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Washington: The worst terrorist attack ever on Australian soil was always going to command headlines in the United States. But in this febrile and divisive climate, it was instantly hijacked for political purposes.
The American gun lobby wasted no time in using the Bondi Beach massacre to campaign against stricter gun laws in the US, claiming Australian governments had “empowered terrorists” and left citizens defenceless by regulating weapons.
Gun lobby groups in the US are fiercely opposed to tougher regulations.
Allies of President Donald Trump echoed those sentiments, saying Australia needed to fix its antisemitism problem, or reduce immigration, rather than get even tougher on guns.
In a statement that also drew upon the weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, in which two students were killed, and nine others injured, Gun Owners of America asserted that strict gun laws were to blame.
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“The consistent failure in these tragedies is not the presence of firearms, but their absence in the hands of law-abiding citizens,” said the lobby group’s vice president, Erich Platt. “Gun control laws in these jurisdictions make it far more likely that no one is armed to intervene when violence erupts.”
Platt claimed Australian authorities had “confiscated” firearms commonly used for self-defence, enabling mass killers. “Doubling down on these failed policies only compounds the danger.”
In a separate statement, Gun Owners of America said no level of gun control would have prevented the Bondi attack. “Those who want to do harm, will do harm – citizens of all countries deserve the right to protect and defend themselves,” it said.
The lobby group did not mention the Bondi terrorist attack was only Australia’s second mass shooting since 2022. In the US, there have been 391 so far this year – about 25 per cent fewer than last year, data from Gun Violence Archive shows.
Meanwhile, MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec told his millions of followers it was Muslim migrants – and more broadly, immigration from “Third World countries” – who were to blame.
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“When is the West going to wake up and understand that these third-world migrants are not interested in assimilation, they are interested in murder, they are interested in looting, they are destroying our countries,” Posobiec said on Real America’s Voice.
He omitted to mention it was a Syrian migrant, Ahmed al Ahmed, who heroically tackled and disarmed one of the gunmen without a weapon himself.
Republicans elsewhere called Australian gun laws into question. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who challenged Trump for the presidential nomination last year, said on X: “Australia doesn’t need to tighten gun control laws. It needs to acknowledge the hate and rise of antisemitism in their country.”
That sentiment was echoed by The New York Post’s star Australian-American columnist Miranda Devine, who opined that weakness on antisemitism and decades of “foolish” immigration decisions had led to the attack.
“We saw exactly what ‘Globalise the intifada’ means in Bondi on Sunday,” she wrote.
Meanwhile, on Fox News, Jesse Waters told his primetime audience of about 3.6 million viewers that the Bondi massacre showed left-wing leaders were “pretending every ideology and culture just melts into the West with no consequence”.
This unspeakable act – the deadliest attack on Jews anywhere since October 7, 2023 – has struck at a time when immigration is arguably the most sensitive political issue in the Western world.
In the US, emotions were already turbocharged after the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, allegedly at the hands of an Afghan national who came to America amid the US evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, and was granted asylum this year. He allegedly shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest) as he fired, court filings say.
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Trump quickly broadened his response to encompass grievances about immigration from “shithole countries”. The Trump administration has also dedicated itself to “cultivating resistance” to mass migration in Europe.
Into this environment, the Bondi terrorists – who appear to be Islamic extremists inspired by the Islamic State – have lobbed a serious grenade.
Australia won’t backtrack on its gun laws – indeed, it is already moving to strengthen them – but it is now certain to have a similar reckoning over immigration, if it weren’t already under way.
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