Australian Jewish Community: Deflection Game
Antisemitism, in public life, is frequently approached as a security file rather than a moral inheritance. The headline offender is “radical Islam,” and the diagnosis is delivered with confidence. Yet a diagnosis that points only outward treats Jews as incidental to the story, and treats society as innocent by default.
Australia is, in the ordinary sense, a civilized and often compassionate country. That is precisely why antisemitism here so often arrives not as a roar but as a reassurance, not as a riot but as minimization.
Islamist fanaticism is real. Islamist jihadism has produced antisemitic violence and incitement, and a serious democracy treats that as a security problem as well as a moral one. Yet the habit of treating jihadism as the main explanation for antisemitism in Australia turns one part of the picture into the whole picture. It also flatters the society telling the story.
Antisemitism did not arrive here in a suitcase from the Middle East. It travelled, as many of our institutions travelled, inside the cultural luggage of Europe. The familiar tropes were already waiting: Jews as hidden manipulators, Jews as alien to the nation, Jews as money, Jews as a collective with a plan. These are not modern inventions. They are the worn tools of Western civilization, periodically polished, periodically denied, never quite discarded.
Western societies like to speak as though antisemitism were an unfortunate deviation from their moral progress. A brief look at Jewish history in the West makes that story hard to sustain. Jews were confined, expelled, forced into conversion, scapegoated in times of plague, excluded by quotas, attacked in pogroms, and routinely treated as a theological irritant and a social contaminant. The modern era refined the prejudice into something “respectable” and then produced the Holocaust, administered with paperwork and defended by people who considered themselves civilised.
The Bondi Beach terrorist attack has produced grief, shock, and anger. Those reactions are human. Yet the Jewish community should not allow grief for the innocent lives lost in the Bondi Beach terrorist attack to overwhelm the rooted antisemitic culture that exists in wider Australian society. The Jewish community should not allow a sense of vengeance to distract it from recognizing the main sources of antisemitism and what ignites it within wider Australian society. Outrage can be necessary. Outrage can also be misdirected, and misdirection is a gift to complacency.
There is antisemitism from Islamist extremists and from those sympathetic to them. There is also antisemitism from the far right, in its familiar language of race and nation. But a large portion of modern antisemitism arrives with clean hands and a good conscience. It appears as educated insinuation, institutional minimisation, and moral vanity. It comes not as a shouted slur but as a presumption: that Jewish fear is exaggerated, that Jewish particularity is suspicious, and that Jews must explain themselves before they are granted ordinary sympathy.
A generally decent public culture can still produce indecency when it becomes anxious, self-protective, or eager to avoid naming the source of prejudice.
Legal remedies matter, but they are not a cure. A legal system can punish an act. It cannot manufacture moral seriousness. When institutions are anxious about offending fashionable sensibilities, enforcement becomes hesitant. The Jew is told to keep records, to file reports, to wait for thresholds, and to accept that the first incident is not quite proof. This becomes a social permission slip for repetition.
Honesty requires a less flattering conclusion. Islamist antisemitism warrants plain naming. Western antisemitism warrants plain naming too, including the kind that arrives draped in progressive language. The common thread is the old fantasy that Jews are uniquely responsible for the world’s disorder. That fantasy predates modern political Islam, and it will outlive it if Australia keeps pretending the problem lives somewhere else.
