#WTH Jew hatred down under

And Albo's ambivalence

Australia is reeling from a series of antisemitic attacks that began escalating sharply in the weeks and months following the Hamas war on Israel that started on October 7, 2023. The news has been lurid enough that it’s made the Wall Street Journal, with the recent dismissal of two Sydney-based Muslim nurses threatening to kill Jews the cherry on top. (They were quickly stood down.) But there’s more to the story than you’re reading in the press.

First, those of you who know me know I’m from Australia. Like many Aussie Jews, my family ended up in Melbourne after the Holocaust. It was a beautiful home to so many who survived the Holocaust, and the communities Jews built remain strong today. Most of my parents’ best friends are still in Melbourne, and many have been friends since they attended Jewish schools and camps in the 1950s. Second, the community is very much a post-Holocaust one. What do I mean by that? Simply, while Australia was home to Jews before World War II — General Sir John Monash, the Melbourne-born brilliant World War I commander, is a standout — there were still fewer than 25,000 Jews in all Oz before 1945. A huge influx after the war more than doubled those numbers.

American Jews are different. Yes, this is a major generalization, and plenty of American Jews came post-Holocaust to these shores. But there is a different spirit that infuses American Jewry — one less imbued with the experience of persecution than in the Australian Jewish community. “Don’t go looking for trouble” might be the mantra of many Aussie Jews. Don’t call attention to yourself. Do good, be part of the community, and support the causes you believe in. But do it quietly. Until now.

The litany of antisemitic attacks around Australia since October 7 hasn’t attracted much attention, apart from a few appalling exceptions. When Sydney’s robust pro-Hamas hordes came out in force and began chanting “gas the Jews,” the world got a sense of the forces at work. A synagogue was firebombed in Melbourne yards away from where my Mum grew up. Last month, a childcare center was firebombed in Sydney. The leader of one of Australia’s preeminent Jewish organizations — the Executive Council of Australian Jewry — had his former home vandalized and burned in Sydney.

But there are so many more stories. Australian universities have shamed themselves, behaving like mini-Columbias even as they skate with little focused attention. Friends have seen their children expelled from group houses for being “Zios.” The Federal Courts are hearing a case of systematic antisemitic persecution around by two Victorian students. Per the ECAJ, “from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, there were 2,062 anti-Jewish incidents logged by volunteer Community Security Groups (CSGs), official Jewish state roof bodies, and the ECAJ.” In the year previous, 495 such incidents were logged.

After almost a year of escalating violence and hate crimes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who hails from the far left wing of Australia’s Labour Party, began, reluctantly, to pay attention. After the Melbourne firebombing, Albo (as he’s known down under) took two days to define the attack as an act of terrorism. Labour State governments in Victoria and New South Wales have been similarly reticent.

Could Albo’s antipathy towards the State of Israel be part of the issue? Under his leadership, Australia has transformed from a stalwart supporter of the Jewish state to more regularly voting against Israel and with the antisemites of the United Nations. His government denied a visa to a former Israeli government minister who had made derogatory comments about Palestinians. There was even some suspicion that Home Affairs was denying visas to Israelis who had served in the IDF (ie most), though the government went to pains to insist that was not the case.

Team Albo has tried in recent weeks to project a more concerned face about rising Jew-hatred in Australia. Ministers were quick to denounce the two Sydney nurses who wanted to kill Jews and Israelis. But the reality of the government response is indifference, with a veneer of politics as national elections approach this Spring. And a close read of reactions and legal steps taken suggests that the Labour Party would like to see antisemitism in Australia as a problem of the far right, performatively banning Hitler salutes, while doing nothing precious little to address the vile antisemites in their own corner.

Historically, the Jewish community has swung left in Australia, though the data is spottier and far less conclusive than that about the Jewish community in the United States. But there are only about 100,000 Jews in Australia, a country of 25 million people. There are 800,000 Muslims. Albo knows math. And Albo has been keen to water down rather than tighten up counter-terrorism laws in Australia.

Needless to say, antisemitism and hostility to Israel has become a major issue for the upcoming elections, with the conservative Coalition — which, like many conservative parties the world over, has become ever more pro-Israel — highlighting Albo’s painful reluctance to denounce Jew-haters and attackers. When opposition leader Peter Dutton took to the floor of Parliament to denounce escalating antisemitism, the entire government bench walked out, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

One last note. You may wonder why this lovely land of koalas and kangaroos is breeding a strain of virulent antisemitism. And the answer is that Australia embraced multiculturalism and anti-colonialism with unhealthy fervor even earlier than the United States. Truth be told, Australia is a multicultural mix, was indeed a colony, and did indeed have an immigration policy called “White Australia” until the 1970s. There’s nothing wrong with an honest examination of history. But that’s not what happened. From the obsessive “welcome to country” ceremonies — the painfully patronizing admissions of occupying aboriginal, or First Nations, land — to the desperate hyphenation of every known identity, to the far-left Marxist tropes of settler colonialism, Oz has been all in for some time. And as in America, much of that plus an unhealthy mix of Islamist extremism dotting the mosques of Sydney and elsewhere, has come together to create a firestorm.

The elections may punish Labour for its ambivalence towards domestic terrorism; my Jewish friends tell me they’re not voting for Labour again. Then again, they are a tiny corner of Australia. But it would be good to see the scourge of hatred eliminated for once and for all, and its perpetrators back under the rocks from which they crawled.