Party leaders need to prevent racist hate becoming the new normal
Australia cannot allow anti-Semitism to become the new normal, a state of mind where it is somehow OK to attack a historically persecuted minority that has absolutely nothing to do with events in the Middle East.
It beggars belief to see the sheer bigoted blindness of so many Australians – from university students to far left and far right activists to Islamists – who cannot separate their hatred of Israeli government policy from Australian Jews.
It’s not rocket science, you dodos. The roughly 100,000 Jews in Australia have a plurality of views on the conflict in the Middle East and on the current Israeli government but they are spectators, not players.
To blame them in any form for events a world away amounts to racism, pure and simple.
Many of the 1654 anti-Semitic incidents documented in the 12 month report by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reveal just how ingrained and normalised such behaviour has become.
The incidents often occur in the most routine of circumstances, such as the rabbi walking down the street pushing a baby in a pram who suddenly has a flaming projectile fired at him. Or the Jewish doctor who checks into a hotel only for the hotel receptionist to see his name and scratch at him while yelling “You’re a f..king Jew.” Or the Jewish man pushed off his bike by a man yelling “F..king Jews” and “Free Palestine”. The list of such sickening incidents in this report goes on.
Those who deny, play down or somehow twist the facts to pretend that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in this country are being wilfully blind to the reality.
The ECAJ report rightly calls out the weekly pro-Palestinian protests in Melbourne, Sydney and other cities for much of the past year for serving as platforms of anti-Semitism for the activist rump of the pro-Palestinian movement. That these protests which called for a ceasefire in Gaza – continued long after there was a ceasefire in Gaza tells you all you need to know about the activists who organised these events.
What is needed now to prevent this level of anti-Semitism from being baked into our social fabric is for federal and state governments, universities and cultural institutions – whose inaction on anti-Semitism helped foster the problem – to step up.
In July, the federal government accepted with some fanfare the findings of the report of its anti-Semitism envoy Jillian Segal, only to quietly bin its most muscular recommendations, including linking funding for universities and arts bodies to efforts to fight anti-Semitism.
The government should revisit some of Segal’s recommendations and take action on those that will be most effective rather than automatically bow to the complaints of those who employ free speech arguments to mask their inherent anti-Semitism.
Jennifer Westacott, chancellor of Western Sydney University, has this week shown a moral clarity most of her fellow academic leaders did not in calling on universities to take tougher action to eliminate anti-Semitism from campus life.
The ECAJ report reveals that in the past two years, where anti-Semitic incidents have increased fivefold over the historical norm, the incidents have become more serious. This week marks a year since the Adass Israel synagogue was firebombed by local criminals masterminded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp, now belatedly listed as a terror group.
Iran’s interference in Australia to perpetrate attacks on Jews to try to disrupt social cohesion is an ongoing danger. As ASIO chief Mike Burgess says, anti-Semitic incidents are ASIO’s chief concern in terms of threats to life.
The ECAJ report confirms that far too many Australians continue to use the Middle East as an excuse to rekindle the most ancient of hatreds, one so many Jews came to this country to escape.
It is up to leaders across the board to take a stand and make sure these past two years are an ugly aberration in our history and not the new normal.
The real reason inflation is high
News that the poisonous surge in anti-Semitism in Australia has continued unabated for a second year demands urgent action from all levels of leadership from Anthony Albanese down.