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So, the royal commission that Anthony Albanese had to be forced to have has finally kicked off. The opening statements by Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell were at least faint hope that this won’t be the whitewash Albanese and his slimy pals in the anti-Israel lobby hope it will be.
In words which will be a comfort to the country’s Jewish community, Commissioner Bell said she would ensure that the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will prioritise the focus on antisemitism throughout despite acknowledging that other religions also experience prejudice.
She said antisemitism would be a ‘starting point’ for her inquiry given the massacre of Jewish Australians at Bondi occurred ‘simply because they were Jewish’.
Bell also hinted that she won’t be distracted by the Labor left’s attempts to make the commission’s terms of reference so broad as to be simply meaningless.
The commissioner promised a practical approach to the vast terms of reference, conceding that a definitive probe into social cohesion was a task which would take years, rather than the commission’s deadline of December 14, the anniversary of the Bondi attack.
This is hopefully a blow to the left, who have tried to hitch the commission to every imaginable grievance politics cause they can think of, from so-called ‘Islamophobia’, to Aborigines and trannies. This push by the left is frankly disgusting, designed as it too clearly is to minimise anti-Semitism. No doubt due to their own shameful complicity in the febrile atmosphere of hate that culminated in Bondi.
The short opening of the royal commission was largely procedural and did not hear evidence, with Senior Counsel Assisting Richard Lancaster foreshadowing that the hearings would seek to examine antisemitic conduct in Australia, the drivers of antisemitism, how law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been tackling the problem and what can be improved.
As Commissioner Bell’s opening comments indicated, she has a daunting but essential task ahead if she is to properly distill, make sense of and propose remedies to the scourge of anti-semitism and the related fracturing of social cohesion since the October 7 2023 massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists.
Not least the shameless politicking of the left and the Muslim lobby.
Commissioner Bell’s promise to keep antisemitism as a core focus is to be welcomed yet she is certain to be challenged by Palestinian activists who argue that Islamophobia is somehow a similar sized issue in this country. Tell that to the families of the Bondi victims, or to those Jews who once prayed at the burnt-out Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne or to those whose schools were defaced by hate speech and who were taunted as they tried to walk to their classes on university campuses.
But this is always the way with glass-jawed Muslims. No matter how horrific the enormities perpetrated by Muslims, the Muslim community always has to try and make it about them. We saw that after the Pulse Nightclub massacre in 2016. Despite the attack clearly being an act of violent Islamic homophobia, the narrative peddled by the likes of the New York Times was that Brooklyn’s Muslims were afraid that a ‘backlash’ would just ruin their upcoming Ramadan holidays.
“Muslims fear backlash from tomorrow’s Islamic terrorist attack,” as Mark Steyn so aptly put it.
The other group that will be desperate to derail the commission are our shameful universities and arts sector.
The commission’s hearings should also give Australians a better insight into what went wrong on university campuses over the past two years, when pro-Palestinian protests too often morphed into antisemitic hate while those who ran the nation’s tertiary institutions sat paralysed with indecision about how to respond.
The hearings should also shed some light on how antisemitism was ignored by many in Australia’s academic community under the guise of academic freedom, as if the conferring of these freedoms were suddenly a licence to spew hate towards one minority.
The arts and literary community suffers from a similar blind spot of conflating artistic freedom with a licence to embrace antisemitism as if one justifies the other.
We know exactly what went wrong on university campuses: academics are riddled with anti-Semitism. This is no surprise: Germany’s universities were early and enthusiastic adopters of Nazism, driving out Jewish academics and students in an almost identical play of what has irredeemably stained Australia’s universities.
It will also be a challenge for Commissioner Bell to explore the rise of antisemitism without getting bogged down in the politics of the Middle East. And yet, the topic can hardly be avoided. The war in Gaza was the fundamental driver of antisemitism and was wielded as the justification by activist groups for the antisemitic chants which echoed across the CBDs of Melbourne, Sydney and other cities every weekend for more than two years. These weekly protests arguably did more to normalise antisemitism than any other single event.
As writer Graham Linehan stated recently on X, the most upsetting thing about the rise in anti-Semitism was “that everyone saw October 7th and immediately supported the rapist, murdering scum who carried it out”.
