Envoy Calls for Specific Antisemitism Offences, Rather Than Laws That Protect All
“Condemnation is great and important but not sufficient. We need to see perpetrators of antisemitic incidents arrested, prosecuted and then penalties that fit the crime imposed,” said Australia’s antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal this week.
“And the prime minister said the penalties should fit the crime and I agree with him,” she continued, “but we need serious penalties imposed, as these are very serious offences.”
Indeed, after having proposed last month that all protests be confined to areas outside of cities, Segal now appears to be spruiking the idea of having laws specifically combatting antisemitism, or prejudice towards Jewish people, at a moment when, if anything, global events appear to portray a desperate need to protect Palestinian people and in turn, Muslims, from grievous bodily harm.
There has been a series of vandalism attacks upon synagogues of late, as well as suburban buildings and cars in the greater Sydney region. While some of these incidents have appeared to have involved antisemitism, a fair number have specifically been anti-Israel in sentiment. However, there has been a series of attacks targeting Muslims that have gone unchecked, even when they target people.
In the current political climate, Segal’s proposal is akin to a hypothetical scenario involving One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson suggesting that First Nations protests be outlawed as they make whites feel unsafe and then proposing heightened penalties apply to the vandalising of colonial statutes.
On Tuesday, Segal further told the press that as the nation’s judiciary is failing Jewish Australians, as it isn’t punishing antisemitic offenders hard enough, she’s now calling for the convening of national cabinet, which isn’t in her mandate, as she would like it to deliberate upon “the systemic, organised, deliberate and cultural nature” of supposedly repeated antisemitic incidents.
Prime minister Anthony Albanese appointed Segal to the newly created position of antisemitism envoy on 9 July, in order to propagate ‘social cohesion’ in the community, yet all she has done is drive further division.
Proposals for biased social cohesion laws
Segal is not the only public figure calling for specific laws targeting antisemitic attacks, including incidents that involve anti-Israel messaging, which is political in nature, so that offenders can be served harsher penalties than current vandalism or hate crime laws provide, at a time when Islamophobic incidents are too on the rise, but are being given distinctly less attention.
Ahead of Segal’s call for the prime minister and all state premiers and territory chief ministers to meet to discuss making penalties for repeated incidents of antisemitic vandalism, Liberal MP Julian Leeser told the ABC on Monday that he’d already had a word to Albanese and called on the nation’s top minister to convene an emergency meeting on antisemitic vandalism.
Lesser explained that there has been a recent spike in antisemitic incidents over past weeks. He called for mandatory sentences to apply to people who vandalise synagogues. Lesser then added that it’s “all very well for political leaders to condemn these acts but people need to know that “if you graffiti a synagogue or a Jewish communal property, you will go to gaol”.
Segal, who has perhaps gotten the wrong idea about the reach of the antisemitic envoy position, further outlined that the states need to come together to look at their different criminal offences and penalties because “at the moment it’s a mass of different provisions and we need to try and simplify and clarify.”
So, the antisemitism envoy, along with certain federal politicians, appear to be suggesting uniform national laws against antisemitism, rather than all members of the community being protected against prejudicial attacks over their specific and various attributes, whether that be race or religion, which would appear to be more in line with Albanese’s social cohesion mantra, than specifically raising one attribute above all others.
A dangerous conflation
On Thursday night, there was an antisemitic vandalism incident involving two cars being torched and one spraypainted on Gadigal land in the Sydney eastern suburb of Dover Heights.
The reason this can be labelled antisemitic is that there was messaging about Jews, whereas other incidents being termed as “antisemitic” have involved criticising Israel, which is not a pronouncement of anti-Jewish sentiment, but rather an act motivated by Israeli politics.
The scenario of a colonial statute being vandalised with the spraypainted messaging “Fuck Australia” would not lead the authorities to consider this an anti-Christian attack, even though in multicultural Australia, Christianity continues to be the major religion, and in parliaments across the nation, the Lord’s Prayer still prevails.
In comparing this hypothetical scenario with the anti-Israel statement, a clearer definition of a “Fuck Australia” message scrawled across the base of a Captain Cook statute would be to consider it condemnation of the Australian state’s dispossession and genocidal project against this continent’s First Peoples.
The AFP explains that its investigating over 100 reports of antisemitic incidents at present. The most serious case of antisemitism was the burning down of the Adass Israel Synagogue of Melbourne.
Attacks on places of worship are not on, whether that be the burning down a synagogue, a mosque or a church, and there are laws in place at the moment that criminalise and allow for the prosecution of such acts of violence.
So, there doesn’t appear to be a distinct need for a law relating specifically to synagogues.
There has also been a series of “antisemitic” vandalism incidents in Greater Sydney starting in November. The first incidents involved anti-Israel messaging on buildings and the burning of cars. Over the last weeks, the spraying painting of buildings shifted to the targeting synagogues with clear anti-Jewish messaging and the burning of more cars. For this we apparently need a national cabinet.
Meanwhile, the Islamophobia Register Australia announced last month that since October 2023, it’s received a 530 percent spike in Islamophobic incidents being reported to it. Although, these incidents have not been afforded the same media and political attention as antisemitic incidents.
A homemade bomb was left on the bonnet of a ute in the carport of its owner’s Botany house in January 2024, with a message demanding a Palestinian flag in front of the premises be removed or else it implied the assailant would be back, and the next attack would be worse. NSW police appeared not to take this matter seriously and treated it as a nonterror incident.
This first incident was an anti-Palestinian attack and the target was a white Australian man but the lack of policing attention and subsequent light sentencing of the assailant was what the terrorising threat garnered.
A white Australian woman attempted to rundown Shaykh Wesam Charkawi on 18 December, as he was crossing the road on his way to Granville Boys High, where the imam works as a student counsellor, and whilst this incident did threaten injury to an individual, apparently due to their religion no media outcry was heard.
The woman driving the car went on to perpetrate another anti-Muslim assault in Bankstown Kmart on 20 December, which saw her unleash a dramatic tirade of abuse against an Egyptian mother, all because she was wearing a shirt displaying pro-Palestinian messaging, as those living in the Gaza Strip were and continue to be the victims of a full-scale genocide perpetrated by Israel.
All three incidents resulted in feet-dragging from NSW police and silence from major party politicians.
The genocide in Gaza has provoked both the antisemitic, Islamophobic and the anti-Israel attacks in the community.
The Free Palestine movement that has emerged over the last 15 months of the genocide includes many Jewish people. The movement has made a point of reserving its criticisms for Israel and its actions, and it has not stooped to invoking antisemitic tropes in its demonstrations.
Despite this, keen supporters of Israel have been conflating criticism of it with anti-Jewish prejudice, which means criticism of Israel, a Jewish state, is hard to make even as it is perpetrating a mass slaughter, due to the fear of being labelled antisemitic. This is the whole point of propagating this dangerous conflation: it blocks criticism of Israeli domestic and foreign policy.
Segal works within the boundaries of this conflation. So, when she’s decrying both “antisemitic” attacks and those that are political in nature, as the one form of prejudice, she is deflecting criticism of the Israeli state as it perpetrates the most callous and calculated genocide since the Holocaust of World War II.
And for some reason the leader of the country, Anthony Albanese, has empowered Segal to sow social division in this manner.