12-16-25 - 9am - The Bondi Beach Attackers

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Excel is planning to turn off power to about half
a million customers due to high wind risks on Wednesday.
Interesting that they raise their rates about ten percent every year,
and they're forcing us to go to one electricity by
twenty fifty. I think this is to help normalize the

(00:23):
rolling roundouts down the road that we're going to experience.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Well, there's that, and there's also the problem of you
you're going full electric and you're not doing anything to
strengthen or mitigate take the grid to mitigate against the Oh,
I don't know the natural hazards that exist in Colorado,
Chinook winds, ice storms, blizzards, dumbasses that drive off the

(00:50):
road because they're drunk or they're high, own mushrooms or
shrooms or whatever. How about that, You mean Beamer drivers.
Beamer drivers are the best drivers.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
They all think so.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Well, the sad part is dragging. We don't just think so.
We know so we know that we've the best drivers.
So I'm sorry, but you know, it just is.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
I don't want to brag. I'm not bragging and I'm
not punting.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
I'm just pointing out facts like I try to do
in this program.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
We're just the best driver, says the guy who recently
bragged about not getting a speeding ticket in five years.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, that's right, but there's still time. The year's not
over with yet, so true. Yeah, the year's not over
with yet, so there's still an opportunity.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
The Bondi.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
You know, somebody crunching me yesterday and said it's Bondai,
not Bondie. Well, I've heard different newscasters pronounce it different ways.
I don't know, Bondie Bondai. I don't care.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Potato tomato, that's right.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Uh so Bondy, uh, simply because we already have a Bondy,
you know, Pam Bondi. Who who is she?

Speaker 3 (02:08):
Jewish? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Is Bondi a Jewish name? Bondi, Bondi Bonzai? I mean,
I don't know that.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
I want to.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I want to go back to that terror attack for
a little bit because the more I thought about what
I said about everything that took place yesterday, there was
some moment in yesterday's program that I thought to myself,
go home and do a little more research, because this
attack could not have happened in a vacuum. So if

(02:39):
we wanted to understand how two men could walk into
one of Australia's most iconic public places and turn a
Jewish family event into a killing ground. You got to
stop staring at the crime scene and instead we gotta
start staring at the shooters. And I know that generally speaking,
that when we have ahooting in this country, we don't

(03:01):
want to talk about their names, We don't want to mention,
you know, the shooters. We try to bury them literally
and figuratively as quickly and rapidly as we can.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
But not here.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
And I think you'll understand why as I go through this,
because the real scandal is something that this country needs
to learn from. And you know, let me, well, the
real scandal is something that not only does this country
need to learn from, but you and I need to

(03:34):
learn from it, and Europe needs to learn learn from it.
In fact, all the Western civilization needs.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
To learn from it.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
And there are I know, there have been other shootings,
and there have been other anti semitism galore unfortunately everywhere
we turn. But here, the real scandal is not that
Sageta Crome and Navida Crome were in air quotes here unknown.
The scandal, I think, instead, is how much of their

(04:07):
story sits inside the gaps of the Australian immigration system,
but also our immigration system, the Australian intelligence community, our
intelligence community, and for other countries like Western ear If
I would say they're ha intel communities, our policing databases,

(04:32):
and a almost international refusal to name the ideology that
is driving or that was driving these two men. So
let's do a little bit of a deep dive into
who they were, how they lived, how they moved, how
Australia allowed them to become lethal, because I think we
can learn something from that. Sargid Akram was fifty years old.

(04:55):
He's the guy. He's the one that was skilled at
the scene by the New South Wales Police. Navida crom
twenty four years old, survive, spent two days in a coma,
regained consciousness on their December sixteenth, there yesterday to our
today today.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Father and son teen.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
So father and son teen, a family unit turned into
an operational unit. And it was not in my opinion
the more I read about it, it was not some random outburst.
It was a deliberate, well conceived and well executed, deliberate partnership.
Start with Sajid the father, because he's the quiet part

(05:36):
of the puzzle that ought to terrify you. He entered
Australia in nineteen ninety eight. Guess how on a student visa. Yes,
in one he transitioned to a partner visa what's what
they call in Australia that allows him. It's kind of
like a temporary protected status. That's the best analogy I

