Bondi Beach: Why the West Can't Solve Islamist Terrorism

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On Sunday, two gunmen murdered 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

It was the latest in a string of attacks over the past several days. Just this week, a Jewish family’s home displaying Hanukkah decorations was fired on more than 20 times in California; a Hanukkah concert in Amsterdam was disrupted by thousands of protesters; and in New York City, one Orthodox Jewish man was confronted on the subway while another was stabbed in the street.

Sadly, we’ve grown accustomed to Jews in the West being regularly targeted—and this pattern has persisted all year. In Washington, D.C., this past May, Israeli embassy employees Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum. In Boulder, Colorado, this past June, a man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. And in Manchester, UK, this past October, a man drove a car into a crowd outside a synagogue and then began stabbing people observing Yom Kippur.

Together, these incidents raise a pressing question: Why has the West failed to stop violent radicalism and Jew-hatred?

Casey Babb is a director and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Canada, and he has studied terrorism and extremism for nearly two decades. He argues that attacks like these will continue as long as Western leaders refuse to take the threat seriously.

In this interview, I ask how groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operate inside Western countries; whether their threat to our national security has been underestimated; the challenges facing Western intelligence agencies; and, more broadly, what’s driving the global rise in radicalism—and what can be done to stop it.