Originally published in the Herald Sun

The December 14 Bondi Beach massacre was not an isolated act of madness. It was another extreme expression of the climate in Australia, one in which anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence have been allowed to escalate unchecked.

But Australia is not an outlier.

What happened in Bondi reflects a broader Western pattern: anti-Semitism incubated in rhetoric, normalised through institutions and governments complicity, and ultimately expressed in violence.

Like others, a year ago, NGO Monitor president Professor Gerald Steinberg and I warned in the UK-based Jewish Chronicle that the West was moving through a series of predictable phases that would ultimately lead to severe violence against Jews. Phase 1 was the sustained demonisation of Israel.

For more than two decades, the “civil society” ecosystem, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs, many funded by European governments and the UK, ran massive campaigns with accusations of “genocide”, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing”, while creating a system of double standards against the Jewish state.

Phase 2 was the erosion of protections for Jews in the West, which accelerated after the October 7 attacks. Across European capitals and US campuses, marches were permitted by officials that became platforms for intimidation and open admiration of Hamas and Hezbollah. Chants calling for violence against Jews, and sometimes the celebration of mass rape and murder, were tolerated or even applauded.

The same NGOs that led Phase 1 worked aggressively to deny recognition to Israeli and Jewish victims. Amnesty International Australia offers a revealing case study. At a time of unprecedented danger for Australian Jews, with firebombings, threats against synagogues and schools, harassment in public spaces and open intimidation becoming part of Australian Jewish life, Amnesty was active in opposing measures to protect them.

It folded anti-Jewish violence into vague references to generalised “hate” and aggressively campaigned against protective steps. The NGO condemned a university’s adoption of a definition of anti-Semitism as an assault on free speech, opposed restrictions on protests near synagogues even after firebombings and credible threats, and attacked the federal government’s anti-Semitism strategy as “repression” intended to shield Israel.

This pattern reflects not a principled defence of human rights, but a consistent prioritisation of anti-Israel activism over Jewish safety, framing efforts to combat anti-Semitism as illegitimate and thus normalising intimidation of Jews.

Indeed, across the West, NGOs claiming moral authority have worked to deprive Jewish victims of recognition while extending endless legitimacy to those who threaten them.

On October 7 itself, while Jews were raped, burned alive, kidnapped, and massacred, these groups redirected outrage within hours toward Israel. They then spent the next two years accusing it of genocide, starvation and apartheid in its campaign of self-defence.

Elected officials in Spain, France, Australia, Canada and the EU adopted NGO-generated language, repeating blood libels and giving cover to groups affiliated with Hamas, Hezbollah and PFLP to operate freely under the banner of civil society.

The political class has sent an unmistakable signal, a dog whistle for anti-Semitism as long as it targets the Jewish state. We are now firmly in Phase 3: open violence. Anti-Semitism is no longer confined to theoretical slogans. Jews are being targeted in public, in transit, schools, synagogues and their workplaces.

In the US, mobs block Jewish-owned businesses and harass diners. In Europe, Jews wearing kippot are assaulted, synagogues are defaced and random street attacks are routine. In Australia, the escalations culminated in mass murder.

It is within such a context that the role of NGOs must be examined.

They have betrayed themselves to be active participants, not neutral observers, in shaping an environment in which violence against Jews is wholly permissible. The surge in attacks on Jewish communities since October 7 did not begin with Gaza, nor can it be explained by it.

What we are witnessing today is the violent outcome of a long and deliberate process, one in which hostility toward Jews was laundered through the language of “human rights”, legitimatised by NGOs, echoed by governments, and finally translated into physical danger.

For years, hostility toward Jews has been artificially reframed, in NGO reports, UN forums, academia and media, as hostility toward “Zionists.” This moral loophole had one goal: allowing classic anti-Semitism to be repackaged as principled and modern, by recasting Jews as colonial and genocidal, the vogue evils of our age.

Bondi should not be remembered as a warning. It should be remembered as the consequence of years of moral abdication, when Jewish blood stained the hands of the industry of “human rights”.

Itai Reuveni is communications and outreach director at NGO Monitor.