Greens say they condemn antisemitism – but not with any conviction  

Statements from Adam Bandt and other Greens on Israel and antisemitism have avoided spelling out the detail that conveys a sincerity behind their words.

“What’s the problem with being ‘not racist’? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism’. But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ’racist’ isn’t ‘not racist’. It is ‘antiracist’.” ― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist.

Kendi is a best-selling author and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University who rose to prominence after the George Floyd murder in 2020.

Now, reread Kendi’s quote above, substituting the word “antisemitic” wherever Kendi has written “racist”. Doing so illuminates much of what has been deemed antisemitic from the post-October 7 left and why forthcoming Liberal Senator Dave Sharma recently accused the Greens of “turning a blind eye to antisemitism”.

When Greens senator Mehreen Faruqui stands beside a poster proclaiming, “clean the world”, with a picture of the Israeli flag going into a trash bin, a sentiment updating a trope that long predates the Holocaust, it is not enough to delete the image with the claim that she is not antisemitic.

To be anti-antisemitic, to borrow Kendi’s phrasing, might have led her to explain why the poster, for many, implies the extermination of millions of Jews and that Faruqui utterly opposes that eventuality. Without that explanation, she steps onto the slippery slope that leads from “anti-antisemitic”, to “not antisemitic”, to actually “antisemitic”.