Islamic extremists, one of whom had previously been tracked by intelligence services for ties to ISIS, were able to legally obtain firearms in Australia despite strict gun laws and kill innocent people. The Australian government’s response has been to further tighten gun laws rather than address immigration policies that allowed Islamic extremists to enter and remain in the country.
On Sunday, December 14, 2025, a mass shooting occurred at Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration, killing at least 15 people and injuring approximately 40 others. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre and the deadliest terrorist incident in the country’s history. The shooting took place during a Hanukkah event hosted by Chabad of Bondi, attended by roughly 1,000 people.
The attackers were identified as Sajid Akram, a 50-year-old Pakistani national who arrived in Australia in 1998 on a student visa and became a permanent resident in 2001, and his 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, an Australian-born citizen. Sajid Akram was killed in a shootout with police at the scene. Naveed Akram was critically injured and taken to hospital, where he remained under police guard in stable condition.
Australian authorities stated that the attack was motivated by Islamic State ideology and that the gunmen deliberately targeted the Jewish community on the first day of Hanukkah. Investigators reported that the attackers fired a total of 103 rounds. Homemade explosive devices were discovered inside a vehicle parked on Campbell Parade and were later removed by the New South Wales bomb squad.
Naveed Akram had previously come to the attention of Australian intelligence services. In 2019, he was investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation after being linked to individuals associated with an Islamic State cell in Sydney. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Akram was assessed at the time and cleared after six months, with authorities concluding there was no indication of an imminent threat.
According to officials from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team, Naveed Akram maintained close ties to members of the ISIS-linked cell, including Isaac El Matari, who was arrested in July 2019 and identified himself as the group’s leader in Australia. El Matari was later convicted of terrorism offenses, including discussing the establishment of a local insurgency and potential attacks on Australian landmarks such as St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney and the U.S. Embassy. He is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence.
Investigators reported that the vehicle registered to the younger suspect contained improvised explosive devices and two homemade Islamic State flags. Authorities also believe the attackers pledged allegiance to the Islamic State prior to carrying out the attack.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed that both Sajid and Naveed Akram were licensed to possess firearms under Australian law. Sajid Akram had been a licensed firearms holder for approximately 10 years and held licenses for six firearms, all of which police believe were used in the attack.
The case has raised serious questions about intelligence and security oversight. Despite Naveed Akram’s documented associations with a convicted ISIS terrorist, neither he nor his father were on active watch lists at the time of the attack.
The Australian government is responding by strengthening gun laws, implying that firearms are the primary cause of the attack rather than the ideological motivation behind it. However, global terrorism data shows that Islamist extremists are responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks worldwide and that the deadliest terrorist organizations are Islamist.
Authoritative data from the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index 2025 and the Fondation pour l’innovation politique show that Islamist terrorist groups account for the overwhelming share of global terrorism fatalities. Fondapol’s study covering the period from 1979 to April 2024 identifies the Taliban, Islamic State and its affiliates, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda as the five deadliest terrorist organizations, responsible for 81.8 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorist attacks during that period.
According to Fondapol, the Taliban was responsible for 71,965 deaths, followed by Islamic State and its affiliates with 69,641 deaths. Boko Haram accounted for 26,081 deaths, al-Shabaab for 21,784, and al-Qaeda for 14,856. These figures represent cumulative global death tolls from sustained terrorist campaigns.
Additional major organizations identified by the Global Terrorism Index include Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen, Hezbollah, Islamic State West Africa Province, Islamic State Khorasan Province, Hamas, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Fondapol data shows that Islamist terrorist attacks caused approximately 218,734 deaths worldwide between 1979 and April 2024, representing 87.5 percent of all terrorism-related deaths during that period.
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And yet, liberals claim that Christians or right-wing extremists pose the greatest threat, despite the absence of supporting evidence. There is no ideological equivalent to jihad among Christians or nationalists, no transnational Christian or nationalist terrorist organizations, and no comparable record of mass killings.
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FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, bombshell files show
The FBI did not believe agents had probable cause to execute a search warrant at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, according to internal records released Tuesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
The FBI’s Washington Field Office said it “does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ [counterintelligence]) that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar-a-Lago,” according to one of the records authored by an unidentified assistant special agent.
“DOJ has opined that they do have probable cause,” the document continues, “requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space.”
