11/09/2026
This morning I discussed 9/11 with Chris Smith on 2SM Super Radio Network and what we have learned.
Spoiler: Not very much.
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Smith: [00:00:00] And we'll be catching up with Daniel Lewkovitz as well, who's a global security expert, with his interpretations 25 years on from what happened on that day on 9/11.
9/11 was supposed to be the wake-up call, a moment when governments worldwide, police, and the public would rethink how we prepare for terrorism and mass casualty attacks.
But 25 years on, here's a good question for you. Are we actually better prepared, do you think, since 9/11? Have we learned the lessons that extremist terrorist attacks taught us from that event? Or have we simply hit snooze? Daniel Lewkovitz is a global security expert, and he joins us in the studio right now to talk about what we got right, what we got wrong, and what could happen if we fail to learn the lessons once again.
Daniel, welcome. Thanks for coming in.
Daniel Lewkovitz: 9/11 should've been a wake-up call for the whole world, and I reckon the whole world, and certainly [00:01:00] this country, rolled over and hit the snooze button over the last 25 years. You asked what have we learned. We've learned that there's a problem, and we don't talk about the problem, and we know we should do something about the problem, and we don't do anything about the problem.
And we've done lots of window dressings. You have to now queue up for hours at airports while- Yeah ... you get screened by someone who probably wouldn't be allowed on the plane at Tel Aviv Airport. And you know, we're really good at fighting yesterday's problem. Planes have hardened cockpit doors.
9/11's not gonna happen again. But other terrorism will happen, does happen. We saw that happen in Australia at Bondi, and that wasn't our first example of it. It was just the latest example, and there will be more, and I think the government's asleep at the wheel. And I'm a big believer in small government, but I think one thing that the government really does have a job to do is to protect the citizens, and I think they're failing at it.
You see, you look at that antisemitism Royal Commission [00:02:00] and what it got up to and what it heard in terms of evidence, and I don't think they touched on the number one issue, which was how we are allowing radical Islam to exist in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne And are we doing enough in terms of our resources and man and woman power to turn all of that around?
That Royal Commission should've spent more time on that and what we did about that leading up to Bondi than any other issue related to that attack. If there were a Royal Commission into your house burning down and they interviewed the builder, the painter, the termites, but they didn't interview the arsonist.
You wouldn't be impressed, would you?
Chris Smith: That's very... That's so true. That's so true. And then you've got the migration and border policies of our governments, and in particular this government. The fact that we per capita [00:03:00] brought in more people from Gaza on the other side of the globe than any other Western nation defies logic and surely sets us up for what occurred in December.
Daniel Lewkovitz: Well, Europe has a porous border and the inability to control it. But as we saw during COVID, this country has potentially a completely tight border. And as John Howard said, we decide who comes into this country. And this government has invited literally thousands of people from Gaza, probably one of the terror capitals of the world, has absolutely no capability of vetting these people or checking who they are, and they've brought them in.
And why? To protect three marginal seats in Western Sydney. That is what our nation's security is worth, three marginal seats.
Chris Smith: So 25 years on, we forget what 9/11 is all about. That is the only conclusion you can draw
Daniel Lewkovitz: It's gonna get to the point where you can't even show the footage. We have a government policy on [00:04:00] social media via an e-safety commissioner that wants to stop showing dangerous, scary things.
So when there's a mass shooting such as Bondi, they don't want people to see that. When there are people jumping out of buildings on 9/11 after an Islamist hijacking, they don't want people to see that. On TikTok, young people today will be posting videos where they can't even use the word murder or killed or died.
They're gonna say that people were "unalived" on 9/11. It's infantile.
Chris Smith: This is the direction we're going. You're right. This is the direction we're heading.
And how do you solve a problem if you can't even discuss the problem? How do you fight an enemy if you refuse to even name the enemy?
Yeah. And this is all about, "Oh, we've gotta protect certain minority groups in this country, including those from the Middle East and the Muslim community in particular."
So we go out of our way to protect them as much as we can, but we tend to not support the majority who are at, I think, in danger of being the victims of the next terror attack from that same [00:05:00] cohort. Somewhere in that cohort, someone is planning what they will do next.
Daniel Lewkovitz: Well, you raise a perfect point, which is that good security is about stopping tomorrow's attack, not yesterday's.
