Amid calls for Royal Commission, a narrative emerges of the perpetrators, their links to ISIS, and warnings ignored by police and ASIO. Human rights advocate Al the Writer reports (Part 1).
Much of what happened at Bondi and the events leading up to it remain opaque. The facts will continue to be disclosed in the coming weeks and months, not least when we hear from the killer Naveed Akram, who remains alive. That’s the job of the police, and requires no Royal Commission
However, in the opportunistic rush to politicise the tragedy, blame has been levelled aggressively at Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, as unrelenting pressure mounts in the Israel lobby and legacy media for a Royal Commission and attempts to shut down legitimate Gaza protests.
Yet chronology, and what we do know, resists the convenience of easy answers.
It reveals warnings that were sounded long before the present Labor government took office, and long before the Palestine protests unfolded in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks in 2023. These were accumulated failures, many under the watchful eye of the Coalition government, which preceded Labor.
The timeline
Debunking the Palestine protest theory
In the immediate aftermath of the Bondi Beach attack, a narrative emerged in mainstream media that pro-Palestinian protests had somehow radicalised killers Sajid and Naveed Akram.
Naveed’s likely radicalisation stretched back years as a teenager, when he first came to ASIO attention in 2019, during the government of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The investigation specifically concerned his associations with Sydney-based ISIS cell members, including Isaac El Matari. During this six-month investigation, one of the Bondi killers Sajid Akram was also interviewed by authorities.
This was four years before the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel in 2023 and the subsequent wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Australia as Israel’s brutal retaliation unfolded in Gaza. After a six-month investigation, he was assessed at that time as posing no ongoing threat of engaging in violence, and no charges resulted.
To blame pro-Palestinian protests for this attack is to fundamentally misunderstand the ideology, but to also minimise future risks, as is any Royal Commission
that does not examine the rise of extremism in Australia in all of its forms.
Who is ISIS?
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operates according to an extremist interpretation of Salafi jihadism, which mainstream Islamic scholars universally reject.
ISIS is to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity
It represents a tiny, violent fringe that distorts religious teachings to justify atrocities. Despite this, much blame has been heaped on Australian muslims in general, as a group, by media supporting the Israel lobby narrative.
After losing territorial control (Raqqa fell in October 2017), ISIS franchised operations to individual attackers worldwide.
Global ISIS-inspired attacks include the 2015 Paris Bataclan attacks (130 killed), 2016 Nice truck attack (86 killed), 2017 Westminster Bridge attack (5 killed), 2017 Manchester Arena bombing (22 killed), and 2017 London Bridge attack (8 killed). Localised Australian attacks included the 2014 Melbourne police stabbing, the April 2024 Sydney bishop stabbing, and what looks to be the associated the recent December 2025 Bondi Beach shooting (15 killed).
Netanyahu, Hamas and ISIS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strategically conflated Hamas with ISIS since 2014, declaring “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas”, and repeating the comparison following the October 7, 2023, attacks. This rhetorical strategy serves to muffle criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and win over US leaders and public opinion by framing Hamas not just as a threat to Israel, but to Western populations generally,
suggesting that tolerating Hamas is equivalent to tolerating ISIS attacks globally.
The comparison obscures crucial ideological differences. Hamas has a nationalist and territorial focus on Palestine. ISIS, by contrast, is a transnational pan-Islamist movement that seeks to gather Muslims worldwide into a caliphate governed by Sharia law, explicitly rejecting the nation-state system as un-Islamic. Where Hamas wants a state and participation in international organisations, ISIS seeks to conquer states and tear down the international system entirely.
ISIS’s primary targets include Shia Muslims (whom they declare apostates), moderate Sunni Muslims who reject their ideology, as well as Jews, Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities. However,
most of ISIS’s victims have been Muslims.
In the Camp Speicher massacre of June 2014, ISIS executed approximately 1,700 predominantly Shia air cadets in Iraq, forcing them to lie in mass graves before shooting them.
The Yazidi genocide of August 2014 killed approximately 5,000-10,000 people, enslaved 6,000-7,000 women and girls as sex slaves, with 2,800 people still missing. In 2016, the U.S. State Department declared ISIS responsible for genocide against Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims.
