Published: 10 December 2024
Last updated: 10 December 2024
Over the past few days, the Australian Jewish community has received two powerful messages. The first is from the terrorists: we hate you and we want to do you harm.
The second is from the Australian government, police, and many ordinary fellow citizens: we are appalled by racist violence and want you to live among us in peace and freedom.
It is essential that in the grief and pain of hearing the first message we do not close our ears to the second.
Police now say the firebomb which destroyed the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne on Friday morning was very probably a terrorist attack. “By default, it’s an attack on the Jewish people,” Victoria Police commissioner Shane Patton said at a media conference.
Comments3
Fiona16 December at 09:37 pm
Thanks for this rational and measured article.
We need to call out rising antisemitism and insist that our governments take action. Yes we say this with the memory of the horrors of our shared past. However we must not distort the Holocaust. We do not have a totalitarian government in place with mob violence. We are not disenfranchised. I fear that the Holocaust is being used as a weapon for political agendas.
rosie hersch11 December at 03:39 am
I dispute your quote
“In the face of shock, distress and fear, it is natural to look for fault and to find resonances from familiar battles, but we must temper that instinct with a sense of proportion. But any suggestion that this synagogue attack is the harbinger of another Holocaust remains ludicrous: ahistorical, insensitive and alarmist.”
Sorry but may I remind you dear writer of this article that your words were exactly what Jews in Berlin, Poland and in other European cities were all saying in the early thirties in an effort of denial and convincing themselves that violence against jews would quieten down, and nothing bad will happen. Well look how that ended!! Yes, we have to keep making as much noise as we can before this antisemitism does escalate to something we cannot control.
Pauline Shilkin10 December at 08:29 pm
Thank you so much for this rational, thoughtful and important editorial. To allow ourselves to be used as a tool for political wedging is indeed a dangerous thing.