(05:57):
can come up with. And from being a partner visa,
he then became a long term permanent resident. He never
became a citizen, and he maintained his status through resident
return visas. Now that matters, And the reason it matters
is not because citizenship is some sort of magical moral stamp,

(06:18):
but because it reflects in Australia and it should reflect
in every other country. But I don't think it does
even in our country. It should reflect scrutiny, commitment, and
the terms of belonging. So a decade long permanent resident
who can travel internationally, live very quietly, build a family
by property, and sit still outside the full civic compact

(06:40):
that we all engage in as citizens creates this kind
of gray area in the modern world. Gray area grey
zones are where a threat can hide in plain sight.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
He's what we would call.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
In the when I was the under Secretary of Homeland Security,
what we would refer to as a clean skin, nothing
to see here, just you know, no criminal record, nothing.
But now adds something that's kind of an anomaly. They're passports.
In the weeks before this attack, the Philippine immigration records

(07:17):
reportedly listed Saji, the father as an Indian national and
an Australian resident traveling on an Indian passport. Now, there's
early talk in Australia that also floated a Pakistani origin story.
But news claims circulating via telegram now say that Indian
officials have identified the father as a as a Heyderbad

(07:40):
native who last visited India in twenty twenty two, and
that relatives in India say they cut ties with him
and the son years and years ago. One family member
described Saji's brother. He's quoted as saying that Saji left
India about twenty five years ago, married a Christian in
Australia and the family was shocked. I don't think that's trivia.

(08:02):
It actually ought to be a flashing warning light because
it suggests not saying it is not that I'm afraid
of any sort of wible or staying or lawsuit from
mos Yahoo's But I do want to just be careful
of my language here, because I'm not saying that it
is I'm just saying it suggests document fraud, dual nationality complications,

(08:23):
cross border administrative failures, and none of those options are
acceptable when we're talking about homeland security. When they were home,
they lived in Sydney Southwest. They moved in early twenty
twenty four into a brick house in Bonnie Rigg after
previously living in Cabramatta. Soji lived there with his wife, Verana,

(08:48):
their eldest son of the as well as two younger siblings.
Neighbors described them, But how do you think they described
How do you think theighbors described them?

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Dragon, I quiet, friendly, kept themselves.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah, exactly, Quiet and aloof. Quiet and aloof is the
story that I ran. That's what I got in quotes here.
Quiet and aloof the sort of people that you barely
would ever register. And that's how you maintain your clean
skin status. That's how you avoid attention, that's how you
avoid questions, that's how you become invisible. Now, there were

(09:18):
some early claims I could find about the Jee's work,
including I think I mentioned this yesterday. He was a
fruit shop owner or fruit seller, but there apparently are
some competing claims that those details were somehow muddied or
misattributed in the chaos after the attack. The bigger point
stands either way, his public profile was unremarkable, no obvious

(09:40):
red flags, a clean skin, as I say, the kind
of person who can pass checks that rely on convictions
and not rely on the intel community to do deep
dives into people that they ought to be doing a
deep dive into before they give He can give a

(10:03):
tourist visa, but they don't. And then there's the weapons.
He operated inside Australia New South Wales their legal firearm ecosystem.
He held what's called a Category A and Category B license.
He had six guns registered in his name. Now his

(10:24):
pathway to those licenses is pretty revealing. He had applied
years earlier, and that attempt lapsed. I can't find out why.
I'm not sure, but he originally applied several years ago
and then never felt, you know, never followed through with it.
He reapplied in twenty twenty. The license was finally issued

(10:47):
in twenty twenty three. Now place that timeline alongside what
we know about the Sun. In twenty nineteen, the Australian
law enforcement officials investigated in a VID for extremist associations.
So the Australian Intel Services somehow the Sun got on
their radar and the investigation lasted about six months and

(11:11):
included interviews with the family, and it ended with an
assessment that there was no indication of any ongoing threat
or of him engaging in violence. So he was treated
as low tier at not an imminent threat, and he
was not put under any sort of control order, which
is what they use we might call a surveillance order
in this country. So here's the question that we ought

