Australian PM fails to confront Anti-Semitism
Rivka Sassover Peled told me about what happened to her mother in Trieste when the Nazis invaded Italy. Her mother, Hemda Sassover, was a young Jewish woman living on her own, so her best friend Angelica offered her refuge with her family. But when the Nazis introduced their race laws against Jews that decreed death for anyone offering refuge to Jews, Hemda told her friend’s father that she would leave as she did not want to endanger their family. The father, Dr Giovanni Pesante, refused and insisted she stay with them. He told her: “ I do not do it for you. I do it for myself to keep my humanity.”
After the war, Dr Pesante was recognised both by Italy and Yad Vashem for his valour. An ordinary Italian was prepared to risk his life and that of his family to protect a Jewish fellow Italian.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, however, has failed to protect Jewish Australians and failed to confront growing antisemitism.
The Bondi massacre during Hanukkah that left 15 dead and 42 injured was the culmination of two years of dangerously escalating antisemitism in Australia. However, the response of the Prime Minister following the attack has been alarmingly weak. He has shown that he is not prepared to risk political support within his party and with a section of the electorate by taking a strong stand against Islamism.
A high-ranking law enforcement professional this week published an article in ‘ The Australian’ newspaper describing the Government’s response to antisemitism as “Wilful blindness”. This he explained is when someone deliberately avoids knowing the truth so they can later claim ignorance.
” That is the core issue: the failure to recognise, confront and act decisively against escalating extremist ideology and anti-Semitism… This issue is not about gun control. It is about leadership, anti-Semitism and confronting radical Islamist extremism,”he wrote.
In February this year Mike Burgess, the Director-General of Australia’s Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO ) declared that “antisemitism is the agency’s number one priority in terms of threats to life in Australia”.
Nevertheless, for over two years, the PM had ignored the ongoing pleas of the Australian Jewish community for protection. Since the day after the October 7 2023 massacre of Israelis by Hamas, there have been eleven fire bombings of synagogues and other Jewish centres, graffiti attacks and vandalism of Jewish schools, homes and cars, abuse of Jewish schoolchildren, doxxing of Jewish creatives, boycotts of Jewish businesses, exclusion of Jewish artists, physical attacks and harassment of Jewish university students and staff, and mass weekly demonstrations spewing hate against Israel, Zionists and Jews.
And today in Melbourne, a rabbi’s car with a small mobile billboard on its roof reading “Happy Hanukah’ was firebombed in the driveway of his family home where his wife and children were sleeping at 3.00am.
On the day of the Bondi terrorist attack, the Prime Minister did no better than issue a feeble response. His first statement remarkably did not mention the word Jews. It lacked compassion. It appeared detached from the enormity of the event.
In the next few days, he continued to avoid mentioning Islamist terrorism even though one of the gunmen is known to have proselytised for Wissam Haddad the Islamist State preacher in Sydney.
Nor did the PM initially announce any measures to address antisemitism.
Instead he gave the impression of a politician looking over his shoulder and calculating political fallout and leadership risk.
It was left to others to show their humanity and courage, and they did.
At the time of the attack, Boris and Sofia Gurman and Reuven Morrison immediately understood that the gunman came to kill Jews and fought him, sacrificing their lives in order to protect others. Ahmed al-Ahmed and Gefen Bitton fearlessly risked their lives leaping on the gunman to disarm him and save lives. Both were badly injured. Others threw themselves over strangers’ babies and small children in order to protect them and they absorbed bullets with their own bodies. The police, paramedics, first responders, lifesaving club members and people who happened to be in Bondi rushed to treat the injured as bullets were still flying.
After the attack, there was the fundamental decency and humanity of those who came to mourn, to bring flowers, to donate blood and to take part in the breathtakingly beautiful paddle out ceremony. Lifesavers in their yellow and red gear lined the shores of sandy beaches around Australia. All done to honour the Jews who had been killed and injured and to show solidarity with the Jewish community. In a park in a Jewish neighbourhood, I saw a bouquet of flowers someone had left with the message : “We love you”. Around Australia there was an outpouring of messages and acts of love and support to Jewish neighbours and friends.
The Jewish community inevitably compared the Prime Minister’s response to the slaughter of Jews with the response of other leading Australians. At a memorial of solidarity by inter-faith leaders at St Mary’s Cathedral, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Andrew Fisher in his sermon said: “ For two years now, week after week, demonstrations have taken place in Sydney’s Hyde park, within earshot of the Great Synagogue, where inflammatory messages were articulated unchecked, slogans chanted that only turned up the temperature, messages delivered that made violence thinkable. This must stop! ”
PM Albanese had called on everyone to embrace their Jewish fellow Australians, and the community did so. However, it must be said that Jews were not looking to Albanese for an embrace. They look to him for protection, that is his mandate. They look to him for leadership. They look to him to answer the existential question following the slaughter – can Jews continue to live in Australia? And if so, what is the Prime Minister doing to ensure their safety and survival?
It took Anthony Albanese five days after the massacre to pause the speeches laden with platitudes about unity and prioritising gun control. It was only then that he announced actual measures of what the Government would do to address attacks on Jews. Now belatedly, he is finally talking about measures to tackle those spearheading antisemitism in Australia.
In his own defence, the PM reminded us that he had appointed an antisemitism envoy, but he did not add that he had basically shelved Jillian Segal’s report and recommendations six months ago when she handed them to him.
In the history of Australia, relations between the Prime Minister and the Australian Jewish community have reached a nadir.
The funerals of those killed in Bondi revealed an extraordinary, unprecedented expression of the Jewish community’s dismay and anger at the failure of Anthony Albanese and his Government to protect them. Those who attended the funerals included the Governor-General Sam Mostyn, the leader and members of the Opposition, the Premier of NSW, religious leaders, and dignitaries. The Prime Minister did not attend a single funeral. It is unclear if he stayed away because he feared a cold response or was not invited. It is also not clear if, apart from his visit to Ahmed el-Ahmed in the hospital, he visited any of the others injured in the attack.
What is unequivocal is the reception he received when he arrived at the memorial for the victims of the Bondi shootings. He was loudly booed.
To make matters worse, PM Albanese is now refusing to appoint a Commonwealth Royal Commission to investigate antisemitism, the Bondi massacre and what led up to it. A national Royal Commission is the highest form of independent public inquiry on matters of public importance. It resembles the state commission of inquiry that Israelis are calling on to investigate the failures of October 7th.
The Federal Opposition party in Australia is calling for a Royal Commission. So too are more than 170 of Australia’s most respected judges and senior barristers, with the number rapidly increasing. But Anthony Albanese remains adamant in his refusal.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who was the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, made a speech in the House of Lords in 2018 in which he said:
“A thousand years of Jewish history in Europe added certain words to the human vocabulary: forced conversion, inquisition, expulsion, ghetto, pogrom, Holocaust. Once hate goes unchecked, the road to tragedy is short.”
Australian Jews are facing a threat to their lives because the hate is going unchecked.
Australia is facing a threat to its way of life because the hate is going unchecked.