When a Jewish MP is targeted

The view from afar

Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, Serbia.

Post October 7, I’ve developed a habit of staying on my phone until lights out, scanning Twitter, reading the news. I had hoped to break the routine during a month-long trip to Europe, which is where I am now. No luck as yet, and so it was around midnight in Berlin when I saw the shocking images of the smashed and defaced office of my local MP, Josh Burns, who is Jewish. The photograph of his face covered with red spray paint. Devil horns painted on his head. The words, “ZIONISM IS FASCISM.” 

Not big on self-awareness these vandals. No sense of irony. Depicting a Jew with devil horns, an age-old symbol of Jew hatred, and in the same breath accusing the Jew of fascism. No regard either for consistent messaging. After all, the official line from the anti-Israel camp is that de-legitimising Israel is entirely distinct from anti-Semitism. To be fair, that official line has been noticeably relaxed in recent months as protestors gleefully target Jews globally. In the past fortnight, protesters hurled red paint at the homes of US Jewish officials of the Brooklyn Museum; the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, had a banner hung in front of her door branding her a “white-supremacist Zionist.”

Credit where it’s due: the devil horns on Burns show the vandals do have a good grasp of art history.

A friend from Melbourne told me he had half-wished the news about Burns’ office wouldn’t reach me in Europe. Before the digital age, it was possible to travel in blissful ignorance of events back home; reading my friend’s words brought a pang of nostalgia for that time. As it was, that night in Berlin I didn’t get much sleep.

The following day as my daughter and I passed through airports in Berlin, Warsaw and Belgrade, I was in something of a daze. My mind returning again and again to Burns’ trashed St Kilda office, now a crime scene.

Burns’ crime, it seems, is being a “Zionist”. He believes, as do the overwhelming majority of Jews, that the State of Israel has a right to exist. He has questioned the timing of the Australian government’s backing for the UN push for Palestinian statehood. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre and expressed solidarity with the devastated communities in Israel’s south, with the kibbutz socialists, raped, murdered and kidnapped. 

Burns is a Zionist and therefore a fascist, according to the vandals who attacked his office. These would-be revolutionaries who wish to purify the world by excluding Zionists are calling for the ostracism of the overwhelming majority of Jews. A fact that doesn’t seem to prompt any soul-searching on their part. 

Anthony Albanese said the vandalism had to be seen as an attack targeting a Jewish MP. “It [the attack] does nothing,” he told ABC radio in Melbourne, “it undermines the cause that people purport to represent.” In a Substack piece this week, Michael Gawenda noted that no journalist had asked the Prime Minister what “cause” he thinks is being undermined. Does Albanese believe these people who drew devil horns on Burns and equate Zionism with fascism have a fundamentally noble cause that shouldn’t be undermined?

The Prime Minister also said that “this sort of vandalism, this sort of political aggression has no place in Australia.” It is not the first time he has invoked the “no place in Australia” sentiment, having done so on October 9, October 11, November 10, May 2, May 25 and June 5, to list just a few obvious examples.

Why regurgitate the line about such acts having “no place in Australia” when it is so blatantly contradicted by reality? The day after Albanese uttered these words more vandals attacked the Trades Hall building in Melbourne with pro-Palestinian messages, never mind the union movement is a hub of pro-Palestinian activism. 

Across the past nine months, Australia has cemented a reputation as a place of rampant “vandalism” and “political aggression,” of rampant anti-Semitism.

It is now a place where imams call for the drowning of Jews and the police say nothing to see here; where people march down the streets with placards calling for the world to be cleansed of Jews and the police say nothing to see here; where people gather in public and yell “fuck the Jews!” and the police say nothing to see here — instead they arrest individuals for walking while Jewish; where extremist Islamist groups annex university grounds and the campus administration rewards them with a seat at the table; where Jewish singers, shopkeepers, and comedians are routinely harassed and intimidated while, in an Orwellian twist, people who advocate for the harassment of “Zionists” get tapped by public institutions to run “anti-racism” programs and judge multicultural literary awards; where violent Islamist mobs threaten Jews in their suburban enclaves and in response, senior government ministers condemn “Islamophobia.”

I’m travelling in parts of the world where entire museums commemorate slain Jews and warn against the resurgence of Jew-hatred. I will write more about these places soon. In some of these places there is now little room for aggression against Jews. Until October 7 I believed Australia was also such a place. It is clearly no longer such a place and it’s time the Prime Minister acknowledged that.