(11:34):
to be asking, and don't let it go. If a
young man in a household is significant enough for the
intel community to investigate, how does that same household then
become the staging ground for legally registered arsenal just a
few years later. If you go in because you have intel,

(11:56):
you have actionable intelligence. The reason the reason I describe
it as actionable intelligence is because the ASIO in Australia
actually went to interview, actually went to the home, actually
started a file, started doing you know, open it. When
I say a file, I mean it could have been
a Manila folder, but it is more likely an electronic file.
So they have an electronic database that says this guy

(12:18):
has extremist tendencies, he has extremist ties, and so we
are to be looking into that. And yet hmmm, how
did they then get an arsenal? Either their intel systems
are not being transmitted to the systems that actually make
the life and death decisions about you know, who's an

(12:39):
owned a gun or not on a gun, or the
system is designed to ignore intelligence unless it reaches some
other even higher extreme threshold. But either way the result
becomes the same. In Australia, they failed to connect the
dots and the consequences played out in the Blood that
we heard about. Navied story is the homegrown half of

(13:01):
this duo born in Australia in one a citizen raised
in Sydney. Get that, so his father not a citizen,
but married a Christian, he becomes a citizen. He went
to high school in Cumbramata. People there who knew him
described him as dragon. How do you think they described

(13:22):
the student quiet and kept to himself, quiet, polite and unremarkable.
You're batting a thousand so far. In fact, his mom
of course, of course, if you called my mom right
now and ask her, or you called Dragon's mom, how
do you think they would describe the.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
Two of us. Well, we were the perfect children, right well.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
His mother described him as a good boy, devout, not drinking,
not smoking, keeping the work, exercise, and home.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Sounds like possible serial killer.

Speaker 2 (13:55):
And yet this good boy helped perpetrate deception inside the
family home.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
As if it was nothing at all.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
And then before the massacre, Sugeda Aviv told Verena that
they were going on a weekend fishing trip to Jervis Bay,
and then on the day of the shooting, Navin called
and kept the lie going, talking about how they were swimming,
scuba diving, eating calm, ordinary, no hesitation. This is what
a sealed, self contained plan looks like. But the ideological

(14:24):
trajectory of the sun didn't just come out of nowhere.
As a teenager, he appeared in street videos proselytizing in
western Sydney, speaking to schoolboys, pressing them to prioritize Islam
the law of olive above school and above work. Now

(14:48):
that's not just religion, that's the political framing that rejects integration,
that rejects assimilation and elevates a separate authority above the
civic life that Australian share. Americans, are you paying attention?
Are you hey? UK? France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, You're

(15:08):
paying attention. This is a story that, unfortunately, it is
something that we I don't you know, you're always supposed to,
you know, find the good and everything. There is no
good here other than if we want to recognize there

(15:29):
are lessons for us to learn. There's some lessons for
us to learn. The sun moved in circles tied to
the extremist networks that have produced ISIS linked offenses in Australia.
There was one key association. I found it in public reporting.

(15:49):
That was a figure referred to as Matari. Who's Matari?
Well hang type NY.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Day yesterday, Rob Reiner, Trump's comments about reb Reiner, Lindsey
Graham coming out of the woodwork.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
Shoomer, the bills.

Speaker 1 (16:07):
What is going on? Are they are we going to
fix health A care in this country?

Speaker 3 (16:15):
A silly girl. Silly girls. They don't want to do anything,
They're just want to be seen doing something.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
I saw something this morning, dragon as I was just
bruising the news. The Common Sense Institute here in Colorado.
They've on their website. They you should go look at this.
In fact, if you find it, you might put it up.
It's one of those interactive graphs that shows how you know,
like I've seen them, where you know, what's the greatest
fast food chain or the largest fast food chain. You

(16:45):
can see it as it goes through the decades. How
you know McDonald's starts down here and then Dairy Queen
starts up here and it moves. You've seen those graphs,
they're really fascinating. Well, this one is about Colorado's budget
over the past decade and healthcare spending. If I got
the figures right, is the largest healthcare spending, which includes

