When Our Light Is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead

A call to action from a soldier who refused to look away as hatred came home. For years, the warning signs were visible. Antisemitism moved from history and the Middle East into mainstream discourse, institutions, and public life across Western democracies. Then, on a summer evening in Australia in December 2025—on the first night of Chanukah—a globalised call to intifada arrived on golden sand. The Bondi Beach massacre exposed the consequences of tolerating incompatible ideologies and incendiary rhetoric. What had been fashionable in protest culture became mass murder at an Australian national icon, as families gathered to celebrate light. In When Our Light Is Tested, Michael Scott CSC—author of A Light Still Burns and an Australian Army veteran—draws on survivor testimony, lived experience, and cultural analysis to show how societies drift before they fracture, and how failures of leadership—personal, civic, and moral—allow violence to follow when warnings are ignored. Antisemitism is never only about Jews; it threatens democratic society and reveals how a nation responds to danger before it reaches its door. Bondi was not an aberration; danger is at our door. This book is a tool—clarifying what is happening and empowering readers to exercise principled agency when passivity is no longer neutral. Our light is being tested. We have a choice: tend the light as if our descendants' future depends upon it—or endure the consequences of its loss.