An act of Terror. That’s what it’s officially being called now. It took Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese four days to visit the charred remains of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne after extremist hate torched it in the early morning of December 6. But the call has been made.

It’s the second declared terror attack in Australia this year. The first occurring in April in the Sydney suburb of Wakeley with the stabbing of a priest at Christ The Good Shepherd Church by a teen espousing Islamist views.

Australia was once a lucky country and an integrated multicultural success.

That changed roughly a decade ago, ironically under a series of conservative Liberal Party governments reluctantly acquiescing to the influence of Angela Merkel’s laissez-faire over jihadist immigration, legal and illegal.

Australia is now a nation that has since let that jihadism morph into a far-left anti-Zionist ideology that Albanese’s Australian Labor Party needs to court, which was always its electoral aim.

Australia is also now a nation that has let a far-right neo-Nazism incubate seeing immigration dilute its national pride.

Australia is a nation with two generations under the influence of social media knowing nothing about the meaning of fair dinkum and mateship.

And a nation whose politicians not merely lack the desire to lead, but dumbed down by the media forget that Australians are willing to think if only spoken to without spin.

So, a synagogue has burned. A significant one at that. Its prayer and study halls are destroyed. Charred holy books line the walls and soak on the floor, and hand-written Torah scrolls of the Old Testament are scorched.

I’ve only ever witnessed such a sight at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC where Torahs from Austria and Germany lay in their desecrated forms, abused as they were in the fires of 1938’s Kristallnacht—Night of Broken Glass.

They were there to serve as history’s lessons.

Again, the left will call it an act of anti-Zionism, using “Zionist” as a ruse to avoid saying “Jews”.

The right will call it ethnic purification in a nod to protecting the “White” race.

In the meantime, Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, will not move from her internationally discredited ideology—that Israel is: genocidal, apartheid, and anti-Palestine. When it is none of these at all.

That was the Labor party platform she rammed down the throat of its pre-election national conference—and as a politician it is the only policy position that defines her.

But it is antisemitism. It took Labor one year and two months to unleash it, to Australia’s disgrace.

On December 9 the announcement came of a Federal Police taskforce to investigate this latest episode as a terror crime.

It’s called “Avalite”, which, strangely, is an obscure mineral, a non-awe inspiring name indeed. It’s also reminiscent of Aussie slang as in, “’Ava light, mate?”, said when one’s looking to light up a smoke. Surely that’s just ironic.

Well, what now from here? Here’s a suggested policy program that will not likely see light of day due to political weakness.

Australia’s pro-terror, pro-Palestine marches have run their course. They’re not free speech. They have no geopolitical meaning. They have no legitimacy. They serve only to incite hate. They are not political protest. They must be stopped.

We empower and resource state and territory police to reclaim the streets without favour. That means suppressing any intra-service antisemitism that is currently the UK’s shame.

We reclaim pluralism in our school curricula. Zero tolerance for the teaching of ideology in our high schools. We restore the right to attend and learn at university without fear. We weed out academia’s agenda of hate.

We apply our current anti-discrimination laws and obligations to the provision of all goods and all services. Calls for boycotts are an anti-competition offence.

And we affirm the right of all to worship without fear as enshrined in our national values: Protection of the vulnerable, multicultural community pride, and equality enshrined by our secular laws.

How did this ever happen to Australia?

We know how.

People played games with words and words kill.

© 2024 Adam Parker.

Picture credit: Olkusz, Poland, 1940. A Jewish man is forced to stand in his synagogue worship garb, prayer shawl torn and head phylactery box broken by laughing German soldiers. Fellow Jews lay dead at his bare feet. From © 2002, Shema Yisrael Testimonies of Devotion, Courage and Self Sacrifice 1939-1945. Michigan, Targum Press. Author’s collection.