I mean, it's all well and good when the fire brigade turn up and put out a fire and extinguish it, and everybody's happy about that. But ideally, you wouldn't have had the arsonist on the street, and you wouldn't have had all the fuel built up. Yeah. And you wouldn't have had the flam- the flammable liquids in the first place.
Yes. So we're very good at issuing statements after the fact and, throwing millions or billions of dollars at the problem, but i- it's not preventing the solution. If you look at, say, from a law enforcement perspective There's two really relevant points, and the first one is what we saw at Bondi was that you had private security and the Jewish community who'd been specifically disarmed, and you had police who have been very poor fi****ms handlers for 20 years.
And that's no attack on individual police officers. They just don't get the training that they need. Yeah. And it was very, very lucky [00:06:00] that the man who saved the day was also a sporting shooter in his spare time, so he did- Yes ... a bit of target practice. Yeah. And this has been, 25 years of this.
The other problem is that, they talk about ASIO and government agencies and watches.
One thing we know is that to do proper effective surveillance on a person, on a single person, takes approximately 20 people to do it on a full-time, round-the-clock basis. 20 people. Now, if you do the maths on, and we don't know the exact number, but let's say there's 2,000 odd people on a watchlist somewhere, and you multiply that by 20 people to do the job properly.
If you took every sworn law enforcement officer in the whole country, all of it, and you said, "Right, you're no longer dealing with murder, theft, fraud, sexual crime hold ups," nothing, none of it. All you are doing is doing surveillance. We wouldn't have enough police in this entire country, which means that the boat is already below the waterline.
Chris Smith: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Lewkovitz: And they're trying to convince us that, "No, no, we're on top of this problem." And they're adding more and more water to the ocean in which that boat [00:07:00] is drowning. It's insane.
Chris Smith: Yeah. And then one of the measures that we embarked on several years after 9/11 was setting up de-radicalization programs.
Well, now we've got news today that we've got this $75 million de-radicalization program where the vast majority of its participants, who are voluntary by the way, voluntary participants Are showing no change. As a matter of fact, a significant number have increased their radicalization. So de-radicalization doesn't work.
Daniel Lewkovitz: It doesn't work, and there's no evidence of any so-called de-radicalization program anywhere on Earth working. But it is a multimillion or multibillion-dollar racket, essentially. And, I'm thinking I should start my own program and see if the government will give me a few million bucks to solve the problem.
Because governments are very good at not solving difficult problems by just throwing money and saying, "Oh we've dealt, yeah, we've dealt with it." For example, if you look at the Bondi Junction attack, you had a mentally ill person who went on a stabbing attack. Security couldn't respond properly.
[00:08:00] Police, it was pure luck that they responded the way they did. And so the government solution to the problem was, "Oh, well, we're gonna throw lots of money at mental health services." And meanwhile, you know, what radicalizes people now is very easy. The c- the combination of hardship, economy, suffering, violence, family breakdowns the stress.
I mean, we're still dealing with the long tail of COVID. We're living in a huge pressure cooker, and it doesn't take a lot for a person to crack. Yeah. And the government thinks, "Oh, well, we'll just throw a few million bucks and, we'll build new community centers or, or museums, or we'll appoint new roles," is gonna be a solution.
It makes a good statement for a minister at a press conference, but it doesn't solve a very difficult problem.
Chris Smith: No, it doesn't solve a very difficult problem. You've got across that very well. Where were you when 9/11 took place?
Daniel Lewkovitz: I remember it well. I had been doing a lot of security within the Jewish community back then, and I was at the gym, and I was training with a bunch of mates who did the same thing.
And we were working out, and we we came back to my place for, a couple of drinks, and we ended up staying up all night. And the next morning [00:09:00] I was doing some security consulting work in a government department where there was just stunned silence.
Yeah. And a week later when I was doing security at a synagogue, and someone who'd never been to the synagogue before came, and they saw me there, and they saw metal detectors, and they saw us checking bags. And, remember this, this was at a time when no one in this country was doing security properly.
Yeah. Yeah. But the Jewish community were. Yeah. And the person said, "Oh, i- is this because of what happened in New York?" And I said actually, no. We've been doing this for years." "But welcome to the new world."
Chris Smith: Yeah. It was the new world.
