The writer suggested the victims’ Jewishness, combined with the beach setting wrongly bestowed ‘every person killed with default innocence’
January 6, 2026 12:43
An Australian children’s book author has unleashed a vitriolic onslaught against the public outpouring of shock and grief following the Bondi Beach terror attack, accusing Chabad – which organised the Chanukah celebration targeted by the gunmen – of helping to facilitate what he called a “Zionist and Euro-American imperialist Holocaust of Palestine”.
In a newsletter titled “We don’t mourn fascists”, Matt Chun claimed the December 14 “Chanukah by the Sea” was event not merely an “innocent Chanukah gathering”, but a broad-daylight celebration of a violent supremacist organisation deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians”.
Chun also condemned British-born Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who was killed during the attack, as a “Zionist zealot” claiming he supported “the eradication of Palestinians”.
Fifteen people were killed as result of the Bondi Beach terror attack, with most of them in the area to celebrate the first night of Chanukah. The victims included Holocaust survivors and a 10-year-old girl, Matilda, who had been enjoying playing in a petting zoo at the event with her younger sister moments before she was shot.
In his broadside, Chun argued that in the aftermath of the shooting, “the story was immediately written by Zionist lobbyists, Zionist politicians, Zionist police, and Zionist ‘witnesses’”, later adding that "whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue”.
Elsewhere, he lamented how “Australian progressives have also failed to engage meaningfully with Islam, or offer any coherent analysis of its varied and disparate political formations, allowing Zionist media to fill the gap with collapsed definitions and orientalist tropes.”
He went on to complain of the “elaborate memorials [for the Bondi victims], rolling media coverage, and international headlines”, and how “white, Jewish settler victimhood demands exceptional, heightened grief”, adding: “While the colonised are bulldozed into mass graves, the death of a single coloniser must shake the earth.”
Chun won an Australian Picture Book Illustrator Award in 2021, has been shortlisted for various other awards and previously received a taxpayer-funded grant for one of his books.
In the preamble to his newsletter, Chun said the piece was written “in close consultation” with members of his extended community “including Indigenous people across three continents and anti-Zionist Jewish comrades”.
Chun was approached for comment.
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