6 days ago
Sky News host Sharri Markson asks if it is safe to be a Jew and still live in Australia after a horrific weekend
The Jewish community can't help but ask: Is it still safe to live here in Australia?
Where and when will the next attack be?
Should we be moving somewhere else to protect our children and our families?
These are the questions we're helplessly pondering, bereft in our darkest hour.
We have to be upfront about the country we're now living in.
Australia has become violent and racist. Our once proudly multicultural, peaceful society has turned ugly, and it's increasingly unsafe for Jewish Australians.
There's been yet another weekend of horror. A Melbourne synagogue set alight, cars torched and an Israeli restaurant stormed, with families terrorised.
We warned this would happen, over and over again.
We begged for the federal government to show leadership.
We even developed a blueprint to help tackle this crisis at our Sky News Antisemitism Summit.
Yet, Albanese did not adopt a single one of the recommendations, perhaps naively believing if he did nothing, if he buried his head in the sand, the problem would go away.
But of course it hasn't, and under his watch our country has irrevocably changed.
This is the face of Australia in 2025: a violent, unsafe nation where racism has been allowed to flourish.
Where a peaceful, philanthropic, caring community has been demonised and become a scapegoat for a foreign war, while out-of-control pro-Palestinian activists are endlessly protected by the law and the leadership.
At one of Australia's oldest synagogues - the East Melbourne Hebrew synagogue - on Friday night, Jews were the targets.
A man rang the synagogue's doorbell around 8pm, twice. Inside, about 20 jews were enjoying Shabbat, the Friday evening meal.
The Age newspaper reports a 13-year-old was in the synagogue office at the time and heard the bell. Through the security monitors, he reportedly saw a man he didn't recognise.
Thankfully he didn't open the door.
The man lit a petrol bomb at the entrance to the synagogue - where it detonated.
On the same night, a Jewish-owned restaurant, Miznon, in Melbourne's popular Hardware Lane, was stormed by about 20 masked protesters chanting 'death to the IDF'.
They terrorised families eating dinner and toppled furniture in disgraceful, unlawful scenes.
This lawless act had its inception a day earlier when pro-Palestinian social media accounts demanded a boycott of this restaurant, sharing the address.
That murderous phrase they chanted - "death to the IDF" - started at the Glastonbury music festival and has spread across the globe.
The fact that crowds at a music festival mindlessly chanted this phrase is difficult to comprehend when 250 similar young people at the Nova music festival in Israel were hunted, gunned down and murdered on October 7.
The bloody Nova massacre was apparently forgotten at Glastonbury. And now forgotten in Australia, too.
The protests, full of hatred, continue in Melbourne and Sydney most weekends, encouraged by angry political rhetoric.
As DOR Foundation chief executive Tahli Blicblau writes in The Australian: 'Every week, protesters march through the streets of Melbourne calling for intifada and revolution, and this is amplified online. Who could be surprised that calls for uprising would lead to actual uprising?'
And Jewish community leader Mark Liebler makes the same point, writing: 'As long as protests accompanied by chants of 'Zionists are terrorists', 'death to the IDF', 'globalise the intifada' and 'from the river to the sea' continue, violence directed at the Jewish community and its institutions will follow.'
Elements of this angry, hateful pro-Palestinian protest movement have beocme dangerous.
It's not a peaceful expression of political speech, as many try to claim. It's cultivating and nurturing hatred against Jews.
It's excusing and justifying cruelty and violence.
You'd think we'd be used to this by now, but we're not. And the sadness of each attack against the Jewish community in Australia never gets easier.
It's been six months since arsonists tried to set alight the Newtown synagogue in Sydney.
A pre-school was completely destroyed in another firebombing, while cars and buildings were similarly torched in Sydney's east.
It's been six months, too, since the Addas Israel synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. I'll never forget the devastating symbolism of walking through the charred remains of hundreds of prayer books. The history of persecution repeating itself in modern Australia.
After that attack, we heard much the same political commentary as we have again now. Politicians utter a repetitive script: "This must be condemned. The full force of the law felt."
The platitudes have become meaningless. Their words unmatched by actions.
The perpetrators who firebomb Jewish institutions intend to kill, harass or harm Jews.
They are motivated by their hatred of Israel. It's a hatred I believe the Albanese government perpetuates with its anti-Israel rhetoric and hostile foreign policy.
The Israeli Minister for the Diaspora and for Combating Antisemitism made this point formally in an official letter addressed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Amichai Chikli didn't mince his words. He wrote: 'This alarming climate is unfolding under your government's watch - and is further legimitzed by recent actions to deny entry to former Israeli minister Ayelet Shaked and pro-Israel advocate Hill Fuld.
'These choices are seen as discriminatory and embolden those who spread hate. This is no longer a matter of rising tensions - it is a test of moral leadership.'
And he warned that silence sends a dangerous message that Jewish safety is negotiable.
It's not. Of course it's not.
This is not an impossible problem that has no solution.
We have helped the Albanese government with a clear strategy to tackle antisemitism.
That was the point of our Sky News Summit in February, attended by some of the brightest brains in the country, including Federal Court Judge Justice Michael Lee, former Prime Minister John Howard, former Chancellor Greg Craven, Holocaust survivors, the Ambassador to Israel Amir Maimon, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Dave Hudson, Former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and many more.
They contributed ideas for much-needed reform.
Through this summit, along with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, we developed 15 recommendations across national security, education, the university sector, migration, citizenship, social media and more.
You can see the full list at this link, but they included the declaration of a National Emergency on antisemitism and establishment of a Joint Counter-Terrorism Taskforce.
The repeal of charity status and funding from religious and charitable institutions if they promote racism or display terrorist symbols.
The Migration Act should be enforced or amended to ensure antisemitic conduct is grounds to reject a new visa, or cancel an existing one.
New social media legislation such as Algorithms Regulation laws, should be introduced to counter foreign interference.
They are 15 sensible areas of reform that ECAJ Alex Ryvchin said would have a meaningful impact in reducing antisemitism.
We did the thoughtful and meaningful work for Albanese. He didn't have to develop a single policy.
Yet, while the Coalition committed to the crucial reform in its entirety, the Albanese government refused to implement any of our recommendations. Not one.
Albanese is categorically not doing all he can. He has refused to action policy areas that would help reduce the level of antisemitism we're experiencing in Australia.
If he truly wants to end this crisis, then he needs to adopt our action points from our Antisemitism Summit.
He needs to take action, not simply mouth pointless platitudes.
As you'll recall, when we held our Antisemitism Summit, then Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus accused us of doing it for ratings.
An absurd notion. No one who is hurting deeply from this antisemitism crisis in Australia could possibly make such a crude suggestion.
And that's the problem with the Albanese government - they believed this was all confected, they didn't genuinely believe drastic action was needed.
Despite the multiple firebombings, the arson attacks, the torched cars and the vandalised offices.
It's enough. It was enough long ago.
