Canadian author warns Bondi lessons being forgotten

Canadian political strategist and author Warren Kinsella has warned Australians not to assume the Bondi Chanukah attack will not be repeated, after visiting the site of the December 14 massacre at Archer Park this week.

Kinsella, who writes for the Toronto Sun, was in Australia to speak at a counterterrorism conference. He was taken around the Chanukah terror attack site on Thursday by Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) head of Sydney office Arsen Ostrovsky, who was injured in the shooting.

“For anybody seeing it, [it] just looks like a park. Kids’ playground, you get a barbecue, you get picnic tables, but it’s a place where terrible things happen,” Kinsella told The AJN. “I fear that the importance and the lessons of what happened there get forgotten and have gotten forgotten.”

Kinsella drew a parallel with the shooting outside the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in his home town of Belleville, Ontario, on the eve of Yom Kippur on September 20.

“Bullets were going through the stained glass window … and all of those people were saved because a Belleville police officer, Constable Smith, was there. He was shot. He almost died,” he said. “What happened at Bondi, it’s happening in other places, unexpected places, unexpected days, and that is a consequence, in part, of this global propaganda war.”

Kinsella said the threat was growing. “The problem is getting worse. It’s not getting better. I know a lot of people look at Bondi and they think, ‘Okay, well, that’s not going to happen again.’ Don’t believe that. Don’t succumb to that delusion,” he said.

Kinsella said he began writing his book The Hidden Hand, an expose of the planned, well-funded global propaganda campaign to delegitimise Israel and spread antisemitism after October 7, 2023, in the three weeks after the Hamas-led massacre, when about 2500 protests took place around the world “using professionally rendered signage and banners, people with talking points that have been prepared for them”.

“This looks like an organised, professional, well-funded campaign,” he said.

He described Iran as the campaign’s manager, China and Russia as its echo chamber and Qatar as its banker, with “this alphabet soup of NGOs and charities, nonprofits” as the front line in Western democracies.

Kinsella said young people were the first target. He cited Anti-Defamation League (ADL) data showing that concern about antisemitism among Gen Z and millennials fell around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, while their concern about racism held steady.

“They had to move online. Iran was waiting for them. Hamas was waiting for them,” he said. “They started to believe in conspiracy theories … Once you get them to succumb to antisemitic tropes and madness like that, it becomes easier to bring them further along and radicalising.”

Kinsella said governments and social media companies were the two entities most important in fighting the problem, and both had “dropped the ball”.

Of social media owners including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, he said: “You’ve got billionaires, in one case a trillionaire, who operate in this lawless, wild west environment where anything goes.

“We’re not asking them to donate a kidney. We’re asking them just to observe certain basic restraints, such as to promote truth and discourage hate and lies.”

He said governments should tell the companies: “You will do this, or there will be consequences … so far, there’s not really a government in the world that has done that.”

Kinsella was also critical of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney for recognising a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September 2025. He said recognition had been predicated on elections, governance reform, changes to the school curriculum and an end to the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” program.

“None of those things have happened, not one,” he said. “[The] Palestinian state, at least in the case of Gaza, is governed by a designated terrorist entity in this country and in my country.

“We have leadership that is weak and is either recklessly or wilfully blind to this virus of antisemitism and hatred that is spreading in our countries, and that in some cases has cost people their lives.”

Referring to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Kinsella said the Australian government had questions to answer over Bondi.

“Here, feet from where we are at the moment, you got 15 people [who] were slaughtered as a consequence of an ideology that was allowed to be taught without restraint in this country, and the people involved in that have to answer that. But so too does the government,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the commission of inquiry deals seriously with what it’s got, which is a serious problem.”

Kinsella also addressed a lunch for AIJAC supporters in Sydney on Monday. “The beast of antisemitism is out of its cage, and it is everywhere to be seen,” he told attendees.

Kinsella said he had fought antisemitism for decades as a lawyer, journalist and political adviser, facing threats against his life and at times requiring police protection. “I have never seen it as bad as it is now. Never,” he said.

He argued that antisemites across the political and ideological spectrum were driven by envy and resentment. “[They] envy your success in every endeavour. They envy the resilience and the strength of the Jewish people,” he said.

Kinsella said Israel was always going to prevail militarily, but a second war  – “the information war, the propaganda war” – was under way. He said social media profiles began appearing across North America, Europe and the Middle East 18 months before October 7. He said they sat dormant until the day of the attack, then were used to spread denial of the atrocities.

Kinsella said most people in the West supported Israel and the Jewish community. But he warned that millions of young people on the right and the left “have fallen under the spell of Hamas and Iran and the Jew haters”.

“We cannot lose a generation. We cannot lose the future,” he said.

He said the campaign’s blueprint was devised 40 years ago, and traced its origins to the Soviet Union. “I believe we will win that war,” he said. “Because we must win that war.”