australia.” A huge chunk of the flagged content sat in the “new” category: blaming all Australian Jews for what happens in Israel, accusing them of being “baby killers” or throwing around slurs like “Zionazi” at ordinary people, regardless of their personal views on the Israeli government.
Let me say this bluntly: if you think this is “just words,” you haven’t been paying attention to what words do to a nervous system.
From Pixels To Bullets
On mainstream platforms like X, most of the really explicit calls for violence don’t show up in the open; those tend to slither away to fringe channels like Telegram. But X is now a messy collision zone where mainstream talk and fringe rhetoric crash into each other, especially with the erosion of content moderation. The click of the “post” button is silent, but the emotional echo isn’t—once an insult, a lie, or a threat lands in someone’s notifications, it vibrates through their body like a low‑level electric hum.
The same research team stresses something important: even though we’ve seen an escalation of hostility online, there’s no simple straight line from any particular spike in antisemitism to the Bondi attack. People who commit terrorist acts, whether they move alone or have loose ties to groups, do not automatically follow the curve of public sentiment like iron filings to a magnet. On the law‑enforcement side, Australia’s security agency ASIO has to make constant triage decisions, because hundreds of people brush against extremist content or networks, both online and offline. Their analysts listen, read, and watch, trying to sort who’s just shouting in their living room and who’s actually planning something bloody, in a world where resources are always limited.
One of the alleged Bondi gunmen was already “known” to ASIO, connected in some way to networks and communications that had raised concerns after an Islamic State cell leader in Sydney was arrested back in 2019. Being “known” doesn’t mean someone is marked with a red light over their head; it can be as thin as a thread in a chat log. And here’s the bitter taste in all this: you can’t just arrest everyone who expresses extreme ideas or brushes against radical spaces, because you’d end up criminalising thought, drowning any sense of due process in a flood of anger.
So we’re in this strange, tense space where words matter, but not every hateful word is a direct fuse to violence.
The Lone Gun And The Thin Line
The Bondi attack appears, so far, to fit what analysts call a “lone actor” pattern, even though there were two shooters, because they were father and son, not members of a wider operational cell. That label sounds cold, almost sterile, but what it really signals is terrifying: minimal planning signals, few people to leak information, no larger group to infiltrate. These are the cases where you don’t hear the metaphorical ticking beforehand, only the deafening crack of gunfire and the panicked screams after.
As ASIO’s director has said in his public threat assessment, the biggest concern remains a single person picking up an easily obtained weapon. That phrase—“easily obtained”—sticks like sand in the mouth when you remember that Sajid Akram was licensed to own six firearms, including weapons that ended up spitting bullets into a crowd where children were eating festival snacks and older people were probably laughing under the rustle of gum trees. Public spaces like parks are almost impossible to secure without turning them into fortresses; there are too many entry points, too many soft edges, too many places where the smell of barbecues and the sound of kids playing would be replaced by checkpoints and metal detectors.
So when people ask, often through clenched teeth, “Could this have been prevented?”, the most honest answer carries the roughness of grief. Some things, with better gun laws, sharper intelligence, and more resources, probably can be stopped. Some things can’t, not completely, unless we accept living inside a permanent cage.
What Governments Tried… And What They Didn’t
Months before the attack, Australia’s first special envoy for combating antisemitism, Jillian Segal, handed over a plan to the government, after the rise in antisemitism that shook Jewish communities since the Hamas attack on Israel and the Gaza war. This plan focused on three big areas: stopping violence and crime through better coordination between agencies and tighter rules on letting dangerous individuals into the country; strengthening protections against hate speech by regulating all forms of hate and watching social media platform policies more closely; and promoting media, education, and cultural spaces that don’t normalise antisemitism, through journalist training, education programs, and funding rules for organisations that spread or ignore antisemitic content.
The government said it would think about these recommendations, the way you say you’ll “look into” fixing a creaking door while the squeak keeps waking you in the night. After Bondi, Segal herself said the official messaging against antisemitism has not been strong enough, a diplomatic way of saying the words from the top have sounded thin, like distant radio chatter over the static of hate. Some people argue that if points two and three—stronger speech protections and serious cultural work—had been taken more seriously, Bondi might have been less likely, because a society that clearly rejects antisemitism at every level makes it harder for violent ideas to breathe.
The researchers and terrorism experts push back on that neat story. They remind us that while there’s real value in prevention work aimed at reducing hostility and prejudice, people or small groups bent on violent terrorism often move on their own strange timelines, not directly governed by public opinion graphs. In the short term, education and culture change carry a warm, slow smell, like bread rising; valuable, necessary, but no match for the cold, sharp reality of a gun in a park tonight. What stops large‑scale attacks most effectively, they argue, is still old‑fashioned law enforcement: good firearm regulation, vigilant monitoring of extremist networks, and active disruption of plots before they shift from whispers and keystrokes to footsteps and triggers.
