A Moment of Clarity
Reflections on Bondi Beach, the Rush to Judgment, and the Right to Self-Defense
Good morning, afternoon, or evening, especially those who are friends.
Let me begin with my commonly stated stoic philosophy: If you wake up, you had a good night. If you go to bed, you had a good day. Anything else is not good.
And so, let me be absolutely clear about something before we go any further. There is no justification for mass murder. None. Not ever. Self-defense is one thing. Casualties of war, as tragic as they are, remain an unfortunate reality of conflict throughout human history. But deliberate, calculated mass murder of innocent people? There exists no excuse, no rationalization, no explanation that makes it acceptable.
On December 14th, 2025, a father and son opened fire on families celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. They murdered fifteen people, including a ten-year-old girl named Matilda and an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor named Alex Kleytman who died trying to protect his wife. They wounded more than forty others, including children who remain hospitalized. The victims ranged from age ten to eighty-seven. Rabbis. Community members. Families who showed up expecting donuts, face painting, and the joyful lighting of Hanukkah candles.
Now here's what the Australian government has confirmed, and this matters because the media initially got it spectacularly wrong. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett stated publicly that this was "a terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State." Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed the attackers were "motivated by Islamic State ideology." Police found two homemade ISIS flags in the vehicle belonging to one of the shooters. The father and son had traveled to the Philippines just weeks before the attack, to an island known for Islamist insurgency. They had improvised explosive devices in their car. One of the attackers had previously been investigated for possible ties to an ISIS-linked cell in Sydney.
This was Islamic terrorism. The Australian government says so. The evidence says so. The ISIS flags in their vehicle say so. Their trip to meet with militants in the Philippines says so.
The evil that humanity produces never fails to astound me. One moment you witness the magnificent capacity of people to love, to create, to sacrifice for one another. You see a man named Ahmed al Ahmed wrestle a rifle away from a murderer, taking bullets in the process to save strangers he'd never met. President Trump called him a hero who saved countless lives. Prime Minister Albanese visited him in the hospital and called him "a true Australian hero." The next moment you see this darkness emerge from the same species that produces such heroes. It echoes through history like Cain and Abel, that eternal struggle between light and shadow, between building up and tearing down. The yin and yang of human nature. We always have both dwelling among us.
But here is what troubles me almost as much as the act itself.
Within minutes of the first reports, before anyone knew a single fact about the perpetrators, the usual suspects in media began their predictable performance. The implication landed with familiar weight: here we go again, another attack by radicalized white supremacists, more evidence of right-wing extremism, and of course, the inevitable declarations that guns kill people rather than people killing people.
I read several articles that first evening. The framing was unmistakable. The narrative was already being constructed before the bodies were cold, before the victims' families even knew what had happened to their loved ones.
And the narrative was wrong.
Let's address an uncomfortable truth that polite society pretends doesn't exist. Islamic radicalization and Islamic terrorism represent a pattern that repeats across the globe with disturbing regularity. Nice, France, 2016: a man drove a truck through Bastille Day crowds, killing eighty-six people, claiming allegiance to ISIS. Berlin, Germany, 2016: another truck attack on a Christmas market, twelve dead, ISIS affiliation. Barcelona, 2017: thirteen killed. New York City, 2017: eight killed on a bike path by an ISIS-inspired attacker. New Orleans, just this past January: another ISIS-inspired attack.
You simply do not see this pattern among Christians. You don't see Christians strapping bombs to themselves and walking into markets. You don't see Christians driving trucks through crowds in the name of their faith. You don't see Christians shooting up holiday celebrations of other religions while pledging allegiance to terrorist organizations. The pattern is not hidden. It's not subtle. It's documented, researched, and undeniable. Yet pointing it out gets you labeled as something unpleasant in polite company. The truth doesn't care about polite company.
And Jews remain frequent targets. The data from Australia alone is staggering: over 1,600 antisemitic attacks reported in the past year, nearly five times the average from before October 2023. Synagogues firebombed. Schools vandalized. Community members harassed in the streets. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry warned this was coming. They said the writing was on the wall. Nobody in power listened effectively enough.
Now, does acknowledging the reality of Islamic terrorism mean white supremacist violence hasn't occurred? Of course not. History is filled with its horrors from all directions. But the rush to judgment, the desperate need to fit every tragedy into a predetermined storyline before facts emerge, represents a profound failure of the journalistic profession regardless of which direction it leans. Left or right, it doesn't matter. The disease of predetermined conclusions infects coverage from both sides. When reporters become activists first and fact-finders second, we all suffer. Truth becomes a casualty right alongside the victims.
This brings me to the gun control nonsense that predictably erupted within hours.
