Hours after a Pakistani man and his son were filmed unleashing deadly gunfire on Jews celebrating Chanukah in Sydney on Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a “strong, decisive and focused gun law reform.”
The announcement was welcomed by New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, who belongs to Albanese’s Labor Party, and by opinion shapers, including Jacqueline Maley, a senior columnist for the left-leaning Sydney Morning Herald. “We have motivation and reason to tighten gun control now,” she wrote in a column advocating the reform.
But among Jewish critics of the Albanese government, the focus on gun reform was dismissed as an attempt to distract from lax immigration laws and indifference to Islamist and left-wing antisemitic incitement.
“It’s really just a giant ‘look-over-there’ exercise to avoid looking at very difficult subjects surrounding migration policy, extremism and law enforcement,” Daniel Lewkovitz, a senior security consultant and member of Sydney’s Jewish community, told JNS on Monday, shortly after he toured the scene of Sunday’s massacre.
Authorities identified Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24, as the shooters who killed at least 15 people and injured dozens more on Sunday. Sajid Akram had been a licensed firearms holder for the past 10 years, with six weapons in his possession, all of which were recovered from the scene. He arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa, switching to a partner visa in 2001, the year that Naveed was born in Australia.
Naveed was briefly under the surveillance of Australia’s domestic anti-terrorism service six years ago, but was ultimately deemed harmless, 9News reported. He may have had historical links to an Islamic State terror cell, and an ISIS flag was found in his car, according to the report.
“If we’re not talking about mass Islamic migration; we’re not talking about radicalization in mosques; indoctrination in schools; intergenerational jihad—which is what we saw in a father-son set of shooters—then there’s a big elephant in the room that they’re not addressing,” said Lewkovitz.
But addressing this may cost Labor votes in Western Sydney, where many Muslim immigrants live, he said, whereas promoting stricter gun laws in Australia might not—especially since the country already implemented a far-reaching gun laws reform in the 1990s, said Lewkovitz.
“The whole gun-law debate, frankly, this country has already had it. We’ve been there, done that. This is deflection,” he said.
Robert Gregory, CEO of the Australian Jewish Association (AJA), told JNS: “It’s very disappointing to see this focus on gun laws as a major issue. Australia’s gun laws are not the cause of this massacre.”
The cause, he added, “is antisemitism and in particular Islamic extremism and the Albanese government’s ignoring of the problem.” He, too, called the focus on gun laws “just a deflection.”
“In fact, I have heard from several members of the Jewish community expressing a desire to acquire a firearms license because of the failure of police to protect the community,” he added.
The Australian government should “not be allowed to divert attention away from their very serious failures by tightening Australia’s already strict gun laws,” said Gregory.
Australia gave 3,000 visas to Gazans fleeing the war that Hamas started on Oct. 7, 2023, when it invaded Israel, murdering some 1,200 people.
According to a 2024 study by professor Mehmet Ozalp, head of school at the Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Islamic Studies, Australia will have 1.1 million Muslims by 2026, or four percent of the general population—a near quadrupling of the minority’s numbers in 2001, and a 35% increase over 2021.
Andre Oboler, an expert member of Australia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, told JNS that the current focus on gun control “entirely misses the point” as it “may reduce the risk of a random attack, but the Chanukah massacre was not a random attack. It was targeted. It was driven by an ideology of hate.”
Australia, Oboler said, will “only get back on track and return to the country we knew when the hate we are seeing, antisemitism, is named, recognized, and addressed.” Efforts to “avoid confrontation,” he added, “have left Australian Jews with their backs to the wall. That is the issue and only by addressing it can Australia return to what it once was.”
On Sunday, the Australian Jewish Association accused the Albanese government of ignoring the antisemitic threat, writing in a statement it had “blood on its hands.”
The Albanese government “ignored countless warnings, including from one of the murder victims, Rabbi Eli Schlanger. Instead of cracking down on Islamic hate preachers, the Albanese Government revoked the visas of Jewish and Israeli visitors. Instead of being raided and shut down, radical mosques and extremist Islamic organisations were given taxpayer grants,” wrote the AJA, a conservative group that’s been highly critical of the Albanese government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday recalled that he’d warned Albanese that Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood in September, alongside the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand, “pours fuel on the fire of antisemitism.”
Asked about this during an interview with the Australian ABC broadcaster on Monday, Albanese said he doesn’t accept any link between the Bondi Beach massacre and Palestinian statehood, adding that “most of the world recognizes a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu said on Sunday that Albanese had ignored the warnings.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday also blamed the government in Canberra for some aspects of the Bondi massacre.
“These are the results of the antisemitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years, with the antisemitic and inciting calls of ‘Globalize the Intifada’ that were realized today,” wrote Sa’ar.
Albanese on Monday defended his government’s handling of antisemitism, which has been on the rise in Australia. There were 1,654 cases of antisemitic incitement in the country between Oct. 1, 2024, and Sept. 30, 2025—roughly five times the annual average in the decade before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, according to statistics compiled by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
“We have acted and will continue to act on the implementation of the plan,” he told reporters, referencing a national plan for fighting antisemitism announced earlier this year. It listed steps such as criminalizing hate speech, banning the Nazi salute and hate symbols, and creating a student ombudsman with investigative powers.
On Monday, Albanese gave an interview to ABC, the country’s national broadcaster, where a journalist asked him to respond to what she called “the inevitable calls” from “some parts of our society linking the Bondi massacre to Muslim immigration to Australia.”
Albanese, who called the attacks “driven by ideology [that’s] an extreme perversion of Islam,” answered by noting that a Muslim man, Ahmed al Ahmed, had heroically disarmed one of the terrorists. “We also saw an example of the best of humanity in running towards danger, putting his own life at risk, being shot twice by the second perpetrator as he took the gun bravely off this terrorist,” said Albanese.
