CO26023 | The Bondi Attack: ISIS-Inspired Antisemitic Terrorism in Australia Joshua Roose 09 February 2026 download pdf Listen to this article 8 min SYNOPSIS The December 2025 assault on a Jewish community gathering at Bondi Beach outside Sydney, Australia, was the deadliest terrorist attack in recent Australian history. It exposed legislative and security gaps, failures in threat assessment and protective security, and political inaction amid escalating antisemitism. It also serves a warning for Western counterterrorism and social cohesion policies. COMMENTARY On the evening of December 14, 2025, at around 6.45 pm, a father and son pair inspired by Islamic State (ISIS) ideology carried out a coordinated attack on a Jewish community Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney. The event, attended by around 1,000 people, was held in open parkland with minimal cover. The attackers arrived by car, displayed an ISIS flag across the windscreen, and initiated the assault using simple but effective military tactics. After throwing four improvised explosive devices that failed to detonate, Sajid Akram advanced on the crowd armed with straight-pull shotguns, firing at close range. His son, Naveed Akram, provided cover from higher ground with a .308 straight-pull rifle, enabling sustained fire across the site. Several bystanders bravely attempted to intervene. Three were killed, and one was seriously wounded. A police officer at the scene returned fire and was seriously wounded. The attack was stopped about six minutes after it began when a plainclothes police officer, acting independently and armed only with a pistol, fatally shot Sajid Akram and wounded Naveed Akram. Fifteen people were killed; fourteen members of the Jewish community – including a Holocaust survivor, two rabbis and a 10-year-old-girl – along with a non-Jewish photographer. Failure in Threat Assessment and Intelligence The Bondi attack exposed the shortcomings of Australia’s firearms and protective security frameworks, which remain heavily shaped by a lone-actor threat model dating back to Port Arthur in 1996 where a gunman armed with two semi-automatic rifles killed 35 men, women, and children at a tourist site in the state of Tasmania. This was the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history. Acting in tandem, the Bondi attackers exploited legal grey zones by using high powered straight-pull shotguns designed to circumvent bans on pump-action weapons. They achieved sustained close range, improvised micro-combined arms rifle and shotgun fire with these legally obtained weapons to maximise casualties. Irrespective of the failure of the improvised explosive devices, the attack demonstrated how legislative intent can be circumvented through tactical adaptation. Equally alarming was the ease of preparation. Despite Naveed Akram’s documented associations with extremist Salafi preacher Wissam Haddad and the Street Dawah network, the pair retained lawful access to firearms through Sajid Akram’s licensing (from 2023), travelled to Mindanao in the Philippines in October 2025 in an apparent attempt to establish contact with Islamic State, rehearsed tactical shooting techniques in rural New South Wales, and conducted hostile reconnaissance of the Hanukkah celebration site in Bondi Beach days before the attack. When the assault began, the attackers were significantly better armed than local police, who only had pistols. These failures intersected with shortcomings in threat assessment. The Hanukkah gathering was publicly advertised, and its intersection with Bondi Beach – a renowned landmark – gave the event particular symbolic significance. Although the Hanukkah celebrations were held in an exposed environment, it seems to have been security-assessed using a generic crowded-places framework rather than one tailored to a markedly heightened threat environment. This is despite reports that the Jewish Community Security Group (CSG) had identified a heightened risk during Hanukkah. In the preceding months, pro-Palestinian protests had targeted Bondi and surrounding suburbs with significant Jewish populations, sometimes involving aggressive behaviour. Across Australia, antisemitic incidents had escalated sharply, including graffiti, harassment of Jews, and designated terrorist activity linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, culminating in the expulsion of the Iranian embassy. Despite this context, access to the Bondi Hanukkah gathering appears to have been unrestricted. Reports indicate that three police personnel were present at or near the event, but this did not deter the attackers, who engaged police, wounding two. The attack also raises broader questions about intelligence sharing and coordination. Previous events, including the Dural caravan incident, had already highlighted gaps and tensions in how threat information is synthesised across Australian federal and state agencies. In this case, the failure to assess familial, ideological, and logistical risk factors holistically appears to have obscured the danger posed by lawful firearm access within an extremist-related network. Political Context and Inaction Bondi took place against a backdrop of sustained political equivocation amid the rising tide of antisemitism. Following the protest at the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2024, where offensive chants targeting Jews were reported, the official response was marked by dispute and delay, resulting in an inquiry that produced little accountability. Over the past two years, antisemitic rhetoric has increasingly been reframed as legitimate political expression through the language of anti-Zionism. That shift matters. The attackers themselves used the term “Zionists” in their video recorded before the attack, illustrating how the toleration of specific political language can distort threat assessment and underplay the potential of extremism and violence. These developments have unfolded within a context of electoral calculation, as the government seeks wider community support in critical constituencies, and demonstrates a more inclusive political posture. Seemingly, this has failed to moderate the extremist sentiment and may have emboldened it. Where to from Here After an initial delay and a raft of new laws targeting hate and gun violence, the Australian government has announced a “Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion” to report in November 2026, alongside a security review led by former ASIO Director-General Denis Richardson, with a preliminary report due in April 2026. These processes will matter only if they address the structural failures exposed by Bondi terror rather than focusing narrowly on operational errors. The central question is whether Australia is willing to recalibrate its threat models, protective security frameworks, and political thresholds for action in an environment of sustained antisemitic and jihadist mobilisation. The Bondi attack must be understood as a critical warning for Western democracies facing similar challenges. About the Author Dr Joshua Roose is an Associate Professor at The Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow at RSIS’ International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) from 12-23 January 2026.