Australia already has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. They implemented them after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Nearly thirty years of tight restrictions, and it didn't prevent Bondi Beach. The father had held a gun license since 2015 and owned six legally registered firearms. All that paperwork, all those regulations, all those restrictions, and fifteen people are dead anyway.
Here's what the gun control crowd refuses to acknowledge: evil finds a way. If it's not guns, it's something else. Consider the vehicle attacks that have become increasingly common worldwide. Nice, France: eighty-six dead when a truck plowed through a crowd. Berlin: twelve dead at a Christmas market. Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2021: six killed and over sixty injured when a man drove his SUV through a Christmas parade. Just last month in Tampa's Ybor City, four people killed and thirteen injured when a driver crashed into a crowded sidewalk outside a bar.
Do we ban cars? Do we ban trucks? Do we stop allowing vehicle pursuits because one disgusting human being in Tampa killed innocent people while fleeing police?
And just yesterday, here in the United States, Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their Brentwood home. Stabbed to death by their own son using a knife. Butchered in their own house. Do we ban knives now? Do we follow England's path, where they've lost their collective minds trying to regulate kitchen utensils? Where they require ID to buy scissors?
The weapon is not the problem. The evil in the human heart is the problem. And you cannot legislate that away. You cannot regulate it out of existence. You cannot pass enough laws to stop someone determined to do harm.
What you can do is give good people the ability to defend themselves.
Consider what might have happened if something like Bondi Beach occurred in Florida. After decades of what I'd politely call shortsighted policy, Florida finally passed permitless carry in July 2023. Law-abiding citizens twenty-one and older who meet the legal criteria can now carry concealed firearms without a government permission slip. Not a shoot-out at the OK Corral. Not vigilante justice. Simply good people equipped to protect themselves and others when the unthinkable happens.
Because here's the uncomfortable reality: you cannot put a law enforcement officer on every corner. And even if you could, horrible things still happen. The police cannot be everywhere. They cannot protect everyone at every moment. When seconds count, police are minutes away. The first responders to Bondi Beach were brave and professional, but fifteen people were dead before the shooting stopped. Ahmed al Ahmed, an unarmed civilian, did more to stop the carnage than any law or regulation by tackling one of the gunmen and wrestling away his rifle.
Imagine if there had been legally armed citizens in that crowd. Not cowboys looking for a gunfight. Just prepared, responsible adults with the training and equipment to respond when evil showed up uninvited. The outcome might have been very different.
This is why the Second Amendment matters. This is why self-defense is a fundamental human right, not a privilege granted by government permission. Criminals and terrorists don't follow laws. They acquire weapons illegally, or they use vehicles, or they use knives, or they use whatever tool serves their evil purpose. Disarming law-abiding citizens doesn't stop evil. It just ensures that evil faces less resistance.
Journalism was supposed to be about discovering truth, not confirming assumptions. We deserve better. The families of those fifteen murdered souls deserve better. A ten-year-old girl named Matilda deserves better. Alex Kleytman, who survived the Holocaust only to die defending his wife at a Hanukkah celebration eighty years later, deserves better. The rabbis and community members who gathered simply to celebrate their faith and share joy with their children deserve better. Every single person who came to Bondi Beach that Sunday expecting donuts and face painting and the lighting of candles deserves better than to have their deaths exploited for political points before their names were even released.
And this is precisely why people have stopped trusting mainstream journalism. When every story gets filtered through predetermined narratives before facts emerge, when everything becomes an opportunity for political advocacy rather than honest reporting, when readers can predict the spin before they read the article based solely on which outlet published it, the institution of journalism loses all credibility. People turn to alternative sources. They seek out podcasts and blog posts like this one because at least here, someone is willing to wait for facts and call things by their proper names.
Here is the uncomfortable reality: evil wears many faces. It doesn't check boxes on our political scorecards. It doesn't wait for our preferred narratives. It doesn't care about our talking points or our cable news segments. And when we are so busy trying to make tragedy fit our worldview that we cannot even wait for basic facts, we dishonor the dead and we fail the living. We become part of the problem we claim to be fighting.
Stop calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi. Stop assuming every tragedy is white supremacy before the facts emerge. Stop pretending that gun control would have prevented an attack by legally licensed gun owners in one of the most gun-restricted countries on earth. Stop acting like pointing out patterns in Islamic terrorism makes someone a bigot when the facts are documented across decades and continents.
Perhaps the next time something terrible happens, we might try something radical. We might wait. We might listen. We might let truth emerge before we begin our performances. We might consider that the victims and their families matter more than our hot takes and our ideological preferences. We might acknowledge reality even when it's uncomfortable.
But I won't hold my breath.