Jew Hatred and Moral Failure by Australian Leaders
If ever there were a moment to test whether our leaders match words after a terrorist attack with action, this is it. The verdict is clear: they do not.
Clover Moore, as Lord Mayor of Sydney, has the authority to prevent an event titled Why It’s Right To Say ‘Globalise the Intifada’ from proceeding at the East Sydney Community and Arts Centre, a venue owned by the City of Sydney. Yet neither Anthony Albanese, nor NSW Premier Chris Minns, nor Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig has chosen to act.
To be fair to Minns, he did attempt to halt the 3 August Sydney Harbour Bridge protest last year. That effort was overturned at the eleventh hour by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, with Justice Belinda Rigg ruling that the demonstration would be peaceful. Turns out, it wasn’t so peaceful. Minns himself conceded the limits of his influence, remarking today that the chances of Moore listening to him now were “zero”. Who, exactly, is in charge? Last I heard, it wasn’t Clover Moore.
The protest itself was notable not only for its scale, but for those in attendance. Among them on the front line were Clover Moore, Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Mary Kostakidis, Craig Foster, Julian Assange, Bob Carr and Ed Husic, alongside Randa Abdel-Fattah, Meyne Wyatt, Antoinette Lattouf and Antony Loewenstein. The imagery on display – Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State flags, alongside a portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei spoke volumes. So why can they be waved with such impunity?
The defence often offered is that such gatherings are merely expressions of political dissent. Yet the reality is antisemitism rarely presents itself in static form. It evolves. In the modern West today, antisemitism is frequently refracted through the language of anti-Zionism, providing a veneer of legitimacy to sentiments that would once have been universally condemned. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran is not making a political statement. It funds terrorism through its proxies and calls for the destruction of the United State of America and Israel.
This is not without historical precedent. The collapse of the Camp David negotiations in 2000—after Israeli Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state in most of Judea and Samaria and Gaza was followed by the Second Intifada, a campaign marked by suicide bombings targeting buses, cafés and nightclubs. To these Islamists, martyrdom is the highest honour with families receiving pensions. Western governments seem to turn a blind eye to this. These events are not ancient history; they continue to inform the rhetoric and attitudes we see today. This is why calls for an intifada is seen as so offensive.
Nor is the current government’s posture without context. Albanese, as a former union leader, led anti-Israel demonstrations during that same period. It is therefore hardly surprising that he has shown little appetite to intervene now, whether in response to inflammatory slogans or controversial events. This would explain why he refused to take action in response to former Australian of the Year award recipient Grace Tame’s “globalise the Intifada” chant.
Concerns extend beyond rhetoric. The admission of almost 3,000 Gazans under expedited processes raised legitimate questions about vetting and security. Similarly, ongoing support for UNRWA, despite persistent allegations about the diversion of resources and links to extremist groups has done little to reassure a sceptical public.
The issue is compounded by the recent entry into Australia of preachers with well-documented histories of incendiary antisemitic statements. Hate preachers such as Bangladeshi preacher Mizanur Rahman Azhari praised Adolf Hitler as “divine punishment” against Jews, described them as the “biggest terrorists in the world,” and called them a “poisonous blemish” linked to global crises and disease. Shaykh Ahmadullah stated that Jewish people “keep the whole world in turmoil,” suggested a Jewish global conspiracy, and labelled Jews “despicable.” That they were eventually deported offers no comfort; the fact that they were admitted at all suggests systemic failings. This is why I challenge the validity of proper vetting of 3,000 Gazans.
Meanwhile, the distinction so often drawn between antisemitism and anti-Zionism continues to blur. One need only observe the escalation in incidents: synagogues targeted, swastikas daubed on community buildings, Jewish Australians harassed in workplaces and public spaces. What was once unthinkable is becoming normalised and tolerated in Australia.
History offers a warning. The Holocaust did not begin with violence. It began with words—conspiracies, libels, and the gradual normalisation of exclusion. Only later did those ideas harden into policy, and policy into atrocity and genocide. To dismiss rhetoric as harmless is to misunderstand how prejudice takes root.
Today, similar patterns can be discerned in the way Israel is singled out and delegitimised. The Jewish state is accused of crimes—genocide, apartheid, colonialism that invert historical reality and, in doing so, provide moral justification for hostility. Within certain ideological frameworks, Jews are recast as “oppressors”, and aggression against them reframed as resistance. Normalising attacks on Jews worldwide under the ‘globalise the intifada’ slogan is not acceptable. Would globalising attacks on other minorities be okay? Definitely not.
As they hunt down Zionists, do they stop to ask a Jew of their Zionist affiliation? Of course not. They are all branded as Zionists unless proven otherwise. This is why Palestinian groups accept the likes of the Jewish Council of Australia. These so-called Jews have proven their self-loathing of Zionism and the right of Jews to self-determination. These people who ordinarily have nothing in common suddenly find common ground.
The result is a coarsening of public discourse and a dangerous erosion of boundaries. Acts that should provoke universal condemnation are instead rationalised, contextualised, or quietly ignored. Boundaries once unthinkable were pushed on 9 October 2023, just after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, crowds in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews” and “where’s the Jews”. Where was the consequence? Nowhere at all. This set the tone.
Against this backdrop, the performative gestures of political leaders ring hollow. Attendance at memorials and carefully worded statements are no substitute for decisive action. It is little wonder that Albanese was booed at the memorial symbolising the end of the ‘Shloshim period’, or 30 Days period of Jewish morning. It has not gone without notice that this week on Israel’s Memorial Day and then Israel’s Independence Day, no words of support to the Jewish Community. Funny that!
Support for Israel, in this context, is not merely a geopolitical stance. It is a statement of principle: that Jews, like any other people, have the right to exist securely in their historic homeland, without having to justify that existence to an increasingly hostile chorus.
They have endured centuries of persecution, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the horrors of the Holocaust and now October 7. They will endure still. Regimes have come and gone; however the nation of Israel remains and has outlasted them all. And they will continue to contribute disproportionately to the advancement of science, medicine, technology and culture, often to the benefit of those who would deny them legitimacy.
More fundamentally, this is not a moment for passivity. The past two years have shown that silence only creates space for further deterioration. We cannot afford to be bystanders to this drift. Citizens, institutions and community leaders alike must be upstanders—prepared to call out what is plainly in front of us, including the failures of government that have allowed this environment to take shape in the first place. The steady normalisation of hostility did not occur in a vacuum; it has been enabled by hesitation, equivocation and a reluctance to draw clear lines. After all, those who traffic in hatred are emboldened when they see repeated failures of leadership and enforcement; when words and actions go unchecked, the message received is one of tacit permission. That failure must be named, and it must be corrected.
As Melanie Phillips has argued, “Palestinianism is a moral cancer.” On that, she is surely right.