Chabad are the latest scapegoats

By Dan Jacobs

On Sunday 14 December 2025, Jews celebrating Chanukah on Bondi Beach in Sydney were attacked in an indiscriminate mass shooting. Within hours, a familiar pattern appeared online. People who could not deny the horror tried to reorganise it into something that more easily fits their worldview: a narrative where the victims were no longer civilians at a festival, but political actors who had it coming.

One strand of that response focused on Chabad, and on a London-born Australian Chabad rabbi. Alongside the false-flag conspiracies, there were posts suggesting that Chabad are complicit in “Gaza genocide”, and that Jews connected to Chabad were therefore legitimate targets. That move does two things at once. It erases the reality of what happened at Bondi Beach, and it introduces a permission structure for violence against Jewish civilians anywhere.

This is scapegoating through political essentialism: taking a Jewish religious identity, stripping it of its human reality, and replacing it with a single political caricature. It is also a rhetorical strategy that attempts to downgrade victims from protected persons into acceptable targets. It turns a religious identity into a political caricature, then uses that caricature to justify violence.

To illustrate the phenomenon, I have been analysing the Facebook replies to Owen Jones’ condemnation of the Bondi Beach attack - using a dataset published on the SAAS website. Jones condemned the massacre. This is not about Jones’ condemnation. It is about the reflex in parts of the audience to downgrade Jewish victims even when the prompt is a straightforward condemnation of antisemitic violence. That did not stop a large proportion of commenters from re-labelling the victims so that sympathy could be rationed.

The specific pattern this article focuses on is the treatment of Chabad as a proxy villain: “Chabad = ultra-nationalist Zionists = genocide supporters = fair game”. That is how collective guilt is snuck into the conversation.
Here are three examples I pulled out from the thread, including an image that was posted repeatedly.

Quote 1: Chabad framed as a violent “sect” whose members are undeserving of sympathy:

“Owen, this was a Zionist sect- and their leader a war criminal. And whilst I am horrified that this happened on Australian soil, I only have sympathy for others caught up in this- tourists and Australians out for a Sunday afternoon. I cannot drag a tiny bit of sympathy for others involved in this vile sect.”

Quote 2: Chabad linked to Israeli far-right politics to imply culpability:

“Look up chabad and who they actively support. None other than that genocidal maniac Ben givir. Some very strange facts coming to light”
Even if individual Chabad figures express support for particular Israeli politicians, that does not convert Chabad globally into an arm of Israeli state politics, and it certainly does not attach collective guilt to civilians at a Chanukah event in Sydney.

Quote 3: “The Rabbi” posted as standalone insinuation with image
The user posted an image implying the Rabbi was a militant. Whether the image is AI-generated, doctored, or simply miscaptioned, it functions as a visual lie. We know the man in the photo was a 41-year-old assistant rabbi and civilian chaplain who had just celebrated the birth of his fifth child. By the time this photo reached the Owen Jones thread, its purpose was to provide ‘proof’ for those looking to justify his murder.

Many users repost the same images on the thread, and on thousands of similar social media posts around the web. The repetition suggests circulation rather than discussion. The image itself is doing the rhetorical work.

Quote 1 is explicit moral deligitimisation. Sympathy is withheld from Jewish victims because they are reclassified as members of a “Zionist sect”.

Quote 2 trades in insinuation: it points at Israeli politics to imply guilt by association.

Quote 3 No claim is stated, which makes it harder to pin down or challenge. The image itself carries the accusation and does the talking.

Civilians are not legitimate targets

A civilian’s political beliefs, affiliations, or religious identity do not turn them into a lawful target. International humanitarian law distinguishes between civilians and combatants. Even if someone has previously served in an army, that does not make them an “always-target”. Protection does not disappear because of past service, nationality, or ideology. Holding an opinion, even a controversial one, does not amount to direct participation in hostilities and does not remove civilian protection. The implication that you can kill civilians because you dislike their worldview is not “radical politics”. It is advocacy for sectarian murder.
You can disagree fiercely with Zionism. You can consider forms of Zionism ugly, racist, or dangerous. None of that changes the status of Jewish civilians at a religious festival in Australia.

Who are Chabad?

Chabad-Lubavitch is a Hasidic movement within Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Judaism, founded in the late 18th century by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. The name “Chabad” is an acronym referring to intellectual faculties (chochmah - wisdom, binah - understanding, da’at - knowledge), reflecting its emphasis on study and contemplative religious life.

Chabad is often the most publicly visible Jewish presence in a given place, for a simple reason: it runs an unusually extensive global outreach network. Chabad emissaries (shluchim) set up synagogues, community centres, holiday events, and practical support for Jews who are travelling, living abroad, or disconnected from formal Jewish life.

Chabad’s organising instinct is Ahavat Yisrael, love of fellow Jews, and that outreach-first posture has drawn criticism from multiple directions over the decades.

This is important for understanding why Chabad is so often pulled into conspiracy narratives. Visibility makes an easy target. Traditional Hasidic dress makes identification easy. Outreach means Chabad is present in locations with few other Jewish institutions. When antisemites want a “representative Jew” to project onto, Chabad is frequently the first thing they see.

Chabad’s most influential modern leader was Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, who died on 12 June 1994. He died without naming a successor, and that left Chabad without a single living figure who can plausibly function as a central authority in the way other Hasidic dynasties do.

That has two consequences that matter for the kind of claims being made in the Bondi conspiracy posts.

First, Chabad has institutions, leaders, and influential rabbis, yet it does not operate with a single “party line” that every Chabad rabbi globally follows on contemporary politics. Different communities have different emphases. Even within Israel, Chabad’s relationship with state politics has long been complicated, and often described as walking a tightrope between religious identity, communal needs, and political pressures.

Second, Schneerson’s own relationship to Israel and to Zionism does not map neatly onto the slogans being thrown around online. He never visited Israel, and Chabad itself has published explanations of why. At the same time, he was deeply engaged with Israel’s security and Jewish welfare, and Israeli political leaders regularly sought his views.

So the idea that Chabad can be reduced to “ultra-nationalist Zionists” is not just ugly. It is factually careless.

If you want one grim, concrete example of Chabad being targeted as Jews, the 2008 Mumbai attacks include the siege of Nariman House, a Chabad centre, where Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were murdered. Chabad has also faced ongoing security threats and plots in different countries, including later reporting around threats to Jewish sites in Mumbai.

This is one of the reasons the Bondi “Chabad did it / Chabad deserved it” narrative is so grotesque. Chabad is not a shadowy arm of a state. It is, very often, a frontline Jewish address in places where Jews are exposed.

There is also a quieter error underneath the whole “Chabad = the Jews” framing. Chabad is a Hasidic movement within a wider Haredi world, within a wider Jewish world. It does not represent all Jews. It does not represent all Israelis. It does not represent “Zionism”, which itself is not a single ideology.
Many Hasidic groups are far more insular than Chabad. Chabad is unusual precisely because it engages outwardly. That outward-facing posture is part of why it becomes the stand-in when people want a tangible Jewish target.

The problem is the ecosystem that uses any Jewish bloodshed as raw material for narrative warfare, even when the prompt is a straightforward condemnation of antisemitic violence.

If your politics requires you to strip civilians of their civilian status, your politics has already crossed a line. If your response to murdered Jews is to hunt for a sub-group you can blame, you are participating in the same ancient logic that has followed Jews through history: the idea that some Jews count as civilians, and the rest are symbolic embodiments of evil.

Chabad are the latest scapegoats. They will not be the last, unless we get much better at naming this pattern early, and refusing the move that turns victims into proxies.