"The US-led Western world must swallow the bitter fruit of having indulged Israel in reviving the 'law of the jungle' in the Middle East" -Ma Xiaolin & Yang Fuxin frame the Bondi attack using one of history's oldest tropes: blaming Jews for the violence perpetrated against them.

Ma is a former Xinhua correspondent in the Middle East and professor at Zhejiang International Studies University (ZISU), where he directs the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean Rim (ISMR). Yang is a research assistant at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Their article was published on state-owned Phoenix TV's online accounts the day after the attack, on December 15.

To their credit, the piece does clearly condemn antisemitism and radical Islam; they do label the Bondi Beach shooting as antisemitic terrorism and call for stronger counterterrorism and social governance. They also correctly note that "soft targets" and symbolic timing (a public Hanukkah event) can be tactically attractive to terrorists. Sadly, the rest of the analysis overreaches into speculative, politically convenient causality.

The core problem is captured in the authors’ own words:

"It is self-evident that the so-called ‘Sixth Middle East War’ of the last two years, particularly its trigger, the Gaza war and the large-scale, indiscriminate deaths of Palestinian civilians, has become the most significant immediate catalyst for antisemitism in Australia. From another angle, this is one of the unintended consequences of bellicose Israel resorting to military aggression at will 穷兵黩武, which has turned back at it like a boomerang 回旋镖 to fuel the resurgence of global antisemitism. Australia has a large population in which Muslims and Jews coexist, and its policies are relatively permissive and multicultural. However, rather than encouraging peaceful coexistence, these conditions have exacerbated religious and political conflict, ultimately leading to this massacre."

This framing rationalizes terror as a natural response to Middle Eastern geopolitics rather than condemning it as the murder of innocent people who bear no responsibility for decisions made thousands of miles away.

Even if they intend to condemn antisemitism, this "boomerang" logic echoes the classic victim-blaming trope: antisemitism is rising "because of the Jews" (or because Jews, via Israel, supposedly "caused" it). Why is it so difficult to fathom that grievances about a conflict thousands of miles away do not logically translate into the murder of Jewish people?

The same pattern appears again in their closing paragraph:

"As Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated: “This extremely brutal terrorist attack targeted innocent Jews who were lighting the first candle of Hanukkah on the beach.” But when the candle was extinguished in a pool of blood, Australia needs to reflect on its long-standing lax attitude toward counterterrorism; the Western world led by the US must swallow the bitter fruit of having indulged Israel in reviving the “law of the jungle” 丛林法则 in the Middle East; Israel must face the inevitable cause-and-effect relationship between its unlimitedencroachment and annexation of Palestinian land and its repeated creation of humanitarian disasters in Gaza; and radical Islamist terrorism, together with the worldwide surge of antisemitism, must be condemned in the strongest possible terms."

Notice how they acknowledge innocent Jews were murdered, then immediately pivot to what Israel "must face," as if the victims deserved their fate as karmic retribution. But they condemned terrorism at the end, so I suppose that makes everything that came before it all fine.

Finally, like Chen Hong's analysis below, the ideological framing here is transparent. The article attempts to maintain contradictory narratives simultaneously, rendering its conclusions unfalsifiable.

They argue Australia was targeted as a "core ally" of the US that "unilaterally favors Israel," yet they acknowledge that the Australian government announced plans to recognize the State of Palestine in August 2025. Rather than admit this complicates their thesis, they perform remarkable mental gymnastics, suggesting that recognizing Palestine might have been viewed by terrorists as "weakness" or "wavering" that "emboldened them to pursue their political goals through violence further." By this logic, Australia deserves blame whether it supports Israel or Palestine, since its real crime is being part of the Western alliance.

Link: news.ifeng.com/c/8p6kSH…