Islamic State’s (IS) 2025 campaign of attacks and plots in the West shows how the group continues to weaponize online spaces to deadly effect, targeting Jewish, Christian, and general populations across North America, Europe, and the Pacific. From New Orleans and Bondi Beach to Villach, Berlin, Mulhouse, Bielefeld, Manchester, and disrupted conspiracies in Canada, the United States and across Europe, IS propaganda has turned sacred times and ordinary public spaces into preferred theatres of terror, with attack planning repeatedly intersecting with Christmas, New Year and Jewish holidays.
Islamic State has capitalized on the post–October 7 environment by sharpening its focus on explicitly anti‑Jewish and anti‑Christian violence, casting both communities as core enemies and urging followers to strike them “in their homes, markets and festivals.” This is not a new departure but an extension of a longstanding position: from its inception IS has vilified, threatened and repeatedly targeted Jews, Christians and surrounding Western publics in its propaganda and operations, and now presents any crowd of Western civilians—Jewish, Christian or otherwise—as a legitimate target so long as it can be labeled part of a “Crusader” society.
Religious and Holiday Targeting Across the West
The Bondi Beach shooting, where a father and son killed 15 people and injured more than 40 at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s waterfront, illustrates the convergence of offline violence, religious hatred and online incitement. Authorities confirmed IS inspired the attack, and analysis notes the pair’s travel to the southern Philippines, a hub for IS-aligned militants, before returning to target Jewish worshippers and families at a festival of faith; Bondi immediately reverberated across IS-linked channels, where the attackers were praised and copycat violence during the holiday period was openly encouraged.
This reaction was codified in a new al-Naba editorial titled “The Pride of Sydney” that framed the “glorious deed of Sydney” as a model for future lone-actor attacks on Jews and Christians. The text dismisses critics who claim IS does not truly fight the Jews, boasts that “the Jews [are] bleeding in Australia’s streets,” and urges supporters who have absorbed its “jihadist code” online to seek out Jewish and “Crusader” targets at festivals and gatherings, presenting cyberspace-delivered guidance as a deliberate strategy in which a single believer who reads IS material in Arabic or translation can “set out like the whirlwind” against synagogues, churches and holiday crowds with little preparation, leaving Western states in what it calls an “unending conundrum of attrition.”