15 people were killed and dozens wounded in a terrorist attack on a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. MEF Chief Strategist Jim Hanson spoke to FOX news shortly after the attack to explain how such a horrific event could happen.
Transcript:
FOX: Jim, thank you for coming up with us. We’re struck by the fact that obviously you have the Australian Prime Minister now confirming this isan act of terror, but the actual location, Bondi Beach, certainly seems like a specific target.
HANSON: I think it was definitely chosen because it is an iconic part of Australian culture. And I think it was kind of painful for me to listen to Anthony Albanese talk about how all of this was unforeseeable or they are going to come together now.
His country allowed this anti-Semitism to boil over time and time again. And many people have warned him, as the Israelis have, the U.S. has. They were allowing these Hamas mobs and others to run rampant. And I think now it’s time for the entire world to look at this and say, who is funding this? Who is doing it?
Because, yes, in most cases, it ends up being Islamic terrorists or Islamist terrorists, to be fair. It’s not all Muslims. But the people funding this are leftist revolutionaries who fund the mobs, who degrade Jewish people, and who set up the circumstances that allow something like this to happen.
FOX: What are the special circumstances in a place like Bondi Beach where you have, obviously, the shooters were well off the beach. It appears from other videos that one of the shooters was on a sort of elevated walkway bridge.
I would think that, you know, as a military tactician, you would look at that and see it’s a pretty The shooters clearly picked this out for the tactical advantage for them.
HANSON: Undoubtedly. And that’s the difficulty free Western countries have, is we are essentially giant soft targets. Everywhere we go, any collection of people, it’s almost impossible to secure it. We don’t have that type of a police state. You know, there’s no way.
Securing something the Secret Services work just to secure one appearance by the president president anywhere is such a logistically massive undertaking that the idea you can secure any large group of people, you know, in a country like Australia, the United States or others, it’s just not possible.
We have to get them left of boom, left of the attack before they do it, infiltrate their networks, find their funders and start rounding them up and putting them away.
We can’t stop an event like this, but we can stop the groups we’re now allowing to to go ahead and use the Gaza genocide and the Gaza famine and other lies like that to generate outrage and cause these type of horrific events.
FOX: Yeah, Jim, it’s been awful just to see our entire show taken over by, you know, the deaths in Syria, the deaths at Brown University, and then what we’re seeing here happening. in Australia.
I want to get back to just how iconic Bondi Beach is, because when I was there in Australia, I was really struck in the morning. It’s not just a tourist spot or a surfing spot. It’s a gathering point for the community every morning. No matter what day of the week, Australians gather in that beach, they walk up and down.
There’s a pathway, actually not unlike the pathway in Newport, Rhode Island, where people just grab a coffee and they walk for miles up and down the beach. the speech. There’s all kinds of activities. There’s cafes, restaurants. And then they’re back at sunset to watch the sun go down together as a community.
This isn’t just chilling for the Jewish community. Jim, I believe that this is going to have a massive impact on the psychology and the psyche of all people who live in Sydney and in Australia.
FOX: Absolutely, and it was designed to do that. If you think back to 9-11, why did they hit the Twin Towers? Because they were the two most iconic, recognizable pieces of New York that the entire world knew. So, everybody who has paid attention at all has heard of Bondi Beach. And that’s why you attack something like that.
And you attack us where we’re weakest, where we’re not expecting it. And you do that in the cause of terrorism to strike at the heart of an entire people, a culture, and now the world.
The leftist revolutionary movement and the Islamist movements around the world, the red-green axis, both have one goal. That’s to undermine Western culture. And, like this are designed to do that. They’re designed to strike fear. They’re designed to ruin our ability to enjoy the wonderful cultures we’ve built in the hopes of rising up and bringing what they have, which is an Islamist culture that’s destructive and a leftist, communist-style culture, which is equally destructive.
We need to band together every free country and person in the world to oppose this.
FOX: You know, Jim, I know that your specialty is security, and, obviously, that’s a big, important part of this. I want to get back to the assimilation part of this, because we’ve had massive amounts of people moving to different places. We’ve had immigration, illegal, legal. But we don’t talk enough about assimilation.
If we want to preserve our Western culture and those values that we have of tolerance, can you talk to me about what Australia or other countries, including our own, can do to ensure that those who come to our country learn to have, to adopt those kinds of values, and for us to stop being so, uh, feel so bad about expecting that from those who come to our Western, uh,civilizations.
HANSON: There used to be a concept of the melting pot in America, where you came from somewhere, and you brought the valuable good things of that culture, and they came in and became part of the fabric of America. We lost that when the left in the ‘60s took over and told us that American culture was actually a destructive thing.
And that’s expanded. It was always in Europe. There was an underbelly of the Western civilization, because of colonialism and other things, was not a net positive. And that’s always been a lie.
The greatest cultures ever built came out of the Enlightenment in Europe and moved across the ocean to the United States, where we built the greatest country the world has ever seen.
Bringing people here who believe that it is not that and whose goal is literally to undermine and destroy it is suicidal. We need to change the mindset and look back and say, What has America and the West done for the world? And it’s easy to say we have been the greatest thingthat has ever happened to this planet.
FOX: Such an important message.
Aired originally on December 14, 2025.
