The suspects in the mass-murder attack have been identified as Sajid Akram, a 50-year-old Pakistani immigrant to Australia who was killed at the scene, and his 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, born in Australia, who was wounded and taken into custody at the scene. The New York Post reports that younger Akram studied the Quran at the al-Murad Institute, the Islamic center outside Sydney. He is said to have been investigated on suspicion of terrorist ties in 2019, but authorities concluded he was not a threat at that time. The Akrams reportedly had an ISIS flag and an improvised explosive device in the car they drove to Bondi Beach.

Video captured the depraved, indiscriminate shooting, and the heroic intervention of Ahmed el Ahmed, an Australian citizen who immigrated from Syria, who tackled and disarmed the elder assailant. (Ahmed sustained serious injuries and has been hospitalized but is reportedly in stable condition.)

As is customary, the progressive, Islamist-friendly media has quickly pivoted to a focus on the firearms used — as if the guns had spontaneously fired — rather than the ideology of the shooters. Continued conscious avoidance of the animating sharia-supremacist ideology should not be tolerable.

The surge in antisemitism in Australia and the West is directly proportionate to the increase in Middle Eastern Islamic migration. Let’s generously assume that most Muslim immigrants want to assimilate — notwithstanding the admonitions of such Islamic leaders as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoan, who says demanding Muslim assimilation in the West is a “crime against humanity,” and the late Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood eminence, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who similarly urged Muslims to integrate into the West but resist assimilation — instead, to form Islamic enclaves that agitated for autonomy to live in accordance with sharia. It doesn’t require a majority of assimilation-resistant Muslim immigrants to catalyze sharia-supremacist activism — a committed minority can be the critical mass needed, particularly in dense urban centers.

There were about 41,000 Muslims in Australia in 1981 — a negligible 0.03 percent of the total population of about 14 million. Today, there are well over 800,000 Muslims — about 3 percent of the total population of about 28 million. That is, while Australia’s population increased by a factor of two, its Islamic population grew by a factor of 20. And about a third of that growth occurred in just the last 15 years, due to immigration from countries in which fundamentalist Islam is prominent — Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. That is a prescription for sharia- supremacist activism, and Australia has had it for years — as attested by the pro-Hamas street celebrations and demonstrations after the October 7 atrocities.

I addressed sharia-supremacist ideology and its doctrinally rooted Jew hatred last year, in connection with revelations about the role of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in Hamas’s annihilationist war against Jews in Israel:

The salient ideology is undeniably derived from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic scripture that remains authoritative in the Middle East — including in the Palestinian territories. Yet the transnational progressives who dominate Western governments and media persist in denying that this ideology exists, or at least in denying that its powerful influence grips more than a relative handful of “extremists.” . . .

Behind the UNRWA’s “right of return” mantra are two animating principles of sharia supremacism.

The first is that any territory that Islam claims, either in scripture or by subsequent conquest (which is scripturally endorsed) is deemed Islamic in perpetuity. If such a territory is annexed by non-Muslims, Muslims are obliged to conduct jihad (seen as “defensive”) until the territory is returned to Islamic rule. Now, Israel was the Jewish homeland for millennia before Islam was “revealed” to Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, in the early seventh century…. Nevertheless, a dubious but long-standing interpretation of Islamic scripture holds that Israel, particularly Jerusalem, is central to Islam. (It is claimed to be the launch point for Muhammad’s “night journey” to heaven in around 621.) And in the nearly 14 centuries between the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Jerusalem in 637 and the Ottoman Empire’s post-World War I collapse (giving way to Mandatory Palestine under British control), Israel was regularly under Islamic rule, although Jews continued to live there. In sharia supremacism, once it has been under Islamic rule, a lost jurisdiction must be brought back under Islamic rule as soon as Muslims have the wherewithal for reconquest.

The second principle, deep-seated in sharia supremacism, is enmity toward Jews. Muhammad’s army fought Jewish tribes after those tribes spurned his efforts to entice them to accept Islam. Moreover, Islamic eschatology — reflected in the al-Bukhari and Muslim hadiths — holds that there will be a final confrontation in which Muslims slaughter Jews. This is expressly reaffirmed in Hamas’s charter. As the self- proclaimed “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Hamas there “aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.” What promise? As Muhammad put it:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

This is not a fringe belief. Not only is it founded in scripture; it was a favorite theme of the [aforementioned] Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni Islamic jurisprudent in modern history, who died in 2022. Qaradawi’s television program, Sharia and Life, broadcast by Qatar-based Al Jazeera, had a weekly audience of millions. Hamas took Qaradawi as its authoritative sharia scholar, marinating in his instruction that “the martyr operations” against Israel were “the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”

Biden-Harris officials and other progressives who urge the kid-glove approach to Hamas are fond of saying that you can’t defeat “an idea” militarily. Put aside the abject stupidity of this fortune-cookie wisdom. The “idea” in question is not Hamas. Hamas is just a jihadist fighting force — like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and dozens of others. Fighting forces are quelled all the time; Israel has already substantially defeated Hamas in Gaza. But it will reemerge, maybe with a new name on the door, because the animating idea, sharia supremacism, remains predominant in the Muslim Middle East, and forcible “jihad in the cause of Allah,” as the Muslim Brotherhood proclaims, is the scripturally endorsed method of spreading the idea.