The Free Press

For months, Amnesty International, self-proclaimed champion of human rights and among the world’s most influential and best-funded nonprofits, has been blasting Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza, while hesitating to divulge full results of its investigation into the bloody event that triggered that war: Hamas’s atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Commissioned in early 2024, and mostly completed well over a year ago, Amnesty’s October 7 report finally came out on Thursday—two years, two months, and five days since Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups massacred some 1,200 people in southern Israel, and one year after Amnesty accused Israel of genocide in a separate report.

It’s Monday, December 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why are UK censors coming for TGIF? Is the age of reading well and truly over? Coleman Hughes interviews one of the first “Never Trumpers.” And much more.

But first: The bloodshed at Brown and on Bondi Beach.

What an awful weekend.

At 4 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, a gunman burst into a classroom at Brown University and started shooting. Two students are dead. Eight more are in the hospital.

For 13 hours, the campus was on lockdown. One of the students who spent the night hiding from the killer was Victoria Zang, a senior who barricaded herself in her dorm alongside her classmates. The police detained a person of interest on Sunday morning, but released him that night. The manhunt continues.

Victoria writes about a terrifying Saturday night, and how she and her school are changed forever, in The Free Press today. “I’m used to reading about shootings in the news,” writes Victoria. “Every single time, I pray first for the students, and then that my school is not next. I can’t pray for that anymore.”

Read her full firsthand account in our pages:

Victoria was still locked down in her dorm in Rhode Island when, on the other side of the world, two gunmen, a father and son, opened fire at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Their target was Australia’s Jewish community, and a celebration of the first night of Hanukkah.

The attack lasted some 10 minutes. By the time the terrorists were stopped, they had killed at least 16 people and injured dozens more. It was the most lethal terror attack in Australian history, and the deadliest attack targeting Jews since October 7, 2023. The victims include a rabbi with five children, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl.

We have four pieces to help you make sense of this horror this morning.

First, Ayaan Hirsi Ali declares that the intifada has arrived in Australia and writes about how we should respond. “Love without courage doesn’t stop hatred,” she writes. “Unity without truth dissolves into denial.” In this essay, Ayaan writes with the moral clarity that makes hers such an essential voice, now more than ever. Read it here:

The Australian Jewish author Julie Szego writes that, of all the emotions she has grappled with since the attack, the most complicated is a dark sense of vindication. “Now do you believe us?” she imagines screaming at the country’s progressive intelligentsia—who she says have downplayed and looked away from the explosion of antisemitism in Australia since October 7. Read Julie on the platitudes of Australia’s political class—and the uncomfortable reality no one in Australia can deny any longer:

Sometimes, the most important thing to do after an atrocity like the Bondi attack is to speak straightforwardly about what just happened. That is what Brendan O’Neill did in an essay published very soon afterward. Read his reaction to “a pogrom on a beach”:

Adam Louis-Klein has written brilliantly for us recently on the illusory distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The Bondi attack, he argues, is an appallingly vivid illustration of the problem. “This is not about a political opinion that ‘crosses the line’ into antisemitic violence,” he writes. “We are dealing with anti-Zionist violence itself: the targeting of Jews as ‘Zionists,’ legitimized by specific anti-Zionist libels.” Read his long history of this dangerous strain of thinking—and violence:

And for more on the Australia attack, catch up on the most recent Free Press livestream, hosted by Rafaela Siewert.

The weekend’s horrors made two things we already had planned grimly apposite.

The first is Bari’s town hall with Erika Kirk, which aired on CBS on Saturday. Kirk’s husband Charlie was assassinated in September, and she spoke to Bari about grief, political violence, conspiratorial thinking, and much more. Watch it on our site:

The second is a powerful essay by Rachel Goldberg-Polin on her son and his fellow captives commemorating their final Hanukkah in the tunnels under Gaza. Rachel writes about newly released footage that shows them lighting a makeshift menorah. As she puts it, they were sending a message to their captors, and now the rest of the world: “We are Jews and this is what we do on this holiday.”

