The Bondi attack has exposed the limits of Australia's 'ideology first' anti-terrorism model

The assumption that ideology leads to violence is based in fear, not facts, writes Dr Wesam Charkawi

Dr Wesam Charkawi is an Australian-born Sydney researcher, Imam and community organiser. He completed a PhD at Western Sydney University in the field of countering violent extremism. His work sits at the intersection of faith, youth work, research, and public advocacy, with a strong emphasis on justice, community empowerment, and principled civic participation. Opinions expressed are those of the author alone.

The need for an academic voice becomes most important when public events are being explained before they are properly understood. In these moments, the first account is often not the most accurate one. Fear, political pressure and media framing can quickly shape how violence is understood before the evidence has been carefully examined.

The role of analysis is therefore not to distance the discussion from its human consequences. It is to ensure that the explanation does not outpace the evidence. This matters because once a narrative settles, it shapes policing, law, media coverage and public suspicion long after the event itself.

In the wake of recent reporting by ABC Background Briefing on the Bondi attackers, including clinical observations from a forensic psychiatrist, accounts from family members, and testimony from those who encountered them in ordinary settings, a clearer picture has begun to emerge — not an ideological pathway but a pattern of isolation, control, secrecy, and deterioration over time.

These are not new findings. They are entirely consistent with decades of research, yet they continue to be ignored in how terrorism is explained.

The Bondi shootings should have prompted a serious reassessment of how terrorism is explained. Instead, the response quickly returned to a familiar pattern: searching for ideology, religion, or belief as the primary explanation for violence. Yet the available evidence suggests a more complex pathway, shaped by social, familial, psychological, and contextual dynamics that cannot be reduced to ideology or faith.

Help us publish perspectives the mainstream media won’t. Buy a paid subscription to support Deepcut today.

Isolation and family breakdown

The reporting on Sajid and Naveed Akram reveals a trajectory that does not begin with ideology. It begins with secrecy, isolation, control, family breakdowns, and gradual behavioural shifts. It includes deception, fractured relationships, psychological instability, personal breakdown, and long-term exposure to weapons.

As forensic psychiatrist Dr Andrew Aboud observed, Sajid appeared to be “an isolated man prone to secrecy” who became “increasingly vulnerable” before locking onto a cause. Even when intelligence agencies examined the individuals, they found no evidence of imminent violence. The system did not fail because it missed ideology. It did not fail because it misread religion. It failed because violence does not emerge from neat ideological pathways.

For more than two decades, counter-terrorism policy has been built on a simple assumption: that identifying ideology, particularly religious ideology, allows the state to predict and prevent violence. That assumption is not supported by evidence; it is contradicted by it.

The Bondi tragedy is a clear example of this contradiction. Sajid did not arrive in Australia as a religious extremist. He married across faith lines to a woman from a devout Christian family, lived in a mixed community and displayed no clear theological rigidity. What followed was not a linear ideological journey but a slow accumulation of instability: social isolation, control within the family, resentment, and breakdown. Even the introduction to extremist networks did not produce immediate violence. Authorities investigated and found no actionable threat.

This aligns directly with decades of research rejecting linear models of radicalisation and distinguishing cognitive radicalisation from violent mobilisation. Sageman demonstrates that most individuals exposed to extremist ideas never engage in violence. Horgan has repeatedly shown that cognitive radicalisation is not the same as behavioural mobilisation. McCauley and Moskalenko distinguish clearly between holding extreme beliefs and acting on them.

Schuurman goes further, showing that non-involvement is the norm, not the exception. Holbrook’s findings in 2025 reinforce this pattern: ideology often functions as a justification, not a cause. This also accords with Australian research showing that religiosity is not a predictor of support for violent extremism, while alienation, perceived injustice, and social identity dynamics carry greater explanatory weight.

The political lens of ideology

The Bondi shootings closely reflect this literature. Religious language appears late, not early. It is used to frame and explain violence that has already taken shape through other dynamics. The video cited by police, invoking a flag and political grievance, is not evidence of causation; it is evidence of narrative. It is the story attached to the act, not the origin of it.

Yet the policy response continues to prioritise ideology. Terrorism law still embeds political, ideological, and religious cause as a defining element, with consequences that extend beyond legal classification into policing practice, media interpretation, and community trust. It directs attention toward belief systems, encourages law enforcement to interpret behaviour through the lens of ideology, and, in cases involving Muslim actors, turns religious identity into an evidentiary shortcut for motive.

The consequences are measurable and damaging, especially for communities that have long been treated as suspect under counter-terrorism frameworks. Programs have targeted Muslims for decades rather than environments of risk. Families seeking help have found themselves drawn into security processes rather than support structures.

This risk is not confined to Bondi. In a separate Australian case, the family of a vulnerable autistic child reportedly sought help from authorities, only for the matter to evolve into a counter-terrorism prosecution pathway rather than a protective intervention. That case illustrates the danger of a security-first response when vulnerability, family concern, and early intervention should be treated primarily through safeguarding rather than prosecution.

Further, the Bondi reporting reinforces a broader point: intelligence and policing frameworks may be able to investigate ideology, but they are far less equipped to detect the slow accumulation of secrecy, family influence, social isolation, psychological deterioration, and access to weapons that often precede violence.

The framework must change

In this regard, the Royal Commission’s interim findings acknowledged that there was no clear operational gap that authorities could have filled to prevent the attack. That point is critical because it exposes the limits of a system built around identifying ideology. If the model were correct — if belief reliably predicted violence — then earlier intervention should have been possible, but it was not. This is not a failure of intelligence collection; it is a failure of assumption.

The assumption is that ideology produces violence. The evidence shows that violence emerges from a convergence of factors: grievance, isolation, humiliation, identity conflict, personal instability, and opportunity. Ideology may later give the act meaning, coherence, or justification, but it does not generate it.

Continuing to build terrorism law around ideological cause is therefore both empirically unsound and operationally counterproductive. It widens the net in the wrong direction, and it shifts attention toward belief rather than behaviour. It does not strengthen prevention; it deepens suspicion, erodes trust, and leaves the real pathways to violence poorly understood.

The Bondi case should be understood for what it is: a direct challenge to the dominant model of radicalisation. It shows that violence does not follow a predictable ideological pathway. It shows that exposure to extremist ideas does not equate to an imminent threat. It shows that systems built to detect ideology cannot reliably detect violence.

If the goal is prevention, then the framework must change. The focus must move away from categorising belief and toward identifying behavioural escalation, social isolation, and environments of risk. Terrorism law must be grounded in serious harm and coercive intent, not in attempts to define ideology.

The alternative is to continue misdiagnosing the problem, widening surveillance, and eroding trust, while failing to prevent the very acts the system is designed to stop. The Bondi attack did not confirm the existing model; it exposed its limits.

---

Check out the latest Deepthink episode with Lebanese-American journalist Rania Khalek, where we go deep on the war in Lebanon. Watch or listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or your preferred podcast platform with this RSS feed.