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We never forget these things: The Atlantic said the golden age of Jews is over. Ha! That headline—Franklin Foer’s massive The Atlantic cover story, "The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending"—became a lightning rod. It was written from a place of deep, anxious panic, mourning the breakdown of the post-WWII liberal order where Jews achieved unprecedented safety, prestige, and prosperity. Your "Ha!" is the perfect, defiant response to that entire premise. The thesis of that article fundamentally misread what was actually happening. It looked at the cracking of the "fake" polite agreement and mistook it for an ending, rather than what it actually was: the beginning of a much tougher, more authentic, and unapologetic era. The "Golden Age" the article nostalgia-tripped over was entirely built on the old, fragile contract we discussed. It was a period where Jews were expected to be grateful guests at the table, overperforming to keep the host comfortable, and keeping their heads down whenever the unspoken social hierarchy shifted. Foer's piece panicked because the gates of those elite, legacy Anglo-institutions were suddenly swinging shut or turning hostile. But the "Ha!" exposes the flaw in that panic: Who cares about their gates? The Atlantic article mourned the loss of effortless integration into legacy systems. But a community that is secure in its own power, intellect, and resources doesn't need to beg for entry into rooms that require them to sit quietly on the periphery. Safety isn't granted; it's enforced. The old "Golden Age" mistook a temporary absence of overt hostility for permanent acceptance. The current era has traded that naive hope for absolute clarity. Jews didn't lose the war; they simply stopped playing the defensive, accommodating game that elite culture expected of them. The true golden age is self-determined. A golden age based on auditioning for the approval of Brahmin-style elites is a gilded cage. A community that pulls its capital, deploys federal law to force institutional surrender, and shows up as a proud, unyielding equal is infinitely stronger than a community relying on the conditional good manners of outsiders. So let them write their eulogies for an old, compliant contract. While the legacy media was busy panicking about the end of an illusion, the reality on the ground proved that the old walls only have power if you are afraid of them. Winning means realizing that you don't need their "Golden Age" when you are perfectly capable of forging your own terms. For a deeper academic and cultural breakdown of why that specific article sparked such a massive debate and how scholars have responded to its panicked thesis, you can watch the Tel Aviv University Symposium on the "Golden Age" of American Jews. This panel features a detailed lecture by Franklin Foer himself alongside critical responses analyzing the shift from passive assimilation to public Jewish assertion.
