Published: 9 September 2024
Last updated: 10 September 2024
In preparing this submission to the Senate Inquiry I thought it would be helpful if I obtained some first-hand testimonies from university students, academics and professional staff to understand the gravity of the situation.
My office has interviewed more than 65 Jewish students, academics and staff at universities… the situation is very grave and indeed much more serious and alarming than I expected.
Antisemitic behaviour is not only present on many campuses but is an embedded part of the culture. Universities have not taken appropriate action to denounce and suppress it: it has become systemic.
The Jewish students are traumatised and feel isolated and unsafe. They are not participating as they should in university life. They have been told by their university administration to stay home for their own safety.
This normalised antisemitism is incredibly dangerous to our society as it is an attitude and behaviour that eats away at the fabric of the mission of the tertiary sector. To date university leadership is either in denial about how serious and normalized antisemitism has become on their campuses or has not received information as to the seriousness of the situation (bad news does not travel upwards) or has failed to truly understand what constitutes antisemitism and has responded by placating activist forces.
Universities, important institutions responsible for the development and maturation of Australian values in our next generation, appear to have an embedded culture of antisemitism
This contrasts with the growing realization of universities overseas that strong measures must be taken. As US universities open for the new academic year, I expect more US universities will adopt the policies and stances of NYU, Columbia and California.
Comments1
Betsy Cornwewll13 September at 10:57 pm
Australian antisemitism is undoubtedly an evil inheritance from the all pervasive European antisemitism that preoccupied church and state from Roman times onward. At the time of Australia’s settlement as a penal colony ( a nasty effusion of colonial arrogance) the caste system established in Australia, jailers and inmates, replicated most of the European caste division between peasants, serfs, indentured laborers ,and the free, entitled middle classes, aristocrats and sometime voters in quasi democracies.
Antisemitism was so deeply embedded in European social and economic systems it is natural that even the exiles were infected with it. All humans seem to need someone inferior to themselves.
Modern Australians have maintained, as much as possible their exclusive white society, grudgingly admitting only the most carefully vetted and useful others. For those imbibing antisemitism without any corrective, it is no wonder they accept it as natural and right So too, do far to many people around the world. It is still a plague in North America but was losing its virulence until Trump’s bottomless well of disparagement unleashed all the imperfectly buried racism in the New World, which in this instant global news network explosively exhumed all the rotten old fear and hatred.
I can think of only one response to the unformed brains of the young – “surely you are not going to let your parents and grandparents opinions rule your lives?”