The FBI official noted that agents had spent six weeks trying to establish probable cause that was “counterproductive.”
Interviews with witnesses had also not yielded any proof that sensitive intelligence files remained hidden at the former president’s estate since a trove of them was returned on June 3, 2022.
Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted on X that the records were “shocking,” emphasizing that the “FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway.”
The Iowa Republican also claimed the emails and other documents were proof of a “miscarriage of justice” against Trump.
The memo on probable cause and another series of emails exchanged just one week before the Aug. 8, 2022, raid of the former president’s Palm Beach, Fla., residence show that the FBI was looking for “a second path” on the search warrant.
Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge of Counterintelligence Tony Riedlinger and DC field office boss Steven D’Antuono were included on that email exchange.
The communications revealed the bureau wanted the warrant to be executed “in a professional, low key manner … mindful of the optics of the search” — though the reality was anything but.
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The Supreme Court Should Overturn Wong Kim Ark
The modern court has the chance to restore the 14th Amendment and end the judicially invented version of birthright citizenship
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship has triggered predictable outrage from the left, which insists the Constitution “plainly” guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. They cite more than half a century of practice and supposed precedent,in particular the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
But the Supreme Court has never been bound to preserve a decision simply because it is old, especially when that decision is wrong.
Wong Kim Ark did more than just misinterpret the 14th Amendment. It effectively rewrote the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment according to English feudal principles that the founders — and framers — rejected. In doing so, the court created a doctrine that the amendment’s authors surely never intended.
The Supreme Court now has the chance to correct that mistake.
Wong Kim Ark was born in 1873 in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China but were “domiciled residents” at the time of his birth. After visiting China as an adult, Ark was denied entry into the United States on the grounds that he was not a citizen.
The question before the court was whether a child born to “subjects of the Emperor of China, [who] have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States … becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States.”
A 6-2 majority, led by Justice Horace Gray, said yes. But the reasoning that got the majority to its decision is indefensible. Gray based his entire opinion on the idea that the 14th Amendment must be understood in terms of English common law.
“In this as in other respects, it must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the Constitution,” Gray reasoned. “The language of the Constitution, as has been well said, could not be understood without reference to the common law.”
Gray further argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.”
But as scholar Edward Erler argued in his book United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State, the phrase “‘subject to the jurisdiction’ is alien to the common law.”
Erler also explains that English common law historically based membership in the king’s dominion on allegiance, but the “framers of the Citizenship Clause intentionally avoided using the word ‘allegiance’ in the clause because they wanted to dispel any idea that citizenship derived from the common law.”
“Thus, Justice Gray’s argument in Wong Kim Ark — that the plain language must yield a common law result — is demonstrably wrong; it was intended to yield the opposite result. The express intention … was to avoid any possible inference that the Citizenship Clause derived any meaning from the common law.”
But Gray dismissed that intention outright. He even wrote that congressional debates were “not admissible” in interpreting the amendment — a bizarre claim given that the debates and statements of purpose are routinely used in interpreting amendments. “[T]he intention of the Congress which framed and the states which adopted this Amendment of the Constitution must be sought in the words of the Amendment; and the debates in Congress are not admissible as evidence to control the meaning of those words,” Gray wrote.
Gray only dismissed the framers’ debates because if he would have properly acknowledged them, he could have never reached the conclusion he did, as Erler points out. In short, Gray substituted English monarchical doctrine for the framers’ republican understanding of law and their own intentions.
The dissent in Wong Kim Ark also observed that such a reliance on common law was incorrect: “[W]hen the sovereignty of the Crown was thrown off and an independent government established, every rule of the common law and every statute of England obtaining in the Colonies in derogation of the principles on which the new government was founded was abrogated,” the minority argued.
In other words, the Revolution itself severed any claim that English feudal concepts governed American citizenship. Therefore, it is unreasonable that Gray’s entire decision is based upon a concept that was expressly rejected by the founders themselves when they created this country. (Notably, as Erler points out, the framers of the 14th Amendment saw themselves as finishing the work of the founders in regard to natural rights and natural law, and therefore they could not have been trying to resurrect the idea of English common law in the land.)
The dissent also argued that “the framers of the Constitution were familiar with the distinctions between the Roman law and the feudal law, between obligations based on territoriality and those based on the personal and invisible character of origin, and there is nothing to show that, in the matter of nationality, they intended to adhere to principles derived from regal government, which they had just assisted in overthrowing.”
