Pairing anti-Semitism with “Islamophobia”

Why aren’t Jews allowed a full stop?

Photo: ertyo5. iStock.

In the sort of controversy that’s become drearily familiar in the land down under, one of the public broadcaster’s most senior journalists, Laura Tingle, sparked a storm of controversy after she was last weekend caught riffing at a writers’ festival (where else?) that Australia is “a racist country.” 

I’m not interested in dissecting her remark, other than to ponder the obvious question: racist compared to what? To Japan? Denmark? Turkey? No, my interest here is a column she wrote in her defence. In it, Tingle explains that while she wasn’t saying every Australian is a racist, “we clearly have an issue with racism.” 

“For some months now, for example, The Australian newspaper has been devoting considerable space to its alarm about a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia.”

Was this reference to The Australian’s reporting on anti-Semitism intended as a snide remark? Was Tingle using Jew-hatred to score a rhetorical point? Or was she sincerely pointing out that The Australian, which had reported on and criticised her remarks at the writers’ festival, is concerned about this form of racism in Australia and rightly so?

Somehow I doubt it’s the latter because in December the ABC journalist wrote a column criticising The Australian, and Opposition leader Peter Dutton, for “repeatedly raising the alarm about anti-Semitism while having much less to say about the knock-on effects for Australia’s Arab and Muslim communities from the emotions stirred by a conflict overseas.” The Murdoch media and the Opposition, Tingle wrote, were “fanning outrage and seem to be emphasizing only a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia without equally acknowledging a rise in Islamophobia.”

According to Tingle worrying about a rise in anti-Semitism without also acknowledging a rise in Islamophobia amounts to “fanning outrage.” Her opinion is not outrageous, by which I mean it’s not uncommon; indeed it’s the default mantra of the progressive political, bureaucratic and managerial class. For instance, Jane Hansen, the chancellor of Australia’s highest-ranked university, refused to say there is an anti-Semitism crisis in higher education, insisting there are “many different forms of racism” that are abhorrent and deserving attention. 

Never mind that individual protestors, sometimes even leaders, from Gaza solidarity encampments at universities across the country expressed open support for Hamas. The terror group glorifies the murder of Jews. Not “Zionists”, but Jews. Few academic staff publicly pushed back on such comments. On the contrary; the encampments enjoyed the backing of the academic union and more than 1000 academics and university staff signed an open letter saying the student protestors had to be defended and the university “reimagined,” whatever that means.

The nation’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, in an opinion piece lamenting the pile-on against Tingle, argues that we need to talk more, not less, about racism. “Overt examples” of racism in Australia are far too common, he wrote in the Nine papers, citing as an example the “Jew die” graffiti attack against Mount Scopus College in Melbourne. He continues: “Just as the war in Gaza has prompted dramatic increases in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, the Voice referendum led to a deluge of racism against First Nations people and the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a dramatic rise in anti-Asian racism.”

Note the illogical ordering in the above quote. Sivaraman abruptly pivots to listing “anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia..” before he buries a reference to the “anti-Semitism” he had highlighted in the previous sentence — being the graffiti attack on the Jewish school — at the end of the clause. Am I being a bit paranoid and pedantic here? Is Sivaraman is guilty of no more than sloppy prose? 

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Well, let’s consider the actions, or more accurately the omissions, of the Australian Human Rights Commission on anti-Semitism since October 7.

That’s the October 7 terror attack carried out by Hamas, an entity the Commission in its collected media releases fails to name, as Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson established in her grilling in Senate Estimates of outgoing president, Rosalind Croucher. The oversight — to be uncharacteristically charitable for a moment — wouldn’t on its own bother me, but for the frequent references to Israel’s response to Hamas. In January, the Commission acknowledged the interim ruling of the International Court of Justice in favour of provisional measures to protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza. In March, a Commission press release led with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, delivering a “powerful statement” on the urgency of the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza and warning against an Israeli assault on Rafah.