ISIS propaganda also systematically calls for attacks on Jewish communities worldwide, including synagogues, kosher markets, Jewish schools, and Jewish neighbourhoods.
This has translated into deadly attacks: the 2014 Brussels Jewish Museum shooting (4 killed), the 2015 Paris Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket attack (4 killed), the 2015 Copenhagen synagogue shooting (1 killed), and multiple disrupted plots in the United States.
The Al-Madina Dawah Centre
It is reported that Naveed Akram was a follower of Wissam Haddad, also known as Abu Ousayd, from the Al-Madina Dawah Centre (AMDC) in Bankstown.
Wissam Haddad’s real name is William Haddad. He is an Australian citizen born in Sydney to Lebanese parents, who operates his own carpet laying business but also preaches part-time. Haddad established AMDC Inc, which was established in April 2021 to take over the lease for the predecessor Centre.
A Four Corners investigation in April 2024 identified Haddad as a spiritual leader of Australia’s pro-Islamic State network. The Four Corners episode that focused on a former disgruntled ASIO undercover agent, codenamed ‘Marcus’, told the program he repeatedly warned the agency that the preacher was indoctrinating young people at his Bankstown prayer centre.
Marcus claimed that ASIO viewed William Haddad as the most important jihadist.
He told Four Corners that Haddad referred to ISIS in coded language as ‘the brothers’ while instructing young followers to keep silent about any plans for violence, telling them: “If you want to do something, don’t come to me, don’t tell anyone, keep your secret”. This coded language allowed AMDC to operate in plain sight while avoiding breaches in the law.
The ABC reported that Haddad was mentored by notorious British Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary via WhatsApp between 2021 and 2023. Choudary has been serving a life sentence since July 2024 after becoming the first person in the UK convicted of directing an organisation concerned with the commission of acts of terrorism.
Choudary founded and led Al-Muhajiroun, a Salafi-jihadist network that operated under multiple names after being banned. People associated with Al-Muhajiroun either took part in terror attacks in the UK or joined militant organisations like ISIS, including the perpetrators of the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby.
In July 2025, Federal Court Justice Angus Stewart found that Haddad had breached the Racial Discrimination Act through a series of lectures delivered at AMDC in November 2023. The court heard that Haddad, in a lecture series titled ‘The Jews of Al-Madina,’ referred to Jewish people as ‘vile,’ ‘treacherous,’ ‘mischievous,’ ‘murderous,’ ‘descended from apes and pigs,’ and ‘hiding like the rats that they are.’
Justice Stewart concluded that the lectures contained ‘devastatingly offensive’ imputations based on age-old tropes against Jewish people that are fundamentally racist and antisemitic. The judge warned such comments could lead a follower to commit an awful atrocity, stating that many members of the Jewish community grow up with a consciousness of their community’s vulnerability to vilification, discrimination, persecution and mass murder.
Five months after this judicial warning, what many suggest was one of Haddad’s followers carried out Australia’s worst antisemitic attack.
Haddad denies knowledge of Bondi attack
A lawyer for Haddad said that his client, “vehemently denies any knowledge of or involvement in the shootings that took place at Bondi Beach”.
In a statement, the Al Madina Group, which was registered as a business in July 2025, said it now manages the centre and did so independently of Haddad.
It “rejects any attempt to conflate administrative or planning mutters with allegations of extremism, national security, or criminal conduct”. “Wisam Haddad holds no management role, has no operational authority, and is not involved in the administration or decision making of the current organisation.”
Shortly after, Canterbury-Bankstown City Council shut down AMDC’s prayer hall, finding it was operating without proper development consent. The building on Kitchener Parade in Bankstown was only approved to operate as a medical centre, not as a place of worship.
It is important to note that many extremist groups in Australia, well beyond this one, maintain multiple front groups or legally constituted entities that function as recruitment and resource funnels into a primary organisation. When these entities attract regulatory or public scrutiny, they are often dissolved and reconstituted under a different legal structure or name.
This process allows the organisation to retain its core membership and activities while continuing operations under a new auspice.
In part two, we will examine many of these operators closer.
Port Arthur via Oslo to Bondi. History repeats, lessons ignored at our peril