Such an understanding wasn’t unique to the dissenters either. In the aftermath of the 14th Amendment’s ratification, Republican Rep. Frederick Woodbridge argued the doctrine of perpetual allegiance “is based upon the feudal system under which there were no free citizens … and the individual man [had] no personal rights; and it was from this source and system that Blackstone derived his idea of indefeasible and perpetual allegiance to the English Crown. … [But] the old feudal doctrine stated by Blackstone and adopted as part of the common law of England, that once a citizen by the accident of birth expatriation under any circumstances less than the consent of the sovereign is an impossibility. The doctrine … is not only at war with the theory of our institutions, but equally at war with every principle of justice and of sound public law.”
As Erler points out, “Thus, the general sense of the Congress in the wake of the passage of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was that the English common law was incompatible with the principles of the Founding.”
When this understanding (that is, a detachment from English common law) is coupled with the framers of the 14th Amendment’s explicit comments during the debate process — which Gray did not consider admissible evidence — it is unmistakable that Wong Kim Ark got it wrong.
Framers of the amendment, like Sen. Jacob Howard, were clear that the clause was “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.”
The “law of the land” was the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which specified “that all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, and hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” As Erler points out, that means that Congress, just prior to ratifying the 14th Amendment and its citizenship clause, was “committed to the view that foreigners (and aliens) were not subject to birthright citizenship.”
The modern court has the chance to restore the original meaning of the 14th Amendment by overturning Wong Kim Ark and ending the judicially invented version of birthright citizenship.
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Chinese Billionaires Exploit U.S. Surrogacy, Turning Parenthood into Power Strategy
“No, we’re not Costco.”
In a closed courtroom in California, something began to seem off: officials noticed an anomaly the same name appeared obsessively in the files. It was not an administrative error, but a sign of a new phenomenon. A single Chinese citizen was requesting parental recognition for dozens of unborn children, all conceived through surrogacy in the United States.
That name, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, was Xu Bo, a billionaire in the video game industry, residing in China. According to corporate documents and court reconstructions, Xu now has “just over 100” children born to American women, many of whom he has never met in person. When summoned in 2023 by Judge Amy Pellman, he participated in the hearing via video, explaining that he hoped to have at least twenty sons who would eventually take over his business interests.
The court denied the request, a rare decision in a field where parental recognition is normally granted automatically. For the judge, surrogacy had been transformed from a tool to build a family into a serial mechanism, with the risk of leaving children in legal limbo.
The Xu case has drawn attention to a trend long kept out of sight. For more than a decade, members of China’s economic elite have circumvented the domestic ban on “gestational surrogacy” by turning to the U.S., where the practice is permitted in most states and regulated in a fragmented way. Between 2014 and 2019, the use of surrogacy by international parents quadrupled: nearly 40% of initiated cycles involved foreign clients, 41% of whom came from China.
The cost can reach $200,000 per child, and around this demand, a highly specialized network has grown: IVF clinics, intermediary agencies, law firms, birth services, and nannies tasked with collecting newborns from hospitals. In many cases, the clients never set foot in America: they send genetic material, sign contracts remotely, and await the documents.
Beyond Xu, other Chinese entrepreneurs have pushed the model to the extreme. Wang Huiwu, an executive in the education sector, reportedly selected American models as egg donors to have ten daughters, envisioning strategic marriages with powerful men in the future. Such cases have raised ethical questions even in China, where public opinion views commercial surrogacy as a form of exploitation.
In the United States, the issue intersects with automatic citizenship: children born on American soil are citizens under the 14th Amendment. This has become increasingly controversial, prompting the State Department in 2020 to tighten “birth tourism” rules, and in 2024 a Republican bill proposed banning surrogacy for citizens of certain countries, including the Asian nation.
Even within the industry, warning signs are emerging: lawyers and agencies report requests for hundreds of children simultaneously, difficult to monitor in a system lacking a central registry. Amanda Troxler, a Los Angeles attorney, summed up the limit with a phrase: “I thought: No, we’re not Costco.”
The debate over surrogacy, long divided between rights and bans, has thus entered a new phase. It is no longer merely a matter of infertile couples or rainbow families, but a phenomenon in which wealth, technology, and regulatory gaps allow reproduction to be turned into a strategy of power.
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