The Commission routinely denounces the outbreak of anti-Semitism by simultaneously denouncing an alleged outbreak in “anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism” (since when is a nationality a “race’’?) and of course in “Islamophobia.”

Regular readers will know that I have a serious problem with the term “Islamophobia. To quote a definition the late Christopher Hitchens may or may not have coined but most certainly used, “Islamophobia” is a word “created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons”. Still, no-one can deny that anti-Muslim hatred — my preferred term — persists as a dangerous social ill and I’m prepared to accept its incidence has risen since October 7. 

But can we really say anti-Muslim hatred has been unleashed to the same extent and same gravity as anti-Semitism? I’m not doubting the violent potential for hate-filled individuals to target Australian Muslims, even, God forbid, lethally. It’s just that a spike in random acts of hatred is not the same as a surge of collective hate and the reaching for pitch forks, actual or metaphorical. The latter defines today’s outbreak of Jew-hatred. 

A violent, Islamist mob gathers in front of the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews” or maybe just “where’s the Jews” and “Fuck the Jews,” (which makes me feel a whole lot better); a mob, incited by false rumours that Jews burned down a Palestinian-owned burger joint, stages a violent protest outside a Caulfield synagogue forcing worshippers to abandon Friday prayers; a mob repeatedly drives a pro-Palestine convoy of 30 cars and motorcycles through Jewish suburbs of Sydney hurling racial abuse at the locals; 600 members of a private Jewish WhatsApp group have their private information disseminated such that a couple has their gift shop vandalised and is forced out of their suburb; a pro-Palestinian group brands Jewish businesses across Melbourne with boycott stickers reminiscent of Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s; two Islamic preachers in western Sydney deliver sermons variously describing “Jews” as “monsters,” “Nazi gangsters,” “descendants of pigs and monkeys” and calling for them to be “drowned.”

(Add the university protestors expressing open support for Hamas.) 

And it’s a similar story around the world. In Canada, shots have twice been fired at the facade of Jewish schools. Synagogues have been set on fire or nearly set on fire in Canada, Armenia, Tunisia, Germany, Russia, Poland, France and the US. The FBI’s director Christopher Wray has warned that in the wake of violence in the Middle East, anti-Semitism in the US is reaching “historic levels.”

Have we seen anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism at anything like this scale since October 7?

And yet, on October 13, days after the “Fuck the Jews” rally, the Commission issued a vague call for “human rights to be front of mind for all Australians as the situation in the Middle East continues to worsen” while expressing concern about “reports that people’s right to peaceful protest may be blocked in certain states and territories.” It needn’t have worried; anti-Israel protestors have every week since asserted their right to occupy the CBDs of Australian cities, chanting for an Arab-majority state to replace Israel “from the river to the sea” and at times calling — peacefully, you understand — for an “intifada revolution.”

Otherwise, the Commission issues rote condemnations of anti-Semitism, alongside “anti-Palestinian racism” and “Islamophobia.” “Our mandate that we have in Australia is to focus upon the impacts of the (Middle East) crisis on people here,” said Croucher in response to claims from Henderson that the Commission had failed to tackle a rise in anti-Semitism. “All of our material refers to all of our communities,” she said, in a patently redundant observation.

I try to maintain a certain professional decorum here at Szego Unplugged. But I have to ask: if this is the Australian Human Rights Commission’s best response to an unprecedented outbreak of Jew hatred what’s the fucking point of it existing at all?

The body is arguably worse than useless.

In revelations that read as satire, Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg, one of the activists who helped disseminate the doxxed details of the 600 Jews from the WhatsApp group on the grounds their “time was up,” was contracted by the Commission to provide … anti-racism resources. (The Commission told the Senate on Friday it had brought forward the contract’s end after “public discourse” and “community concerns” over Tuet-Rosenberg’s conduct.) And one of the Commission’s anti-racism ambassadors, Tasneem Chopra, appeared to dismiss concerns Jewish women were raped on October 7 and declared on social media that Israel had “forfeited its right to exist.”

Might I suggest these appointments speak to a particular culture within Australia’s human rights sector? 