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Ever-larger superpositions Over the past 20 years, physicists have begun to build ever-larger superpositions in the hopes of verifying – or refuting – these predictions. Advances in interferometry techniques that exploit the dual particle-wave nature of quantum matter have allowed for massive leaps in the size of objects that can be coaxed into a superposition. Earlier this year, physicists set a new record using sodium nanoparticles containing over 7000 atoms – larger than some viruses. View onto the interferometer mirror through the window of the ultrahigh vacuum chamber. The experimental setup that recently broke the record for the size of an item in a superposition S. Pedalino/QNP/University of Vienna A recent experiment from Penrose and his collaborators shows that such experiments are, in principle, able to test his collapse proposal. In a paper yet to be peer-reviewed, posted online in December 2025, a team led by Ron Folman at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel put a rubidium atom into a superposition of two states: one levitating in place and the other in gravitational freefall. Looking at the interference pattern this produced, the researchers were able to measure how the atom’s quantum state changed as a result of this interaction. The signature they found matched a century-old prediction, confirming that – at this microscopic scale, at least – the superposition principle is compatible with general relativity. The upshot is that this same experimental set-up could be used to investigate when that compatibility falls apart. Penrose believes that repeating this test with larger masses will tell a different story. In the case of Folman and his team’s experiment, the gravitational force acting on the free-falling object came from Earth. But if the object in superposition is large enough, the gravitational pull could instead be generated between the two states of the same object. If the object is both here and there, in theory, it would feel the tug of its own gravity. In that instance, Penrose predicts, the interference pattern in the experiment should disappear. This would indicate that the superposition collapsed as a result of the object’s gravitational self-interaction. Cătălina Curceanu, a physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Frascati, Italy, is impressed by the technological mastery demonstrated in the experiment. “It’s absolutely fascinating,” she says. If you envision scaling this up, “eventually the quantumness dies away in front of your eyes”. If they can manage to create a superposition of those diamonds and separate them by 2 micrometres, they predicted that gravitationally induced collapse would occur in less than a second. Others are less optimistic about the timeline. “Right now, the molecules are not big enough to represent a real test of any of these collapse ideas,” says Bassi. “The day will come, but it will be a long journey.” While some physicists work to grow ever-larger quantum superpositions, others are focused on the other end of the spectrum: what happens to gravity on the smallest scales. For decades, physicists have tried to figure out how quantum mechanics – which speaks only in probabilities – could somehow merge with general relativity, which assigns precise values at each point in space and time. Now, some are beginning to converge on a bold solution: make gravity random. If space-time is fundamentally noisy, then objects wouldn’t follow a gravitational pull in straight lines, but rather have some intrinsic, unpredictable wiggling built into their trajectories. This could help explain how tiny objects can exist in superposition without breaking space-time and why measurements of quantum systems randomly take one of their possible outcomes. Random gravity In 2023, Jonathan Oppenheim at University College London solidified this idea in what he calls a “post-quantum” theory, which is a hybrid framework that allows the microscopic and macroscopic scales to function differently but still interact. “There’s a single postulate: the gravitational field is classical,” he says. “Everything else follows.” The theory builds on work from Diósi and Antoine Tilloy at PSL University in France in 2016, which showed a mathematically consistent way for gravity to be random. Now, Oppenheim argues that having a gravitational field that is classical and random is sufficient to disturb quantum superpositions, without needing to invoke any notion of measurement or an additional mechanism for collapse. And unlike previous hybrid models that attempt to keep space-time classical, his proposal also fits neatly with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, further boosting its credibility. Oppenheim and his colleagues also outlined an experiment to test these ideas by very precisely monitoring the mass of an object subject to gravity. Not everybody likes the idea of making gravity random, though. Ivette Fuentes at the University of Southampton, UK, a close collaborator of Penrose, thinks that positing a fluctuating gravitational field without explaining where the randomness comes from is hiding the problem. “Although I disagree with what he does, I really like it,” she says. “He finds an alternative way and proposes an experiment to test it.” Read more Where did the laws of physics come from? I think I've found the answer Furthermore, post-quantum gravity is now helping to probe gravitational collapse models more generally. Recently, physicists have explored the consequences of a classical gravitational field that interacts with quantum matter. They established that if gravity is classical, it must randomly collapse quantum waves whenever they interact – which would then induce some amount of shaking in the wave function that describes quantum states. In the past year, separate studies led by Bassi and Daniel Carney at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California calculated the minimal size of those fluctuations. Their analyses prop open new windows for testing these models. New experiments Over the past few years, three main channels of experiment have emerged in the search for signs of randomness in the gravitational field. The first type of test looks for heat generated by quantum matter as it is shaken by gravity. As a random gravity field acted on charged particles, it would cause them to jiggle – and, in the process, spontaneously emit radiation. Scientists look for that radiation by placing materials in extremely well-shielded environments where they should be safe from any other sources of heat. Curceanu and her