Who feels unsafe and why?

Jan 25, 2025
Flags of Israel, Iran and Palestine with gavel.

When Parliament returns, the government will be pressed to enact a law making it a criminal offence to threaten violence against people or groups on racial or religious grounds, or to threaten them about gender identity or sexual orientation. Before February, we need to know more about what caused a recent spate of nasty incidents in Sydney.

Let’s hope that the legislation, a hasty response to alleged antisemitism, will not suppress public opposition to Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza and the Palestinian Territories, which have generated the recent rise in antisemitism in Australia. Jewish Australians are joined by many in mourning the loss of the accepting community they once enjoyed, which changed after 7 October 2023.

The new law against racist and religious violence may open up other possibilities. For example, Australians who oppose gay marriage or surrogate parenthood, and those who object to sex changes for children, might object to being silenced by this legislation. Indigenous Australians might try to use it against all – including police – who threaten them with racist violence.

Newfound sensitivity about national symbols and sentiments can be expected to result from the legislation. Flags of Hamas – the elected government of Gaza – are already banned at weekly pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The flag of Israel is not so restricted: the Sydney Opera House displayed it after 7 October 2023. Sydney actors who wore Keffiyeh on stage caused outrage from some Sydney Theatre Company patrons and donors in November, causing the STC to apologise. After a British-Australian pianist in August read a statement supporting journalists in Gaza, he was banned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Labor MP Josh Burns, investigating antisemitism on university campuses, wants disciplinary action at ANU and Sydney University, particularly objecting to one student giving a Nazi salute and another making a gesture apparently imitating a Hitler moustache. Making a Nazi salute in public has been illegal in Australia since 2024, as has displaying or trading in Nazi hate symbols. Now, as Israel’s genocidal actions replicate Hitler’s, it’s not always clear whether such hand or flag gestures are neo-Nazi, antisemitic or anti-Israel.

Meanwhile in Washington, where displaying Nazi symbols isn’t unlawful, President Trump’s favourite Elon Musk said the inauguration was a ‘fork in the road of human civilisation’, and made his point with what appeared to be two Nazi salutes. Shocked observers couldn’t decide if those were Hitler or Mussolini salutes, but it hardly mattered: white supremacism was the clear intent. Musk’s representative in Italy, Andrea Stroppa, published a photo (later deleted) on X with the words: ‘Roman Empire is back, starting with the Roman salute’, according to the news agency ANSA.

As we often hear, such events make the Jewish community in Australia feel less safe. Some like Jeremy Leibler, President of the Zionist Federation of Australia, say Australia’s pro-Palestinian votes in the UN General Assembly have had this effect. On his return from Israel on 20 January, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus assured the media that he had stressed ‘the very long-standing friendship between Australia and Israel’, and Australia’s support for ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’. But the chief law officer failed to mention Australia’s obligation, as though it didn’t exist, to support the findings of the International Courts and UN Human Rights agencies by arresting indicted Israeli war criminals, not supplying weapons to Israel, and pressing Israel to observe agreed boundaries in the West Bank, where Palestinians feel less safe by the day.

That brings us to the six attacks on Jewish premises, including two synagogues in Sydney since November, and one in Melbourne ‒ the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue in December. After the Hamas outbreak on 7 October 2023, 179 people have been arrested in Australia in connection with 452 offences at mosques, synagogues, and in suburbs. The Jewish Council of Australia reports that in addition to acts of antisemitism, over the past 15 months, Islamophobic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and antisemitic hate crimes have included racist anti-Arab graffiti in Sydney; planting a homemade bomb in front of a Sydney home which was flying the Palestinian flag; and setting alight a truck bearing the Palestinian flag which belonged to a man of Palestinian heritage in Melbourne.

Two suspects have been arrested for the Newtown synagogue arson attempt, making a dozen people before the courts on various charges. The AFP Commissioner has raised the possibility of local criminals being paid, either by local or overseas interests using bitcoin, to carry out antisemitic attacks. An anti-Palestinian woman appears to have vandalised a car in Woollahra and written graffiti while her sister allegedly monstered a Muslim woman wearing a pro-Palestine t-shirt in a Bankstown supermarket in December. Tamine and Kelly Farrugia, who are said to be Zionist but not Jewish, are before the court, but not for hate speech or antisemitism. Kelly had allegedly tried earlier to run over a Sheik.

None of them, according to Greens MP Jenny Leong, have the religious or political motivations associated with terrorism. That didn’t stop the media promptly saying the recent alleged crimes were evil, copycat acts of terror by ‘criminals for hire’. That in the public mind at once evokes Islamist extremism, not the terror tactics employed by Israel against the Palestinians. Terrorists are always ‘them’, not ‘us’.

Aftab Malik, appointed as Australia’s anti-Islamophobia envoy in September, broke his long silence on 22 January, after seeking community views for two months. He told SBS that Islam was associated in the media and in the majority public mind with radicalism, extremism, and terrorism. Islamophobia was ‘normalised’ in Australia but under-reported, he found, and violence, hatred, and discrimination against Muslims were widespread, daily realities.

The new law cannot be expected to resolve differences between Jewish and Muslim Australians that represent their core identities, nor to dispel their sense of being unsafe. Only an end to the Israel-Palestine war can do that.

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