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Hello. Two shocking acts of violence took place over the weekend. One was a shooting in America—at Brown University in Rhode Island—that left two people dead and nine injured. The other was an attack by two men, a father and son, on a gathering of Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. It left 15 people dead.
The massacre in Australia appears to have been motivated by antisemitism. One of the perpetrators, an Australian-born citizen, was investigated by the country’s security services in 2019 for suspected links to an Islamic State (is) cell. He and his father are thought to have pledged allegiance to is, whose flags were found at the site of the attack.
The so-called caliphate established by is in Iraq and Syria was dismantled long ago. But its various franchises and offshoots still terrorise people around the world, particularly in Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the group continues to provide ideological inspiration to some in the West.
In October Sir Ken McCallum, the head of mi5, Britain’s security service, noted that is, along with al-Qaeda, was “once again becoming more ambitious” and “personally encouraging and indirectly inciting would-be attackers”. The vast majority of attacks in the West are now carried out by individuals (“lone wolves”) or tiny groups, which makes it harder to spot plotting in advance.
The Bondi attack also reflects a growing tide of antisemitism around the world. An attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, in October killed two people. As Sir David Omand, a former spy chief, noted in our pages recently, antisemitic incidents hit the second-highest recorded level in the first half of this year in Britain. Last year more than 200 of these attacks were violent—the highest rate in Europe. In America, he observed, antisemitic incidents reached well over 9,000 in 2024, the highest level recorded in the 46-year history of the data. Many European Jews fear for their safety, as Charlemagne noted last year.
Antisemitism long predates the war in Gaza, of course, but the conflict has fuelled it. So too have some states. French police suspect that Russian intelligence stencilled hundreds of Stars of David in Paris in 2023 as a way to sow division. And this summer Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador after Iranian spies were linked to an arson attack on a synagogue.
In other news this week, America, having seized a tanker carrying Venezuelan oil, continues to build up military hardware near the country. In addition to a veritable armada of warships, it now has electronic-warfare aircraft, six tankers and high-end drones within reach of Venezuela, as well as a military radar next door in Trinidad & Tobago. If America’s aim was simply to conduct symbolic strikes, for instance against drug-related targets, it could do this by firing Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships and submarines. The current force posture suggests that the aim is to tear down Venezuela’s air-defence network. My view is that a substantial American attack is coming soon.
Elsewhere in The Economist, I wrote about the threat from small, possibly Russian-sponsored drones in Europe and why they are such a nuisance. My colleagues wrote on Russia, where 88% of people recently polled said that they wanted the war with Ukraine to end, and on the intelligence that informs America’s Caribbean and Pacific drug-boat strikes. In the Middle East we examined why Israel refuses to withdraw its troops from Syria. And in Asia we looked at the resumption of hostilities between Thailand and Cambodia.
Thank you for reading. The War Room will take a break next Monday for Christmas (barring an American invasion of Caracas), but we’ll be back on December 26th with a bonus edition on war films. And on December 29th we’ll serve up an end-of-year mega-edition dedicated to your questions. If you want to reach us before then, you can email thewarroom@economist.com.