colleagues have been taking a chunk of germanium, wrapping it in lead, burying it over a kilometre underground and then looking for any unexpected sparks of light. Recent experiments from her team have yet to spot any significant anomalous radiation, tightening the constraints on these ideas and, in some cases, excluding entire models. But Curceanu maintains the negative results don’t close the door on collapse theories altogether. “When you eliminate the simplest models,” she says, “the real work can start.” https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2015/11/LISA_Pathfinder_in_low-Earth_orbit_C Artist?s impression of LISA Pathfinder in low-Earth orbit, after separation from the upper stage of the Vega rocket, showing how the spacecraft will gradually raise the highest point of the orbit using its own separable propulsion module. LISA Pathfinder will operate from a vantage point in space about 1.5 million km from Earth towards the Sun, orbiting the first Sun?Earth Lagrangian point, L1. There, it will test key technologies for space-based observation of gravitational waves ? ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are predicted by Albert Einstein?s general theory of relativity. Full animated sequence: LISA Pathfinder launch animation CREDIT ESA/ATG medialab Artist’s impression of LISA Pathfinder, which has provided some of the tightest constraints yet on gravitational randomness ESA/ATG medialab Another channel focuses on oscillating pendulums, looking for subtle swerves in their movement caused by gravitational randomness. Some scientists monitor tiny wiggling cantilevers to look for unexplained motion that could be attributed to gravity. Others study small metal cubes in constant freefall aboard the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder satellite, which has provided some of the tightest constraints yet. Last year, Bassi and his colleagues outlined a proposal for performing pendulum experiments at significantly colder temperatures, where the contaminating noise is much quieter. Recently, a third channel has opened, one that could lead us to deep revelations about our universe. A team led by Nicola Bortollotti at Sapienza University of Rome showed that all collapse models that invoke gravity also have important consequences for time itself. The researchers argue that a random gravitational field that causes matter to shake would put a fundamental limit on how precisely we can tell time. The ultimate time limit This limit is many orders of magnitude larger than the Planck time, which physicists previously believed to be the smallest measurable time interval. “The ultimate fuzziness of time may not require extreme quantum gravity, but can arise from more accessible physics,” says Curceanu, who co-authored the paper. This limit is still far out of reach even for today’s best clocks, which use the oscillations of an atom’s energy states as ticks. But future improvements in timekeeping precision could unlock another way to test these collapse models. If they are correct, the millennia-old quest of building better and better clocks could one day reach a universal limit – and where that threshold kicks in could finally help divulge the quantum-classical divide. Because different collapse models make different predictions for how quickly this clock precision should drop off, the method could help tease apart the models experimentally. “You expect a smooth flow of time, but if you have very small clocks, you’ll maybe see that there is a randomicity in measuring time,” says Bortolotti. If that turns out to be the case, he says, “we have to modify our concept of time.” Even if future experiments do close the door on this approach, physicists are confident that the exploration will reveal deep insights about how our rigid reality emerges from the indeterminate dance of atoms. “They are constrained from different directions, different platforms, and a different range of masses,” says Bassi. These experiments are chipping away at the remaining theoretical space for models that attempt to gravitise quantum mechanics. “Either they together shrink it to zero, and that’s the end. Or they will find something.” Topics: quantum gravity / gravity / quantum physics / quantum
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The daring idea that time is an illusion and how we could prove it The way time ticks forward in our universe has long stumped physicists. Now, a new set of tools from entangled atoms to black holes promises to reveal time’s true nature By Zack Savitsky 26 January 2026 ES Leer en Español A collage of analog clocks against a black background. Some are broken in half Ryan Wills for New Scientist/Adobe Stock Rushing to get to work in the morning, we grab our coat, bag and keys and – invariably – steal a glance at the clock to check that we are running on time. The passing of time is so integral to our day-to-day lives that we can’t afford to ignore it from one hour to the next. So far, so completely obvious. Yet if we pause to ask what physics has to say about why time flows at all, we find it struggles. Albert Einstein’s ideas warped time, quantum theory barely considers it, and no other facet of modern physics can satisfactorily explain it. “It’s one of the biggest mysteries of science,” says Natalia Ares at the University of Oxford. Now, though, one of the most audacious proposals for how time really works is getting a second look. Back in the 1980s, physicists sketched out the hypothesis that time is an illusion, conjured from an essentially timeless universe by the strange workings of quantum mechanics. Back then, this idea, known as the Page-Wootters mechanism, impressed many – but it was beyond any experimental test. Forty years later, however, new research into the working of clocks is showing how we might finally probe this elegant proposal and revealing the mysterious role that black holes may play in the ticking of time. Read more Is gravity a new type of force that arises from cosmic entropy? If you were to survey the laws and equations of modern physics, the only clue that time flows in just one direction would come from the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, a measure of disorder, tends to increase. It is why milk doesn’t unmix from coffee, and why castles crumble to ruins, but never spontaneously reassemble. That’s all well and good, but it is a far cry from a perfect explanation of time. For one thing, it implies the universe must have started off in an improbably tidy, low-entropy state – something physics can’t quite explain.
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