Paul Moss

Condemnation continues to mount in the wake of the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia.

Politicians around the world perhaps struggling to find adjectives to describe the cold-blooded murder of 15 people, which police say was carried out by a father and his son.

Pure evil was what the Prime Minister, Antonio Albanese, called it.

The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, called it horrific.

But others suggested the killings were all too predictable because anti-Semitism, they said, had gone unchecked.

That subject of anti-Semitism was addressed by, among others, the New South Wales Premier, Chris Minns.

It's two years since Australian police launched what they called Operation Shelter.

That explicitly aimed to deal with issues of public safety in the country, which might be sparked by the conflict in Gaza.

Speaking on Sunday, the New South Wales Police Commissioner, Mal Lanyon, said Operation Shelter would now be stepped up.

We will make sure that we are highly visible at places of worship, places that are known to be frequented by the Jewish community, but very much in those suburbs where we know that we have a large Jewish population.

But for some, this is all too late.

Among those who've already assigned blame for the shooting is the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

He said he'd written to his Australian counterpart in August, telling Anthony Albanese that recognising a Palestinian state would encourage anti-Semitism.

He claimed the Bondi Beach shooting was a consequence of that decision.

And there were similar sentiments expressed by Levi Wolfe, rabbi of the Central Synagogue in Sydney.

He too seemed to complain that the government had been too tolerant of prejudice.

Rabbi Wolff was also one of the many Australians who said they'd already taken precautions out of fear of an attack.

Schools, for example, discouraging pupils from wearing anything which identified them as Jewish.

And the Sydney-based journalist Amy Leibovitz said she had specifically avoided going to the Bondi Beach event out of fear of what might happen.

So could the attack have been predicted and indeed prevented?