How not to fight antisemitism
Something strange and disturbing is afoot. It has been nearly three months since the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. Shane Patton, Victoria’s police chief (at the time of writing), said the matter was “the number one counter-terrorism investigation”. But the perpetrators are still unknown and things have only grown murkier since.
In late January, the Australian Federal Police revealed that some unknown force seemed to be using cryptocurrency to hire low-level criminals to vandalise, and possibly bomb, Jewish targets around Australia. How many of these antisemitic acts—from graffiti to arson—were carried out by this purported network of crypto-hired goons?
Who would run this operation? What’s in it for them? Religiously motivated terror networks don’t usually hire local meth-heads and junior bikies to write racist slogans on the doors of parked cars.
The combination of violence, conspiracy and juvenile sloganeering seems compatible with the interests of Australia’s neo-Nazis—but they also take pride in doing their own dirty work, showing up in person to terrorise their victims. For ideologically motivated ultra-Islamists and fascists, committing the act yourself is usually the whole point.
The AFP suggested that the funders are offshore, which leads us into the mire of espionage and organised crime. It may be some time before we know who ordered these attacks and what they hoped to gain from them.
But we do know some things with certainty: there are antisemitic fascist groups operating in Australia that want to use violence to gain notoriety and terrorise the minority groups they hate.
The National Socialist Network has gained the most notoriety. An insight into the group’s inner life is available from court documents after one of its Adelaide members, Cameron Brodie-Hall, was charged with possessing extremist literature. He lived in a shared house with other NSN members; they were raided by the police in 2021. On a bookcase draped with a Nazi flag, police found an edition of David Myatt’s Practical Guide to the Strategy and Tactics of Revolution, which recommends that neo-Nazis “target and kill several soft targets” because “successful assassination will get the organization known, respected and feared”.
The NSN’s mandatory reading list, discovered and disclosed in the trial, includes Mein Kampf, the Hitler Youth pamphlet Faith and Action and a typically moronic contemporary neo-Nazi pamphlet, “A Squire’s Trial”, which, amid its antisemitic propaganda, quotes Mussolini’s dictum on the intrinsic value of violence: “War is to man what motherhood is to woman”. Text messages revealed NSN members praising the neo-Nazi mass murderers Brenton Tarrant and Anders Behring Breivik.
In the end, Brodie-Hall was acquitted because prosecutors could not prove which of the housemates truly “possessed” Myatt’s terrorist manifesto—a rare legal advantage to share-house living. The NSN has continued to provoke and build; Brodie-Hall’s Adelaide branch staged multiple masked rallies in January.
We know, too, that antisemitic ideology is finding a recruiting ground in the radicalised, taboo-busting, Trumpified right-wing internet. Holocaust denial, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and calls for genocide are now rampant on X, Facebook and Instagram. Elon Musk has become an open and notorious promoter of quasi-fascist political currents, particularly through his favoured method of re-tweeting Nazi-adjacent accounts when they post anti-migrant propaganda.
RFK Jr, Trump’s new health chief, has suggested that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and Chinese people. Far-right politics has an inbuilt tendency towards antisemitism, or something like it, because it is the natural conclusion of extreme nationalism: the search for a national scapegoat. This tendency is remarkably consistent even when official right-wing politics is duty-bound to support the state of Israel and posture as resolutely opposed to antisemitism.
How stupid, then—how irresponsible and shameful—are those right-wing pro-Israel figures and organisations who have sought to minimise right-wing antisemitism while trying to slander peaceful, anti-racist Palestine solidarity activists as the real threat to Jewish safety?
The Executive Council of Australasian Jewry complacently asserted in 2023 that “right-wing antisemitism is overt, but marginalised; left-wing antisemitism is insidious, but mainstreamed”. By left-wing antisemitism, of course, it meant Palestine solidarity activism: ECAJ’s Peter Wertheim said the Greens were “like a lynch mob at a pogrom” when they said Israel was an apartheid state. Worse, then, than the real lynch mobs: fascist gangs that genuinely want to kill Jews, and which are organising and studying in preparation to do so.
Why, when there are genuine antisemitic attacks taking place, would anyone want to fabricate more antisemitism? Yet this is precisely what the pro-Israel activists in the Australian media have done. The Daily Telegraph’s failed attempt to goad Arab cafe owners into a racial fight is only the most overt example. The Tele’s “undercover Jew” operation makes its political priorities undeniable: the more antisemitism the better, if it helps smear Palestine supporters.
The same is true of the Israeli influencer Max Zeifer, who spends his time trying to provoke supporters of the Palestinians into saying stupid things. You can see his highly edited output on his reprehensible TikTok channel, where he asks questions like, “Why are the terrorists hiding behind kids?” to unimpressed Bangladeshi teenagers. He scored the scoop of his career when he managed to get two Bankstown nurses to claim that they’d rather kill Israeli patients than treat them.
The media has treated the incident as if two antisemitic serial killers have been unmasked. Maybe. Or maybe these nurses detected they were interacting with an internet troll and adopted the ultra-aggressive posturing that characterises online discourse—facts and consequences be damned. Zeifer’s own propaganda justifying the very real bombing of Palestinian children has drawn rather less attention than the unlikely claims of these two nurses.
Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians does create a certain risk of an antisemitic reaction. In the first instance, Israel’s rulers and advocates are to blame: they, as the occupying imperial power, fundamentally control the conflict’s dynamic, and so often seek to present their genocide as a clash of civilisations, in which only race hatred could underpin opposition to Israel. But it is not only them. There are religious-sectarian forces that adopt the Palestinian cause and frame it in that lens. They are marginal, but they do exist.
The most effective antidote to this kind of sectarianism is a large-scale, internationalist, anti-racist solidarity movement—just like the movement in support of Palestine. When movements like that are strong, anti-racism becomes the daily reality of its participants. This has been the case over more than a year of intense pro-Palestine activism. At one after another of the huge weekly street marches that have taken place since the Gaza war began, Jewish speakers have taken the stage to situate their solidarity with Palestine in the context of a more broadly anti-racist commitment.
Their participation has been little reported in the mainstream press, which often presented the pro-Palestine marches as inherently antisemitic. But records of the speeches exist, including that by Raphael Duffy, printed in an earlier edition of Red Flag: “If you want to end the inhumanity that caused the Holocaust, we have to demand the end of the siege on Gaza”, he said. Pro-Jewish arguments, slogans and placards are common at pro-Palestine rallies—often recognising the protester’s duty to fight on in the memory of those killed by the Nazis. These are the very protests that pro-Israel institutions have been trying to limit and ban.
It’s the principle of global solidarity that has confronted and challenged antisemitism throughout history. The same principle challenges Israel’s actions today. With an increasingly rabid far-right movement accumulating power throughout the world, and so many dark and unknown forces trying to sow confusion and hatred, the need to speak, organise and act in accordance with that principle has to be defended.