The staff, we know, are revolting. Earlier this year the Commission received an open letter from some of its employees expressing frustration the body had not condemned “Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”.

A sticker on a Melbourne tram stop this week.

To be fair, in March the Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay did write an opinion piece calling out anti-Semitism alone. She expressed all the right sentiments but too late, the damage already done. Most interesting from my point of view is the defensive tone of her piece: “Racism has to be condemned no matter what form it takes, and no matter what individual or group happens to be the particular target.”

“But this even-handed application of principle should never stop us from directly calling out specific examples of racism,” she wrote. “We cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by moral equivalence, or to sit in the silence that then allows racism to flourish.”

What does she mean by “moral equivalence”? That we shouldn’t see anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia” as morally equivalent in scale for all the reasons I’ve outlined? 

The problem is more than simply one of false equivalence. 

In his opinion piece defending Tingle, Sivaraman, the Race Discrimination Commissioner, described the graffiti attack on Mount Scopus as an example of “overt” racism. He says overt racism surfaces viciously whenever there’s a rupture in society because “structural” racism goes unchallenged. We need to talk about structural racism, he says.

I agree. The structural issue that goes unchallenged here is that anti-Jewish racism masquerades as anti-racism.

In recent decades the notion of universal human rights has been consumed by an intersectional politics that can only see identity groups. By now, I don’t need to tell you that this ideology sees Jews as privileged and “white,” meaning it doesn’t see Jews at all. (For one thing, Israel is home to African Jews more black than the Palestinians in Gaza.) 

This ideology does not see, or refuses to see, that Jews define themselves as a people and regard the disavowal of their sense of peoplehood — an indignity no other group must wear — as racist. When it’s not violent, that is. At the Senate hearing, Henderson asked Sivaraman if he agreed with Anthony Albanese’s assessment that “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is a violent statement that has no place in Australia. Sivaraman said it would depend — you guessed it — on the “context.”

So the oppressor-oppressed ideology, an ideology that has hijacked most of our institutions, including the Human Rights Commission, cannot see the Jew in all their complexity. More importantly, the ideology cannot see the anti-Semite.

Let me try a thought experiment. Imagine if in response to the Christchurch mosque massacres our leaders had condemned anti-Muslim violence and anti-Semitism. Such a statement would have struck me as morally objectionable, not to mention absurd. The Christchurch attacks had nothing to do with anti-Jewish hatred.

The same does not apply here. The spiritual epicentre of the current wave of anti-Semitism is the Muslim world. The “trots” at the campus protests are comrades in arms with Islamists. (At one point during the occupation of the Arts West building at Melbourne University, amid threats from the administration to bring in the cops, protestors hung a banner in the causeway that read, “Halal Zone. No Pigs.”)

So when leaders such as Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan and Foreign Minister Penny Wong responded to the “Burgertory” riots in Caulfield with condemnations of anti-Semitism “and Islamophobia” they were not being even-handed. They were handing racists a mask. The incident was not one of Islamophobia but the exact opposite: a group — albeit a small one — of hate-filled followers of Islam, and some of their fellow travellers, looking for a pretext to go after Jews.

When our leaders and our “anti-racism” commissioners religiously pair their condemnation of anti-Semitism with that of Islamophobia they are in fact erasing anti-Semitism, erasing its context and true character. They’re perpetuating the structural anti-Jewish racism, to use Sivaraman’s terminology, from which overt racism, of the type splashed across the Scopus wall, springs.

Structural anti-Semitism explains why the Human Rights Commission hesitates to mention the deadliest act of racism inflicted on Jews since the Holocaust lest it be accused of racism. It explains why the Race Discrimination Commissioner cannot, or will not, see violent Muslim supremacists, why he cannot be sure that a call to free Palestine “from the river to the sea” is an exhortation to a bloodbath of Jews and a second Holocaust. 

And while I’m not sure Australia qualifies as a racist country, I agree racism is an endemic problem here. Something the ABC might one day wish to investigate.