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don’t mention the genocide in regard to social cohesion....
The interim report by the Royal Commission established after the Bondi massacre recommends changes, with the broader issues of ‘social cohesion’ yet to be addressed. Stephanie Tran and Kim Wingerei report. The interim report of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has been released. The report contains 14 recommendations, five of which remain confidential.
The Bondi massacre interim report is out. Don’t mention the G word by Stephanie Tran and Kim Wingerei
The Royal Commission was established in January following the Bondi Beach terror attack in which fifteen people were killed when two gunmen opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hanukkah celebration. The interim report focuses on the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attack and the response of law enforcement agencies. The commission found no evidence of critical failures in Australia’s intelligence or legal frameworks that would have prevented authorities from preventing the terror attack. There is also no explicit criticism of the police and emergency services’ responses on the night, although that will be examined further during the public hearings. “No material or advice from any agency identified any gap in the existing legal and regulatory frameworks that impeded the ability for law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies to prevent, or respond to, an attack of the kind that occurred at Bondi on 14 December 2025,” the report states. Commissioner Virginia Bell is understandably at pains to avoid the interim report prejudicing the upcoming trial of the surviving perpetrator, including not to “make findings or comments about the intention and motivation of the shooters.” Interim RecommendationsAmong the public recommendations are calls to expand high-level policing operations used during major Jewish holidays to other high-risk events, strengthen national counter-terrorism coordination, and prioritise firearms reform, including a national gun buyback scheme. Most of the recommendations focus on procedures, reviews, and better coordination between the plethora of anti-terrorism bodies. Five recommendations have been kept confidential due to national security reasons. The report also discusses Jewish Community Security Groups (CSG) and how these private groups liaise with the AFP and NSW Police. CSG have documentedties to Israeli intelligence. In a press conference, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated that the government has “adopted and will implement all the recommendations of the interim report”. Antisemitism focusThe release of the interim report comes amid ongoing debate about the drivers of antisemitism in Australia, particularly in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, although the report acknowledges the connection between antisemitism and Gaza atrocities, the g-word is not mentioned once. antisemitism is mentioned 271 times, islamophobia once. In an op-ed published by MWM earlier this week, barrister and Jewish community leader Jeffrey Loewenstein said the Royal Commissioner would have to “grapple with anti-Israel sentiment” arising from Israel’s actions in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon. “There have been many attempts to conflate being anti-Israel with being antisemitic, including pushing the IHRA ‘definition’ of antisemitism,” he wrote. “The Special Envoy on antisemitism, Jillian Segal, would have us believe that the weekly protest marches, and even the eventful march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge (under the Banner, March for Humanity), engendered antisemitism.” Questions have also been raised about the independence of legal bodies involved in the inquiry. Earlier this week, Deepcut News revealed that the Jewish Centre for Law and Justice, which was appointed to assist individuals making submissions, has a history of pro-Israel advocacy. MWM previously reported that law firm Gilbert + Tobin was appointed to assist the commission without an open tender process, despite its links to the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. The commission has already received more than 3,500 submissions and will begin public hearings next week. The final report is due by 14 December 2026. https://michaelwest.com.au/the-bondi-massacre-interim-report-is-out-dont-mention-the-g-word/
PLEASE VISIT: YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005. Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951. RABID ATHEIST. WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD
OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THIS TRAGIC ACT OF TERRORISM AT BONDI. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVE AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD. AND WE MEAN IT.
GUSNOTE: THE SYSTEM IS OFTEN AFRAID THAT A MOTIVE FOR A BAD DEED CAN BE USED AS AN EXCUSE... THIS HAS BEEN THE CASE SINCE "ADAM AND EVE".....
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islamophobia...
Mo Amer Schools Islamophobes About All Things Muslim | The Daily Showhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py_jhRSEBRE
Islamophobia is all the rage right now, with prominent public figures delighting in smearing Muslims as pork-fearing fanatics hell-bent on conquering the world. But in the interest of accuracy, Muslim comedian Mo Amer has some notes.
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
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RABID ATHEIST.
WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….
"conclusion"....
“This report was designed to produce conclusions rather than find them.” A response to the interim findings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion by Andrew Brown.
As an ordinary Australian who has read this interim report, I am left with one overriding feeling. Something essential is being sidestepped. Not accidentally. Deliberately.