We edited Rachel’s essay before the news broke out of Sydney. The evil at Bondi only gives her words more force. Read them here:

—Oliver Wiseman

Tim Miller, host of the anti-Trump conservative platform The Bulwark, has a rare vantage point on the transformation of the GOP. A longtime Republican operative, Miller became a prominent “Never Trump” critic after 2016, before leaving the party entirely in 2020. This week, he joins Coleman Hughes on the podcast to discuss the current administration’s greatest controversies—and to explain why American politics, now irreparably warped by Trump, are never going back.

• A Hong Kong court has found the media tycoon and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai guilty under the territory’s illiberal national security laws. Lai’s family says his health is deteriorating as he is being held in solitary confinement. A date for his sentencing has not been set. (Read our past reporting on Lai’s case: “He Fought for Freedom. Then He Chose Prison.”)
  

• President Trump promised a “very serious retaliation” against ISIS after two American soldiers and one civilian were killed by gunfire in Syria on Saturday. “The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

• Ukraine is willing to drop demands for NATO membership in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday as peace talks in Berlin began. He called for “Article 5–like guarantees,” referring to the NATO provision that states an attack on one member nation is an attack on all.

• Belarus freed 123 prisoners on Saturday, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner and an opposition leader, in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions on Belarusian potash. Trump’s envoy John Coale said it’s possible that around 1,000 of the remaining political prisoners in Belarus could be released in the coming months.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has slowed or ceased action on more than 60 percent of crypto cases that were ongoing when Trump returned to office, The New York Times found, including for firms with financial ties to Trump. The SEC said it was pivoting its focus for legal and policy reasons and that Republican commissioners had always disagreed with the charges. (For more on Trump’s crypto empire, read Joe Nocera’s piece: “Inside Trump’s Crypto Cash Machine.”)

• Israel killed Raed Saad, a top Hamas commander, in Gaza on Saturday, the most significant assassination in Gaza since the Trump-brokered ceasefire began in October. Hamas accused Israel of violating the ceasefire, while Israel said Saad recently “operated to reestablish Hamas’s capabilities.”

• In states where sports betting and online casinos are legal, both tax revenue and calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline rose. Those states also saw higher bankruptcy, debt collection, and alcohol consumption, overwhelmingly affecting young men.

• A trailer for an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is drawing criticism online for seeming to deviate from the book. Instead of being an allegory about the dangers of totalitarian Marxism, as Orwell’s book was, the film, set for release next May, appears to focus on the dangers of capitalism and corporate corruption.

Until Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, Tim Miller was a rank-and-file GOP operative. He worked on the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Jon Huntsman, and Jeb Bush, helping shape Republican messaging.

Trump’s takeover of the party set Miller on a different path. Like several other prominent conservatives, he continued criticizing Trump after th…

Of all the difficult emotions I’ve been forced to grapple with in the hours since two gunmen, a father and son, carried out a massacre of Jews at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, the most complicated is a bitter, dark sense of vindication.

“Now do you believe us?” I imagine screaming at Australia’s progressive intelligentsia, political, and media class. Do you believe Jew-hatred is out of control, after the most lethal terror attack on the nation’s soil has claimed at least 16 lives, including a rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl, and wounded dozens more?

The setting for the largest massacre of Jews since October 7 tells a brutal story. Australia’s Jewish community, numbering around 120,000, has long been acclimated to heavily fortified communal buildings, with security guards on every door, and to the politicians courting us in election season with money for yet more fortifications. The Jewish victims in Manchester, England, were killed outside a shul; the young Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C., outside a Jewish museum. But it would take some imagination to predict Jews would be picked off here, at this famous, democratic stretch of sand. If we can’t exhale at Bondi Beach, then where in the country can we be safe?

The Free Press opposes efforts at online censorship. Such laws are bad for the exchange of ideas, bad for truth-seeking, bad for politics, and bad for independent thought. But we’ve also opposed them because, no matter how much lawmakers swear that they will censor only the most abhorrent material, it never turns out that way.