(17:09):
financing and operations and everything, is some somewhere north of
eighteen billion dollars, almost half of a forty billion dollar budget.
And you watch and one thing that stuck at as
I was watching all of that was how the office
of the governor governor has gone from back in say,

(17:30):
you know what, maybe twenty fifteen, from something like oh,
I don't know, I forget how much money it was,
but now it's like now it's like a million bucks
or more I forget what the dollar figure was, but
it's grown exponentially. Just the governor's office. The budget's just

(17:53):
totally out of control in the state, absolutely out of control.
So yes, I agree you're right about that. I haven't
heard about what Schumer said. When you mentioned Lindsay Graham
coming I thought you were gonna say Lindsey Graham was
coming out. I thought, well, that'd be big news. We
can talk about that. So I don't know what Lindsay
Graham did. And then yes, Trump. Let me just say

(18:15):
this about Trump. I've tried to ignore it, primarily because
I think it's a horrible comment, something he should not
have said. And it's it's just, you know, if I
were Versusie Wiles, chief of staff, and I have the

(18:37):
influence that I think that she has, I would have
called I would have walked into.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
The Oval office and ripped him a new one for
doing that.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Now, I'm not trying to excuse Rob Reiner because Rob
Reiner was infused with Trump arrangement syndrome. He said some
god awful things about Donald Trump. But that's neither here
nor there. The president should rise above that and ignore
that because lots of people have TDS and he was
brutally murdered by his son. Yeah, And as I read

(19:08):
the truth social post, it was like, good lord, did
you write this at three o'clock in the morning and
were you were you have on ambient or what? But anyway, yes,
it's a novel statement. And that's all I got to
say about And I would add this, I've seen similar
statements from other so called conservative Republicans that I won't

(19:34):
name here, but they show up like in my Facebook
feed or they show up in my x feed, and
I've just I've muted some of them because it's like,
good grief, where's your humanity? Where's your humanity? So let's
go back to Navid. Navid, as I said, was targeted

(19:58):
by or prof file by, or investigated by whatever verb
you want to use, the Australian Intelligence Services for his
extremist views and for his extremist ties. Now, there's one
key association that's in the public reporting about someone referred
to as Matari. Guess who Matari is In Australia. Matari

(20:22):
is described as a self declared Australian commander of ISIS
who has served a prison sentence for plotting an insurgency
style agenda. Now, in my vernacular, in my understanding, and
based on my experience of getting brief by CIA, d O,

(20:43):
d NSA, everybody else, that's not just a few bad influences.
That's actual proximity to an extremist ecosystem, and that's actionable intelligence.
And the Australian Intelligence Services utterly failed. He was also
the son was also described as a follower of this
hardline preacher, name was Sam Haddad, who's also linked to

(21:06):
the Al Medina Dhalwall Center. A federal court ruling in
Australia in twenty end this year found speeches by Hadad
have breached there. Now I don't necessarily agree with this,
but nonetheless it violated their Racial Discrimination Act because it
contained racist and isemitic tropes, including really vile descriptions of

(21:26):
Jewish people. Now, a lawyer for Hadad had denied any
involvement in the Bondi attack. Well, okay, that's fine, but
you cannot you cannot pretend that there is no ideological
lineage where anti Semitic preaching is the actual background noise
of a young man's world.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
And then somehow a Jewish celebration becomes the target and
you're asleep of the switch that is.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
Let me just there's still things I want to tell
you about this, but I don't want to bury the
anymore radical islamist radical Islam. And I know that some
of you can get mad at me because they use
the word radical, but I think that's the most accurate description.
Radical Islam is a danger and a threat to Western civilization. Now,

(22:22):
if you're Muslim, sorry, but you're gonna have to convince
me otherwise, in some way, and in some way besides
killing me, that you're not violent, and that you don't
see me as an apostate, and that you allow me
to practice my Christianity. Otherwise, you, indeed are a threat

(22:45):
to Western civilization. Do you see the pattern that I've
been describing words, You got worldviews, you got networks, and
then you have violence. The ideology is not the afterthought.
The ideology is the engine that is driving this violence.