So we’re left with this uneasy double truth: the hateful climate online matters, and the sharp tools of policing and gun control matter, and neither is enough alone.
A Story That Breaks The “Jews vs Muslims” Script
In the middle of all this horror, one detail from Bondi keeps echoing in my head like a steady drum beat. A 43‑year‑old Muslim fruit shop owner, Ahmed Al‑Ahmed, saw one of the gunmen, moved towards him, and wrestled a weapon from his hands. It’s the kind of action you can almost feel in your muscles when you imagine it—the weight of the gun, the roughness of the grip, the shouted chaos around, the smell of fear and sweat in the air as shots rang out.
This man has been rightly described as a hero, and his faith is written into every headline because it refuses to fit the lazy script that blames “the Muslim community” whenever a terrorist attack has some link, however thin, to extremist interpretations of Islam. His act slices through that thick fog of collective blame with brutal clarity: a Muslim risking his life to stop an antisemitic massacre at a Jewish celebration. It’s the opposite of the coarse story so many people reach for, the one that paints Jews and Muslims as locked in a permanent war, a story that smells of old books and stale prejudices rather than the living, breathing reality of individuals.
Terrorism experts warn, quite rightly, against the kind of reaction that punishes entire communities for the actions of a few, something the United States has done more than once. Australia, they say, has a chance to do better—to see the Bondi attack as an assault on everyone who shares that beach, that city, that country, not a reason to hurl suspicion at anyone who shares the attacker’s skin colour or religion. Ahmed’s story is not a feel‑good add‑on; it’s a direct challenge to our worst mental shortcuts, those that flatten millions of lives into one hateful stereotype.
When I read about him, I could almost hear the quiet afterwards, when the sirens faded and the gun was finally out of the attacker’s hands, and I wondered: whose story are we going to tell louder—the killers’ or the man who stopped one of them?
What The Numbers Don’t Let Us Pretend Anymore
Let’s go back to that first comfortable idea: online hate as “just words.” Sitting at my desk, with the soft click of keys and the familiar glow of code and text on the screen, I’m painfully aware that I, too, have rolled past slurs and threats, treating them like passing car horns rather than warning signals. The research on antisemitic content after October 7 doesn’t say that every hateful tweet becomes a bullet; that would be dishonest. It does say the water level of hostility has risen dramatically, from a quiet drip to a noise you can’t ignore unless you choose to shove in your headphones.
“Old” antisemitism showing up as explicit calls to “kill all Jews” is not abstract. It tells every Jewish person reading it that they’re seen not as a neighbour or colleague, but as a target, and that seeps into the body like cold air under a door. “New” antisemitism, the kind that blames local Jewish communities for every decision made by a government thousands of kilometres away, turns political protest into personalised hate, the way a chant can shift from demanding change to spitting on an individual. That may not turn every reader into a shooter, but it changes what feels sayable, what feels normal, what feels like “just part of the conversation.”
Once killing Jews becomes a joke, a meme, a throwaway line on X, the distance between thought and action shrinks for those who are already walking the edge. This is not magical thinking; it’s about social permission. When you hear the same slur repeated in ten different accents in a crowded room, you stop flinching as much, and that’s the danger. Online spaces are rooms, just without the smell of sweat and perfume.
The Hard Limits Of Prediction
The second comfortable belief—terrorism as a thing of big networks and long plots—is equally tempting. It suggests we can map it like astronomers map galaxies: draw clean lines, chart every movement, predict every flare. As an astronomer by training, I love the idea that enough data can give us a kind of safety, the way knowing orbits tells you where a planet will be on a clear winter night when the air smells of frost.
But the Bondi case sits in the category of lone actors, even if it involves two people, because it appears there’s no broader network organising them. That’s the nightmare case for security services. There are fewer communications to intercept, fewer meetings to track, fewer money flows to follow. ASIO has to decide, for every “known” person, how much time and attention to pour into them, with limited staff and budgets. You can almost hear the constant background hum in their offices: keyboards, ringing phones, a steady drip of new names.
When we say “they should have seen this coming,” we often ignore that there are always dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people on watch lists, most of whom will never escalate to violence. If you treat every angry tweet as a direct precursor to an attack, you drown your analysts in noise while real threats slip past in the blur. The line between caution and overreach is thin, rough, and constantly shifting under political and public pressure.
So no, more funding alone won’t make every terror plot visible in advance, just as better telescopes don’t remove cosmic randomness from the equation.
The Third Lie: Communities As Enemies
The third idea—the story of eternal hostility between Jews and Muslims—has the sticky comfort of an old myth. It explains ugly things too easily, in the way anyone who’s studied mythology hears the same patterns repeated across centuries, whispered like an old tale over the smell of woodsmoke. It’s a story that gets louder after events like October 7 and the Gaza war, when scenes of horror from one part of the world are beamed into living rooms everywhere, turning far‑away violence into local tension.
