The tragedy of the Bondi Beach massacre of Australian Jewish people celebrating Hanukkah is that it is the tragedy everyone saw coming. Some Jews came to Australia in the late 18th century and trickled in fleeing Russia’s pogroms before World War II, but the bulk of Australian Jewry dates to the Holocaust. Polish Jews settled in Melbourne, and Hungarian Jews established their community in Sydney. With other groups scattered among Australia’s other large cities, Australia’s Jewish community is both fully integrated into the country’s life and economy, while more religiously orthodox than its European and American counterparts.
Traditionally, Australian leaders took a no-nonsense approach to those who would import malign and violent ideologies into Australia or to play out inside Australia conflicts from the countries from which they emigrated. Religious security was not a partisan issue: The Liberal Party of Australia, the country’s center-right, and the Labor Party on the center-left both protected Australia’s Jewish population. Both contained the excesses of Australia’s often antisemitic progressive Greens. Nor were Jewish people alone in enjoying this approach; Australia became a melting pot and, perhaps even more than the U.S., a place in which members of all religious minorities could feel safe: Greek and Armenian Orthodox, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong changed this. Just as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cultivated Sikh extremists and protected Khalistani terrorism for cynical electoral reasons, so did Albanese and Wong seek to appease Australia’s growing Islamist community, both by acceding to their demands to demonize Israel and accept a tendentious and false Palestinian narrative and also by downplaying or rationalizing growing acts of violence targeting Australia’s Jewish population, including torching a Melbourne synagogue and spray painting swastikas on Jewish schools, synagogues, and graves. Albanese and Wong’s response to the terror of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel was to recognize a Palestinian state, thereby rewarding the terrorist group and signaling to its own domestic extremists that antisemitic terrorism works.
Ireland may be 10,000 miles away from Australia, but Dublin’s leadership repeats the actions of Canberra’s and yet appears dumbfounded as Ireland becomes the antisemitism capital of Europe. Ireland once had the dubious distinction of, in 1904, hosting the westernmost pogrom. Just over two decades ago, former Irish President Mary Robinson sponsored one of the United Nations’s most antisemitic conferences in Durban, South Africa. Today, that seems quaint. Irish antisemitism reached a fever pitch after Oct. 7. As Irishmen march through their capital flying Hezbollah flags and waving Hamas banners, Dublin has promoted boycott initiatives ostensibly to target Israel, but which in practice target Jewish people more broadly. As Micheál Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach, criticizes Israel to appease radicals, it is only a matter of time until Ireland’s antisemites turn their guns on Jews.
To be a Jew in Turkey, meanwhile, is today as risky as transfusing blood with an Ebola patient. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan embraces Hamas and uses blood libel to target Jews. Norway, for all its progressive smug self-congratulation of its own virtue, has become another state in which its leadership fans antisemitism by denying its links to anti-Zionism and pro-Hamas activism.
HOUSE DRIVES TOWARD OBAMACARE CLIFF
One hundred and thirty years ago, the Dreyfus Affair highlighted antisemitism in elite French society. There was never any real evidence against Alfred Dreyfus, but investigators singled him out because, as a Jew, they did not believe him to be a real Frenchman. The blatancy of the antisemitism not only led Émile Zola to issue his famous “J’accuse” letter to the French president but also inspired young Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl to establish the modern Zionist movement. Unfortunately, antisemitism did not dissipate in France; a half-century later, many French collaborated with the Nazi regime to deport French Jews to their deaths.
Australia is the canary in the coal mine, but the real explosion may soon come in Ireland, Norway, and Turkey, whose governments follow Albanese and Wong’s cynical strategy of throwing Jewish people under the bus to appease militant constituencies.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
