Sky News published a short video today by their international correspondent Alex Rossi (“How Bondi beach attack unfolded in eight minutes of terror”, Dec. 16) suggesting that the motive for the attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah is unknown.
In addition to Rossi’s failure to mention antisemitism in any context during the broadcast, referring to the anti-Jewish massacre which killed sixteen, representing the deadliest attack on Jews since the Oct. 7 massacre, as merely a “mass shooting”, towards the end of the report Ross claims that the the motive of the attack, by Naveed Akram, 24, and his father, Sajid Akram, 50, is unclear.
While it\s narrowly true that the police are still investigating the terror incident, and are waiting for the surviving perpetrator, Naveed Akram, to recover from his injuries before beginning their interrogation, hours after the Sunday attack, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was already clear about the motivation.
He called it “a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Chanukah” and “an act of evil, antisemitism, and terrorism that has struck the heart of our nation”.
Also on Sunday, Australia’s media outlets were already reporting that the country’s domestic intelligence agency had information that the gunmen were involved with a Sydney-based cell of ISIS, an extremist antisemitic movement which openly calls for the murder of Jews.
Albanese later confirmed that the terrorists were motivated by ISIS ideology, and, more recently, photos emerged showing that the perpetrators had an ISIS flag in their car while driving to the site of the attack.
The motivation of the shooters was so clear that even the Guardian’s coverage on Sunday began almost immediately to frame it as an “antisemitic” shooting.
Sadly, this erasure of the antisemitic nature of the Bondi shooters doesn’t represent a journalistic one-off for the Sky reporter.
In June, 2024, we posted about a report by Rossi on the killing of Yahya Sinwar, architect of the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, which explained that “his final moments are, for many Palestinians, emblematic of their struggle and resistance against an expansionist and aggressive Zionist state”. “How you see Israel, or Hamas and the Palestinian cause”, he wrote, “will dictate what [the] drone images [of his death] mean to you”, before adding that “the old adage has never been truer: one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.”
In addition to representing one of the silliest clichés within the canon of moral relativism, Rossi’s inability to distinguish between the leadership of an antisemitic death cult and their Jewish victims shows clearly that he is the last person at Sky who should be reporting on anti-Jewish terror in Australia, or anywhere else in the world.