In Australia, like in many countries, protests and counter‑protests, chants and counter‑chants, have left the air thick with anger since late 2023. Antisemitism has gone up. Islamophobia has gone up. Some people are turning to violence in their fantasies, even if only a very small number take the final, awful step into action. The war plays out in their imagination in high contrast, blurring every Jewish person into the Israeli state, every Muslim into Hamas or ISIS.
Ahmed’s act on that Bondi grass is a crack in that story, and we should keep pressing it open. A Muslim man, who probably just wanted a quiet evening with the familiar sounds of the sea and city in the background, became the person who stopped one of the shooters at a Jewish festival. If your story about communities can’t fit that in without twisting itself in knots, then the story is wrong, not the reality.
So What Do We Actually Do?
I’m very wary of easy “action steps” at the end of something this heavy, the way I’m wary of cheap fireworks after a serious memorial. Still, there are some stubborn, earthy truths that stick under the fingernails when you read this research and these reports slowly, with the hum of the fridge and the occasional passing siren reminding you the world keeps moving.
First, online hate matters. Not because every slur becomes a shot, but because the massive jump in antisemitic content since October 7 shows a wider permission structure setting in, where people feel bolder about saying things that once would have tasted sour in their own mouths. That’s not a call to criminalise every ugly sentence; it is a call to treat platforms like X and Instagram as real spaces, where the rules shape behaviour, not as neutral blank walls. When moderation is relaxed, as we’ve seen after Trump’s rise and changes at Meta, hateful speech doesn’t stay in shadowy corners; it leaks into the main feed, alongside cat videos and beach photos.
Second, law enforcement and policy decisions about firearms matter more than any public education campaign in the very short term. You don’t stop a shooting this week with a school program about tolerance. You stop it, if you can, with stricter gun licensing, better monitoring of people already flagged as high‑risk, and the ability to move fast when chatter turns towards concrete planning. That’s ugly, dry work, not the kind of thing that smells like fresh paint at a shiny new “dialogue centre.” But it’s what pulls triggers away from hands.
Third, the stories we choose to amplify matter. If all we repeat are the killers’ names, their grievances, their manifestos, we give them exactly the echo they want, bouncing their hate back and forth like shouts in a tunnel. If we instead centre people like Ahmed, and the victims’ lives, and the long, patient work of those tracking hate before it erupts, we shift what courage and community look like in the public imagination.
None of this is easy to hold in one mind. It shouldn’t be.
My Own Uneasy Takeaway
As I finish writing this, the room is quiet except for the soft whir of my wheelchair’s motor when I shift my weight and the faint city smell of exhaust drifting in through the window. I’m thousands of kilometres from Bondi, but the thought of a Hanukkah celebration turned into a killing ground sits heavily in my chest. I also know that as someone who spends half his life online, I’m woven into the same digital fabric that carried all those antisemitic posts, even if I never wrote one.
Here’s the thought I keep coming back to, and I offer it plainly. The Bondi attack did not “happen because of Twitter,” and it did not “happen out of nowhere.” It came after a huge, measurable rise in antisemitic sentiment online; after years of warnings from Jewish communities; after careful, but limited, work by security agencies juggling hundreds of possible threats; after a government received a clear plan on fighting antisemitism and left it largely sitting on the table. Each of those details is a thread, rough to the touch on its own, but together they form something we don’t want to look at for very long.
We like to ask, “Could it have been prevented?” as if there’s a neat yes or no answer, something we can fold and put away like a clean shirt. The better question, though more bitter, is: “How much risk are we willing to ignore, and for how long, before we call ourselves surprised?”
Where We Go From Here
I’m an astronomer, not a counter‑terror chief, and I’ve simplified a lot of complex social science and security analysis here on purpose, so that anyone reading this on a phone on the bus, with the hum of the engine beneath their feet, can follow the threads without jargon. The trade‑off is that I can’t give you a complete technical manual for fixing this, only a clearer sky map of where the storms are.
So I’ll end with questions, not answers. When you next scroll past a slur, what will you hear—the faint click of your thumb, or the early creak of something breaking? When governments talk softly about hate while leaving recommendations in drawers, how long will we accept the smell of stale promises? When stories like Ahmed’s flash across the news, will we let them fade, or will we let them rewrite the lazy myths we grew up with about who stands with whom?
The future here won’t be decided only in parliaments and police stations, but also in the quiet, ordinary spaces where we read, share, challenge, and refuse. Those spaces might feel as small as the rectangle of light from your phone in a dark room, but added together, they’re where the next attack either finds a softer landing… or runs into a wall of people who finally stopped treating hate as background noise.
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