Bondi: Acknowledging Context is Not the Same as Justifying Crime

The attack on Jewish civilians in Sydney shocked Australia — and the world. Yet the conversation that followed exposed a deeper pattern: some violence is endlessly contextualised, while other tragedies are stripped of explanation. Understanding why atrocities occur is not an excuse; it is the only path to prevention.

This article is not about the heroics of individuals, debates over migrant policy, or the merits of stricter gun laws. Those are important conversations, but they are distractions from the fundamental point: understanding violence requires examining the conditions in which it emerges. Context does not excuse crime; it illuminates why atrocities happen and how they might be prevented in the future.

Violence Is Never Born in a Vacuum

After political violence, grief now has a shelf life measured in hours. Meaning rushes in almost immediately. Television panels assemble. Government statements are drafted. Social media decides what can and cannot be said. Before the dead are buried, the boundaries of interpretation are already fixed.

One rule increasingly governs this process: context is permitted only when it is politically convenient.

Yet anyone who has observed modern violence knows a simple truth: no act of political violence is born in a vacuum. Acknowledging context is not the same as justifying crime. Refusing to examine context is how violence repeats itself.

When Context Arrives on Time

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders did not simply condemn the violence. They explained it. History lessons were offered on television. NATO expansion was discussed openly. Russian security paranoia, imperial nostalgia, and post–Cold War grievances were dissected in detail. None of this was seen as excusing the bombing of cities. It was seen as necessary to understanding the war.

When far-right attackers murdered worshippers in Christchurch, analysts quickly turned to online radicalisation, extremist forums, political rhetoric, and the role of grievance culture. Governments promised to tackle the “ecosystem” that produced the killer. Context, again, was not controversial. It was expected.

When police killings of Black Americans trigger unrest, politicians speak of structural racism, inherited inequality, and long histories of mistrust. No serious voice suggests that explaining these conditions somehow condones violence. Failing to mention them would be considered evasive.

And when Western militaries kill civilians abroad — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, or elsewhere — context arrives instantly. Viewers are told about security threats, militants embedded among civilians, historical disputes, regional instability. The deaths are tragic, officials say, but complicated.

Context, in these cases, is not an indulgence. It is standard practice.

When Context Becomes Taboo

But for Bondi, the rules change.

The attack is condemned — rightly — yet analysis is expected to stop there. Antisemitism is invoked as a self-contained explanation, complete and sufficient. Questions about political climate, media narratives, or wider grievances are treated with suspicion. To ask how such hatred formed is to risk being accused of minimising it.

Antisemitism’s Deep European Roots

Antisemitism is often portrayed today as emerging primarily from Muslim communities, yet its history in Europe tells a far more brutal story. The Rhineland massacres of 1096 saw crusading mobs slaughter thousands of Jews in towns such as Speyer and Mainz. In 1391, pogroms across Spain killed many Jews and forced mass conversions, culminating in the 1492 expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. Centuries later, state-sanctioned discrimination and violence continued, reaching a horrifying apex in the Holocaust, in which around six million Jews were systematically murdered across Nazi-occupied Europe.

These episodes make clear that antisemitism in Europe has deep historical roots, shaped by centuries of prejudice, persecution, and scapegoating — a history far broader and more violent than the simplified contemporary narrative sometimes allows. Recognising this is essential to understanding how prejudice forms, spreads, and is selectively discussed in public debate today.

The Shadow of History

The persistence of antisemitism in Europe illustrates a broader truth: the selective attention given to context extends far beyond any single form of prejudice. Across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, violence is routinely described as ancient, sectarian, or cultural — as though borders simply appeared, states naturally fractured, and rivalries emerged fully formed. Rarely is the basic fact stated plainly: many of these lands were divided, ruled, and stripped by external powers whose decisions continue to shape the violence we now treat as indigenous dysfunction.

The partition of the Indian subcontinent, drawn hurriedly by British officials who had never seen the land they were dividing, displaced millions and left a legacy of hostility that still defines South Asia’s politics. The borders of Iraq, Syria, and Jordan were mapped to imperial convenience, stitching together communities with little shared political history and leaving fault lines that later exploded. In Palestine, promises were made to multiple parties, contradictions papered over, and responsibility outsourced — with consequences still unfolding.

Yet when violence erupts in these regions, context stops abruptly at “local hatred.” Colonial intervention is treated as distant background noise, not as a central causal force. The disorder is framed as self-generated. This amnesia matters. It allows former imperial powers to speak about instability as if it were an inherited trait rather than an engineered one. It also reinforces the broader habit traced here: context is welcomed when it absolves power, and ignored when it implicates it.

The Closure of Speech

At the same time, legitimate political expression has narrowed. Protests are restricted. Slogans are policed. Public figures lose jobs for remarks that would once have been argued over rather than punished.

History suggests this is a risky strategy. When political anger cannot be aired openly, it does not disappear. It festers. It moves from the visible to the pathological.

This does not absolve anyone who commits violence. But it does raise an uncomfortable point: societies that choke off lawful dissent often end up dealing with unlawful expression instead.

Moral Theatre and Its Limits

Public responses to violence increasingly resemble performance. Leaders condemn. Communities are urged to “stand together.” Vigils are held. All of this has value. None of it addresses causes.

Counter-terrorism agencies, by contrast, are blunt. They study pathways, not platitudes. They look at grievances, networks, narratives, and triggers. They know that violence is rarely spontaneous and rarely inexplicable.

The gap between how states actually prevent violence and how they publicly talk about it has grown wide.

A Test of Seriousness

If societies wish to reduce political violence rather than simply react to it, they will need to recover a basic intellectual consistency. Context cannot be something offered generously when bombs fall abroad, yet denied when attacks occur at home. It cannot be welcomed when it explains violence against some communities and is banned when it complicates narratives about others.

No act of political violence is born in a vacuum. This is not a provocation. It is an observation borne out by every conflict, every insurgency, every campaign of terror the modern world has faced.

Refusing to examine context does not honour victims. It ensures the conditions that produced their suffering remain intact, waiting sadly for the next eruption