Michael E. Miller
Washington Post, Feb. 19, 2025
“Antisemitism festered in Australia before the tragic events in the Middle East, but the drawn-out conflict gave it oxygen — and gave some antisemites an excuse.”
Australia’s social cohesion is “eroding” amid a rise in antisemitic incidents, intolerance, political violence, and misinformation, the country’s intelligence chief said Wednesday.
The nation also faces “heightened levels of espionage and foreign interference” as it acquires nuclear-propelled submarines from the United States and United Kingdom under the AUKUS security pact, Mike Burgess, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, said in his annual threat assessment speech.
“Many of the foundations that have underpinned Australia’s security, prosperity and democracy are being tested,” Burgess said in Canberra. “Australia is facing multifaceted, merging, intersecting, concurrent and cascading threats. Major geopolitical, economic, social and security challenges of the 1930s, ’70s and ’90s have converged.”
Burgess noted that social cohesion is similarly fraying across the Western world. But his speech, which he said included declassified information about specific threats and plots, was nonetheless a sobering appraisal for a nation that has long prided itself on a sense of togetherness and shared values.
The address comes amid a surge in incidents — some violent — that have targeted Jewish Australians. Synagogues have been threatened, vandalized and, in one case, firebombed. Jewish neighborhoods in Sydney have been repeatedly targeted with antisemitic graffiti and burning cars.
Two Australian nurses were suspended last week after a video appeared to show them threatening to kill Israeli patients and boasting about refusing to treat them.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the video “sickening and shameful,” and authorities have said they are investigating.
Muslim groups have called the reaction “selective outrage” because there has also been an increase in Islamophobic incidents. The Islamophobia Register Australia has recorded a 510 percent increase in reports of Islamophobic incidents since the Israel-Gaza war began, with two women reporting being attacked on the same day this month at a shopping center in Melbourne.…Source