I say that as the godson of two Hungarian Holocaust survivors. I know what antisemitism looks like. I know what it costs. I know where it leads when good people stay silent. That history lives in my family, and it is not abstract to me.
That is precisely why I will not allow the word to be weaponised. Antisemitism is too loaded with real historical horror to be deployed as a conversation stopper every time someone raises the death toll in Gaza. When that happens, it does not protect Jewish people. It uses their suffering as a shield for a government committing atrocities. That is its own kind of desecration.
Antisemitism is real and must be confronted without equivocation. That is not what this is about. This is about a commission that had the opportunity to honestly examine the social fractures in this country and chose, from the very beginning, to look away from half the picture.
A predetermined exerciseThe Royal Commission was announced less than four weeks after the Bondi massacre, stood up under acute political pressure, with terms of reference drafted in trauma and shaped by the loudest voices in the room. The result was an inquiry whose outcome was visible from the day the Letters Patent were issued.
The terms cover four areas. Antisemitism. Law enforcement recommendations. The Bondi attack. Broader social cohesion. That is the entire scope.
There is no mention of Israeli government conduct.
No mention of Gaza.
No mandate to examine Islamophobia. No instruction to ask why social tensions rose so sharply or what role political decision-making played.
When it was suggested the Commission also examine discrimination against Muslims and Indigenous Australians, Commissioner Bell made clear the focus would remain on antisemitism.
A commission into social cohesion that cannot examine what broke it is not an inquiry.
It is a performance.
The conclusion preceded the evidence. The Commission was built around it.
What Australians have been watchingThis commission speaks about social tensions as though they formed in the abstract. They did not. They formed in the palm of every Australian’s hand.
For two years, social media feeds have carried footage no broadcaster would air unedited. Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, surrounded by her family’s bodies, calling for help on a phone. Then the two paramedics sent to rescue her. All of them killed.
Children pulled from rubble. Doctors dragged from wards. Journalists killed in targeted strikes, cameras still rolling. More than twenty thousand children dead. Australians have not read that number.
They have seen those children’s faces.
They watched Zomi Frankcom, an Australian aid worker delivering food in Gaza, killed when Israeli drones struck her clearly marked World Central Kitchen convoy in three sequential strikes. The IDF had her coordinates. Israel withheld drone audio from Australian investigators. Two officers were dismissed. Nobody was prosecuted.
The government accepted that and moved on. Most Australians did not.
That accumulation does not leave you. It builds. And then those same Australians were told by their political class that the primary concern is the feelings of the perpetrating state’s supporters. A Royal Commission is underway. Its terms of reference do not contain the word Gaza. Do not contain the word Palestine. That is not governance.
That is gaslighting at a national scale.
Whose voices this commission choseOrganisations like the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia have spent two years defending Israeli conduct without qualification while saying nothing meaningful about Palestinian civilian deaths.
This commission has amplified those voices as though they represent all Australian Jews. They do not.
A significant number of Jewish Australians have marched, spoken out, and refused the script.
Their voices carry particular moral weight. They have been systematically drowned out by the loudest and most politically connected faction, one that deploys the language of antisemitism against anyone who pushes back. This commission should have made space for the full spectrum.
That it did not tells you everything about whose interests it was built to serve.
The indefensible conflationAny attempt to connect pro-Palestinian protest with the Bondi massacre is not analysis. It is a smear. The attack was carried out by ISIS-radicalised individuals. The hundreds of thousands who marched were exercising democratic expression.
Conflating them insults the Bondi victims and criminalises a community of conscience.
And while the Commission examines the ideological conditions that produced the Bondi attack, it has shown no appetite for examining the structural ones.
The father allegedly owned six firearms, all legally held under the old rules. Under the new NSW regime, that likely would not stand as the new maximum is four. So the question is unavoidable:
Did gaps in licensing and limits help create the conditions for this attack?
A credible inquiry should be examining that directly.
The political will summoned to stand up this Royal Commission at speed was apparently unavailable for the harder conversation about legally acquired weapons in suburban Sydney.
A UN Commission of Inquiry found in March 2025 that Israel’s use of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees was systemic, committed under explicit orders or with the encouragement of Israel’s military and civilian leadership. B’Tselem called the prison system a network of torture camps.
Australian media buried it.
This commission has proceeded as though it never happened.