Sooner or later—and it’s usually sooner—the censors start finding “objectionable” material everywhere they look.

Including, we discovered recently, in The Free Press. Specifically, TGIF, Nellie Bowles’ witty take on the week’s news, is being censored in the UK.

This is because the UK this summer put in force its Online Safety Act, an omnibus law sold to the British public as providing protection for children against pornography, suicide promotion, and similarly dangerous materials. Ofcom (the “Office of Communications”), Britain’s media regulator, summarized the law in a few screenfuls of material, helpfully pointing out that the new law can keep children from seeing content that might promote, say, eating disorders.

This Sunday evening at Bondi Beach, the most popular beach in Sydney, two gunmen opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration attended by more than a thousand people. At least 16 people were killed. Dozens were wounded. Victims ranged from just 10 to 87 years old.

This attack on Australia’s Jewish community comes after a steady rise in antisemitism in the count…

I’m not someone who usually finds it difficult to know what to say. Today is different.

I am a senior at Brown University. Saturday night was a nightmare.

The day began normally. As I usually do on Saturdays, I slept in, then headed to our campus Chabad for lunch around 12:30 p.m. As always, the room was packed with about 30 people, and filled with love, warmth, and food. Our final exam period had just begun, and we commiserated about our studies and chatted about our plans for winter break.

Reading—in particular, reading long books—is losing importance in Western culture, especially in the United States. It is being replaced by two main alternatives. On one hand, people read plenty on their smartphones, but usually it is snippets, such as texts, X and Facebook posts, newspaper articles, and other shorter items. On the other hand, audio and video outputs are rising in importance relative to full books.

When I visit the public library, most of the visitors are on internet terminals, and in San Antonio there is a public library without physical books at all. Anecdotally, I do not see people reading in public as much as I used to. Book sales are robust, but actual reading seems less culturally central. There is good evidence that a smaller percentage of Americans are reading books for pleasure. A New York Times survey indicates fewer whole books are being assigned as reading in high school classes. And within the publishing universe, audiobooks are where the growth lies.

The net result is that we are continuing to move from a literary culture to an oral culture. YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts are growing or robust. Texting is a major form of communication, but it is the written word conforming to the standards of oral communication. Abbreviations, incorrect grammar, short messages, and a conversation tone are paramount, and there are few rewards for longer, more carefully crafted sentences. The snippets we read on our smartphones, however useful or interesting, do not serve the functions of reading Tolstoy or a long, serious book on Roman history.

Sunday’s attack in Sydney, in which gunmen opened fire on a public Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach—killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more—is the latest in a string of anti-Jewish attacks since October 7. These include the May murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim in Washington, D.C., the terror attack at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, and numerous other assaults and threats, all of which have accompanied a wider anti-Jewish hysteria now normalized across many sectors of society.

Though no manifesto has yet been released, the attack on Bondi Beach follows a clear and escalating pattern: Jews being targeted as a result of the intensifying anti-Jewish environment since October 7.

This latest assault only reaffirms the ongoing reality of anti-Zionism as an essentially violent ideology—one that drives out Jewish communities wherever it takes hold, through exclusion, discrimination, and even murder.

As I write this, 16 people are dead on a beach in Sydney, Australia, that once stood for ease, sunlight, and ordinary life. Bondi Beach was never meant to be a killing ground. It was meant to be a place where families gathered, where children ran barefoot, where faith could be practiced openly without fear. On Sunday, that ended.

The victims were gathered to mark the first night of Hanukkah. It was a celebration of light. Of endurance. Of continuity. Families came with children. Elderly people came to pray. A rabbi came to lead the blessings and light the Hanukkah menorah. They stood in the open, trusting that Australia was still a country where Jews could live freely.

They were wrong.

Among the dead is a devoted rabbi, a man described by his community as gentle and selfless. Also killed was a Holocaust survivor, a man who had once escaped Europe’s extermination machine and who, in his final moments, shielded his wife and saved her life. He survived history’s worst hatred only to be murdered by its modern heirs, on a beach in the country he thought was safe.