Violence on Steroids

What a lousy – and extremely violent – week this has been.

First, we witnessed a terrorist attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in Australia where an estimated 1,000 Jews were gathered on Sunday to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah. Kudos to Ahmed al Ahmed, the 43-year-old fruit-shop owner who was shot twice while disarming one of the shooters. Ahmed is currently recuperating in the hospital, and a GoFundMe page has already raised more than $2.3 million to pay his medical bills.

Also, heartfelt thanks and sincere condolences to the unidentified couple and 62-year-old Reuven Morrison, all of whom were killed while confronting the terrorists. I hope they died realizing that their brave actions were not in vain as they may have saved countless innocent lives.

Finally, a big shout-out to the nearly 50,000 Australians who have made appointments to donate blood in the wake of the shootings, which is more than double the previous record. A total of 7,810 pints of blood, plasma, and platelets were donated in a single day, breaking the previous record set during the Black Saturday bushfires in February 2009.

On the flip side, shame on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns for turning this tragedy into a photo-op for tighter gun control laws. Like circling vultures, both men have seized the opportunity to call for even more invasive gun control in a country that already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.

The "very nature of our gun laws means that they are only as strong as the weakest link,” Albanese said before proposing to limit the number and types of guns people can own. Requiring Australian citizenship for gun ownership may soon be mandatory and the establishing of a national gun registry will be fast-tracked, Albanese added… and like a bunch of spineless sheep, the National Cabinet has already unanimously agreed to all four proposals.

For his part, Minns said that he is "determined to bring in the toughest gun laws in Australia, and they'll be significantly tightened in New South Wales."

Gentlemen, it wasn’t the guns themselves that killed those 15 people and wounded 40 others in the worst terrorist attack in Australia’s history (and the second deadliest mass shooting after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre that claimed 35 lives while wounding 23 others and leading to fundamental changes in the country’s gun laws). The real culprits were the two radical Islamists, a father and his son, who pulled the triggers.

The father, who was killed in the attack, was an Indian national and a member of a gun club who owned at least six licensed firearms which police believe were used in the attack. His son was born in Australia, but was a follower of radical Islamic cleric Wissam Haddad, whose violent vitriol was found to be in violation of the country's racial hatred laws earlier this year.

Despite his radical ties – and the fact that he had been known to intelligence officials since 2019 – the son was considered "not an immediate threat" by police. Together, the father and son had recently traveled to the Philippines to receive military training.

And so, let’s not blame the weapons or the law-abiding Australians who own them. Instead, let’s blame the intelligence community who failed to protect the citizens of Australia – and its Jewish residents, in particular – from radical Islamic terrorists when all the warning signs were there.

Speaking of radical Islamists, the city of Paris has canceled its annual New Year’s Eve celebration, including an open-air concert along the Champs-Elysees that drew 1 million people last year, because of security concerns. Specifically, Paris police pressured the mayor to scrap the concert due to fears of “unpredictable crowd movements.” Meanwhile, France’s interior minister cited a “very high terror threat” from groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The festivities will be replaced by a prerecorded video that can be viewed from “the safety and comfort of French living rooms,” reported the New York Post.

Fireworks will still illuminate the Arc de Triomphe at the stroke of midnight, but there won’t be anyone there to see them except for a camera crew, all because “the famed avenue has become a flashpoint of violence lately, with throngs of young, mostly Muslim migrants streaming in from Paris’ infamous suburbs at night looking for trouble, looting luxury stores, and brawling with Parisians and police.”

“Unfortunately, in France, there is such a turn toward savagery that everything becomes a pretext for violence,” said Bruno Retailleau, head of Les Republicains and a former interior minister himself. “These acts of violence are the product of a descent into savagery” perpetrated by “cowards and thugs who attack the property of often modest French citizens.”

“Last year, we had more scares in two hours of New Year’s Eve celebrations on the Chams-Elysees than in three weeks of the Olympic Games,” a police commissioner said. That December 31st, 984 cars were torched and 420 people were arrested in what police called “senseless and endemic violence.”

“It’s obvious that this is the result of massive unvetted Muslim immigration into Europe,” said Daniel Di Martino, an immigration fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “Western Europe has had a terrorism problem for many years now, and that has been exacerbated because of unvetted Islamic immigration as a result of the refugee crisis of over a decade ago.”

Finally, someone is saying what is obvious to anyone with two eyes and half a brain.

The problem isn’t guns. It’s the mass migration of unvetted Muslims – and radical Islamists, in particular – in Australia, in Europe, and yes, in the United States.

Before and after the Port Arthur massacre in Australia, two federally funded gun buyback and voluntary surrender programs – as well as provincial gun amnesty offers – resulted in more than 1 million firearms being collected and destroyed, reducing the national stock of weapons by one-third. And yet, criminals and terrorists still found a way to obtain guns legally and illegally, meaning that the draconian gun control laws were not only ineffective, but they also backfired by removing firearms from law-abiding people.

You know, the kind of gun-toting, law-abiding citizens who could have neutralized those two radical Islamic terrorists at Bondi Beach before they took the lives of a 10-year-old girl named Matilda and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who died while shielding his wife from the gunfire.

Thankfully, the FBI has thwarted several other potential terrorist attacks recently, including one in Dearborn, Michigan on Halloween. Mohmed Ali, 20, and Majed Mahmoud, 20, now face charges of “Receiving and transferring, and attempting and conspiring to transfer, firearms and ammunition knowing and having reasonable cause to believe that the firearms and ammunition would be used to commit a Federal crime of terrorism,” according to the criminal complaint.

Supposedly, Mohmed and Majed were ISIS operatives who had been under surveillance since 2024.

Lest I focus solely on terrorist attacks stoked and provoked by Islamic jihadists, there was a mass shooting at Brown University this week that claimed the lives of two students and left nine others wounded. As of Tuesday afternoon, the suspect remains at large.

And then there was the bomb plot that was discovered and dismantled in the Mojave Desert on Monday. According to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department and FBI "prevented what would have been a massive and horrific terror plot in the Central District of California," which encompasses Los Angeles and Orange County.

FBI Director Kash Patel said that the four people who face charges for the alleged plot in California are members of a group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front. Bondi described the Turtle Island Liberation Front as a "far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group."

The suspects allegedly crafted a "detailed, coordinated plot" to bomb two U.S. companies on New Year's Eve, with the devices simultaneously exploding at midnight, according to Bill Essayli, who leads the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles.

"This case is another reminder about the dangers that radicalized antifa-like groups pose to people, public safety and the rule of law," he said.

Finally, there was the murder of actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele by their son Nick, a recovering drug addict. Their bodies were found with their throats slit in their 10,000-square foot Brentwood home that was once owned by Norman Lear, Paul Henreid, and Henry Fonda.

More on this tragedy – and the fall-out – tomorrow…