(23:07):
It is the ideology that we witnessed on the campus
of Columbia, that we witnessed on Harvard, that we've witnessed
all across Charlie Ebdoh. How long ago was Charlie Ebdoh,
We've witnessed it and witnessed it, and witnessed it, and
nobody will speak the freaking.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Truth about what is the engine.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
It is the ideology, and the ideology is Islam. It's
the engine. Now. Navid pursued Islamic studies locally. He spent
about a year in an institute in Heckenberg. There is
a deleted social media post that was said to have
indicated that he had completed some sort of you know,

(23:49):
Muslim course. I'm not sure what it was. That he
got some sort of certificate. Again, I don't know this
because I don't have all the details of all the
Australian news. But let's be clear. Religious study does not
automatically equal piece or good character. No, I understand. It
can provide status, It can provide identity and authority inside
an insular setting, especially when somebody is hunger and searching

(24:13):
out for meaning. But then you got to add in
the destabilization and what do I mean by that. October
of this year, two months before this attack, Navid lost
his job as a bricklayer because his employer had become bankrupt.
So then you've got a loss of routine, you have

(24:34):
a loss of structure that can amplify the appeal of extremism.
Anytime you see ne'er do wells, can I use that term?
It's not going to be offensive to somebody, call somebody
that cares. When you see people just lounging around the hood,
just lounging around the neighborhood, just lounging around downtown, nothing

(24:56):
to do, not paying attention to clock or any thing else.
That's where you get the hardcore ideology that gets injected
and then becomes part and parcel of the.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
Soul Michael and Dragon.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Did the news ever clear up whether or not the
Australian police sat there and hit behind their cars rather.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Than some did some did not. I don't know about.
I've seen that particular photo of it. It appears to
be a female constable and I don't know whether well,
she's clearly hiding behind the car, that's just factual.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
Whether she was.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Hiding behind the car because she was armed or unarmed,
I don't know. Some are armed, some are unarmed. They're
like the British cops, some of them, you know, if
you watched British TeV, if you watch any of the
British cop shows, I'm always fascinated by you know, this
is what they call them DC. This is DCI. You
know red Beard and DCI. Red Beard goes charging into

(26:06):
a drug infested you know, rat hole and doesn't have
a weapon on him. That always fascinates me, like, really,
you people are really stupid, really stupid, real quickly. In
addition to the associations, there's the travel. Just last month,
the father and son traveled to the Philippines. They flew
into Manila and then going onwards to the Veil before

(26:27):
returning to Sydney, and reportedly traveled on that Indian passport
while the sun traveled on this Australian passport. Now, I
don't know whether that reflects Obfuscationian identity complexity or a
bureaucratic mess, but it is not something that a serious
security system would just wave away. You'd at least ask

(26:49):
about it. And there are serious, serious reports that now
suggest that they undertook military style training in the Southern
Philippines just in the weeks before the massacre. What is
undeniable is that they returned to Sydney just a few
weeks before the attack, and the sophistication of their preparation

(27:09):
suggests more than just the spontaneous rage that we keep
trying to use as well. They just you know, they
just they just went they went crazy, and it wasn't
this was not just guns. As I said yesterday, the
cops have recovered iedes that are linked to these two,

(27:30):
including devices found in the vehicle and another device that
was located at the crime scene. So that changes the
character of the attack because explosives suggest intent beyond shooting.
They suggest they were planning, They were assembling, and they
had escalation plans. And you can't ignore the staging.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
You don't. You don't just you.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Know, go out and plant the bomb and then go
out and start shooting. Everything was staged and in the
in the lead up to this state, they rented short
term accommodations in Campsy for about two weeks and improvised
ex explosives were recovered from that address. So a second

(28:12):
location means they had a movement of equipment, they had
privacy for preparations, and they had distance from the family home.
That's operational thinking that they had upset for you in
the military, for you, for those of you in the
intel communities, they had operational security. And then when the

(28:33):
attack came, it was time to hit a Jewish community
gathering for Hanukkah at Archer Park. Thousands of people, including
families and children, and they used long arms that were
legally registered. They wore black, tactical style clothing. There was
no clear escape plan, which I would read as a

(28:53):
martyrdom mindset. Once again, radical Islam on site, right before
our very eyes quit denying it