The idyllic sands of Australia’s Bondi Beach turned into a slaughterhouse this week.
As families lit Hanukkah candles under a twilight sky, Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed, 24 – both Australian residents of Pakistani descent – unleashed a hail of bullets killing 15 innocents, including a 10-year-old girl, a Holocaust survivor, and a British-born rabbi. Forty others lay wounded. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it what it was: a terrorist atrocity fueled by “extremist ideology,” with intelligence linking the attackers to ISIL.
This wasn’t senseless rage but imported jihad, a horrific warning from Down Under to America: reckless immigration policies that welcome unvetted masses from radical hotbeds erode security, culture and the very soul of Western nations.
Australia’s saga is eerily familiar to our own. Over the past 20 years, Australia admitted roughly 660,000 permanent residents born in majority-Islamic nations including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia and Bangladesh. That’s a flood into a population of just 27.2 million, where those born overseas already constitute 31.5% of the country. These arrivals, often via refugee or chain migration streams, now form a constituency of almost 3% of Australians who identify as Muslim, per their 2021 census. That’s a huge increase from negligible numbers just two decades ago.
The rest of Australia is starting to wake up. Fifty-one percent of native-born Australians deem immigration “too high,” per a 2025 Scanlon Foundation survey. While some may attribute this to xenophobia, it is simply exhaustion from policies that prioritize global virtue-signaling over national survival.
If assimilation has even been attempted in Australia, it has failed. Many newcomers cluster in parallel societies, nurturing enclaves where Sharia can take root. In Sydney’s Lakemba or Melbourne’s Broadmeadows sections, halal markets and madrasas flourish, but English fluency lags and anti-Western values remain.
The Bondi Beach terrorists are a product of this pattern: father and son, raised in Australia, yet radicalized enough to target Jews in an antisemitic fervor. Far from outliers, they were symptoms of policies blind to the extremist ideological baggage that has been brought into the country.
Australia’s folly is not that different from the catastrophe in Europe. From France’s detached banlieue districts to Sweden’s no-go zones, lax borders have imported not just cheap labor, but lethal ideologies. The 2025 U.S. Homeland Threat Assessment warns of persistent risks from “homegrown” jihadists on the European continent, while Europe’s Muslim population – currently around 46 million, or about 6% of the total – is projected to grow to between 7.4% and 14% by 2050, depending on future migration levels, with higher fertility rates among Muslims also contributing.
Paris riots, London knife attacks, and Berlin truck rammings aren’t accidents but erosions of border security, where radical Islamists exploit welfare states to plot attacks from mosques. Europe’s tradition-laden Christmas markets have become a popular target for foreign-born jihadis, either for demonstrations or violent attacks. As President Trump’s national security strategy notes, unchecked inflows spell “civilizational erasure.”
The West’s Achilles’ heel is our generosity, weaponized by enemies among us. Excessively generous asylum laws, born from a national embarrassment or guilt over our prosperity, now serve to import radicals who game a system of fake conversions, sob stories, and porous borders. Once here, they form ascendant demographic and political blocs that demand concessions while native-born birth rates plummet. Politicians are quick to pander to these emerging groups, as their electoral futures require sufficient numbers of immigrant votes.
Back home in the U.S., Minnesota has become the embodiment of the peril we face. More than 90,000 Somali-Americans there have become a political force. They powered Ilhan Omar to Congress, and her anti-Israel rhetoric and Hamas sympathies have greatly influenced Democratic foreign policy.
Along the way, a Minneapolis fraud ring comprised mostly of Somalis siphoned $1 billion from welfare programs, allegedly funneling cash to Al-Shabaab terrorists. Gov. Tim Walz, seeking a third term and dependent on the Somali vote for reelection, swats away any criticism of the Somali community in the fraud scandal as evidence of racism.
Throughout America, left-wing political strategists peddle the same poison: sanctuary cities, DACA expansions, and border nullification. They frame resistance as bigotry, ignoring New Orleans’ 2025 ISIS truck attack (14 dead) or an Afghan migrant shouting “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down two members of the National Guard. Their vision is a borderless utopia where radicals roam free, eroding the melting pot into a balkanized nation at its sunset.
Looking at these trends from a macro level, do they portend a future of strong, cohesive nations? Absolutely not. Without a serious reversal of our recent path, the Western world will continue to deteriorate into lawless, fractured states in decline. A majority of Americans want to reverse course, and that desire fueled Donald Trump to his two presidential election victories.
America must take a stand against grim scenario through immigration freezes, ironclad vetting, and assimilation mandates. Deport radicals, defund pandering NGOs, and reclaim our traditions. The West’s generosity helped sustain the world, and now it is being exploited to tear down our once-great societies. Resist these anti-borders policies at all costs, or follow Australia’s trajectory. Our future depends on it.