This commission must state plainly that opposition to Israeli government policy is not terrorism. That grief for Palestinian civilians is not radicalisation. That the people who marched are not the people who killed. Anything less is not a finding. It is a cover.
This report was designed to produce conclusions rather than find them.
Australians who came to this process in good faith deserved better. They are watching. And they are not going away.
https://michaelwest.com.au/bondi-royal-commission-what-this-report-refuses-to-see/
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
RABID ATHEIST.
WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….
never again....
Stephen Heydt
Why a 73 year old Jew had himself arrestedAfter being arrested in Brisbane for wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Jews for a free Palestine from the river to the sea’, a 73-year-old Jewish protester writes that the law is suppressing dissent and targeting supporters of human rights.
Last weekend, I was one of 22 people arrested in Brisbane. Whether it was necessary for so many police to arrest one 73 year old Jew, I’ll let you decide. Perhaps unconscious echoes of a distant, but never to be forgotten, Jewish past.
This abjectly racist law was designed to suppress a liberation movement, targeting Palestinian and Muslim Australians. There is no mechanism in Queensland’s law to improve social cohesion or protect Jews or anyone else. The law is framed to cow supporters of human rights, carefully worded to avoid capturing the language of the Likud Party’s Zionist expansionism, while Queensland maintains the weakest gun laws in Australia. The contrast could not be more telling.
If you’ve already seen media and are sick of my appearances, honestly, I’m on your side. It seems, however, that people may still be interested.
In 1969, aged 16, I first became active in South Africa against apartheid; peacefully picketing in support of Durban dockworkers on strike, broken up by police teargas and batons. In 1976, Soweto school students went on strike against the prescribing of the hated Afrikaans as the official language in schools. The police were brutal, firing shots into crowds of chanting and marching children. Some 176 people were killed that day. Police broke limbs, fired teargas canisters and it didn’t stop for weeks. Subsequent research indicates as many as 700 were killed across the country. The government claimed the figures were exaggerated. Haven’t we heard that recently, somewhere? More echoes!
After the Soweto uprising I became more active. My friends called themselves freedom fighters. Had they known, the people I knew then would have called my friends and me terrorists. After a period in jail, I had to leave South Africa. I know what apartheid and racism look like. I know the appearance, smell, feel and even taste of massacres.
I made my home here in 1981, with the view that the right to disagree, loudly, was fundamental to the Australian national character.
In the years since I have been a clinical psychologist specialising in trauma and disability. In the noughties I ran UNRWA’s mental health programs in Gaza, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria and witnessed Israel’s terrible brutality firsthand; working in Gaza during wars that killed over 5,000 and injured at least four times that number.
What does our ‘Book’ mean, our morality, if we who call ourselves its people stand by in silence? Israeli genocidaires, and their political allies in Australia, demonise anyone with a Middle-Eastern name; some who are Christian, many Muslims and Palestinians, among them health professionals saving lives in our hospitals, and also artists, writers, musicians, poets and academics; and anyone who might speak in support of a common humanity. We see the criminalising of peaceful protest and legitimising of banning political speech. All this in the name of ‘combating antisemitism’?
On Saturday I was arrested alongside a marvellous upstanding Jew and supported by yet more brave Jews holding banners. There is a longstanding, proud, and loud tradition of Jewish resistance to oppression and defence of civil liberties. Jews I knew gave their lives in the struggle for freedom in apartheid South Africa. Jews have given their lives for democracy and Palestinian freedom; with some killed by Zionists. Some Jews, bearing witness in the West Bank today, are being viciously assaulted by settlers, and the IDF. Even more echoes.
It’s why I stood to be arrested on Friday, and why I wanted to write to you today; to encourage ongoing, collective resistance in this long tradition. This repression will continue unless we demonstrate massive and popular opposition. Have conversations with your loved ones. Organise events in your local community. Talk face-to-face to politicians. Engage with the Royal Commission. If you can afford to support organisations like the Jewish Council financially, please do. You need not get arrested, but we must fight back.
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read this and for your support of the Council. A free society is loud and frequently inconvenient, uncomfortable or even offensive to those who would seek power and control over others, and that is precisely why its protection is essential.
Until it’s “never again” for everyone, it can’t be “never again” for anyone.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/05/why-a-73-year-old-jew-had-himself-arrested/
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PLEASE VISIT:
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
RABID ATHEIST.
WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….
FASCISM IN AUSTRALIA NEVER LEFT....