Australian Jewish Community: Deflection Game |
Antisemitism, in public life, is frequently approached as a security file rather than a moral inheritance. The headline offender is “radical Islam,” and the diagnosis is delivered with confidence. Yet a diagnosis that points only outward treats Jews as incidental to the story, and treats society as innocent by default.
Australia is, in the ordinary sense, a civilized and often compassionate country. That is precisely why antisemitism here so often arrives not as a roar but as a reassurance, not as a riot but as minimization.
Islamist fanaticism is real. Islamist jihadism has produced antisemitic violence and incitement, and a serious democracy treats that as a security problem as well as a moral one. Yet the habit of treating jihadism as the main explanation for antisemitism in Australia turns one part of the picture into the whole picture. It also flatters the society telling the story.
Antisemitism did not arrive here in a suitcase from the Middle East. It travelled, as many of our........