Piers Akerman: Insipid Labor leadership has emboldened anti-Semitic terrorists to attack Jewish community

If the Federal and NSW governments had not given such a miserably weak response to the anti-Semitic scourge sweeping the nation, things may have not spiralled to this crisis point, writes Piers Akerman.

How many arson attacks on synagogues and childcare centres, how much anti-Semitic graffiti, or caravans full of explosives must there be before Treasurer Jim Chalmers recognises the massive surge in domestic terrorism in Australia since October 7, 2023?

Will it take a murder to focus his mind and divert it from obsessive smug self-appreciation?

On Thursday morning, Chalmers said that a series of anti-Jewish attacks and the discovery of a caravan containing explosives showed “some of the fears that Jewish Australians have right now are not unfounded”.

He has ignored nearly 16 months of attacks on Australians of the Jewish faith. Those attacks include one on the electorate office of his colleague, Josh Burns, whose office in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda was sprayed with anti-Semitic slogans last June as windows were smashed and fires were lit in telecommunications pits at the front of the building.

Burns, one of Labor’s two Jewish MPs in federal parliament, said the attack was “reckless and dangerous vandalism”. He did not call it out as anti-Semitism and neither did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who simply said: “This is an escalation of the attacks we’ve seen. We’ve been talking about this. We’ve got to dial this down.”

The slogan “Zionism is Fascism” was sprayed on the electoral office of Australian federal MP Josh Burns in St Kilda last June. Picture: William West/AFP

Too right. The family living in the apartment above Burns’ office were lucky they weren’t incinerated.

So, too, were members of the Adass Israel Synagogue congregation when it was torched in Melbourne’s south in December.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visiting the Adass Israel Synagogue with Rabbi Shlomo Kohn after a firebombing in December. Picture: Supplied

There had been hundreds of incidents of graffiti and firebombing before an Australian Federal Police task force was established on December 9, but more attacks were to follow on cars and buildings, including the former home of a Jewish leader and a Sydney childcare centre incinerated on January 21.

On that day, Albanese held a national cabinet meeting in which premiers agreed to establish a database to track anti-Semitic crime.

Backtrack for a moment to the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023, before Israel had responded to the murderous cross-border invasion two days earlier by Hamas militants who tortured, raped and murdered more than 1200 civilians, including whole families burnt alive, and seizing 250 hostages as they retreated.

It was a miserably weak response to the scourge sweeping the nation. So meagre, perhaps, that Premier Chris Minns didn’t bother informing Albanese of the discovery of the explosives-laden caravan when they met again. If only the NSW police had applied the law to hate preachers after October 7, 2023, things may have not spiralled to the current crisis point.

Pro-Palestine supporters outside the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023. Picture: David Swift

Had the illegal keffiyeh mob not been shepherded to the Opera House on October 9, to celebrate the murders of Israeli Jews, things may have been different today.

But neither the Minns government nor the Albanese government upheld the laws and arrested offenders.

If only they had identified the rioters and expelled all those on visas. They didn’t even acknowledge the shouted Jew hatred, instead using weasel words with vague references to “trouble” in the Middle East.

Emboldened anti-Semitic pro-Palestine protesters have created weekly havoc in the streets of Melbourne and Sydney ever since.

Under the ceasefire agreement reached on January 15, 33 out of the remaining 98 hostages are to be released in exchange for more than 1000 Palestinian criminals held in Israeli detention.

Footage of the Palestinian returnees shows fit and healthy-looking men and women in stark contrast to the vision of the traumatised Israeli hostages who have been kept in tunnels and homes of Hamas operatives.

If Chagall’s dove of peace were to fly from Israel across the Gazan border tomorrow it would be shot down by the terrorists.

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Originally published as Piers Akerman: Insipid Labor leadership has emboldened anti-Semitic terrorists to attack Jewish community