Friday, September 12, 2025
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Australia's "special envoy to combat islamophobia" has handed down his long-awaited report, containing more than 50 recommendations, to the government.
The National Response to Islamophobia: A Strategic Framework for Inclusion, Safety and Prosperity is being promoted as an official antidote to rising anti-Muslim hate. It is published by a government office (OSECI), and hosted on a .gov.au site. But many of its claims overstate or misframe the evidence.
In the Foreword, cricketer Usman Khawaja insists that “for far too long Islamophobia has been overlooked … we are now seeing anti-Muslim incidents at record highs.” He also argues that “an antisemitic attack against a person of the Jewish faith is no different from an Islamophobic attack on a person of Islamic faith. Yet, particularly by the media and some politicians, these two crimes get covered very differently, with one far outweighing the other in terms of exposure and outrage” (report, p.3). These are serious charges, but no evidence is given.
The report leans on snapshots of opinion: that “50% of Australians self-identified as being anti-Muslim in a 10-year study published in 2011,” and that in 2023 “only a quarter of Australians hold a positive view about Muslims,” with “more than 1 in 3 Australians (34%) express[ing] negative attitudes towards Muslims” in 2024 (report, p.16). Yet long-term surveys by the Scanlon Institute show anti-Muslim prejudice has actually declined substantially since its peak. The report presents only the bleakest numbers, omitting the broader trajectory of improvement.
On media coverage, Khawaja claims Islamophobia is ignored while antisemitism dominates headlines. But this is not borne out. When incidents spiked after October 7, Australian media reported on both. ABC News covered a surge in “death threats, physical assaults, verbal abuse, road rage, arson” against Jews and Muslims. SBS News reported women having hijabs pulled off and Jewish businesses vandalized. The Guardian documented 221 antisemitic and 133 Islamophobic incidents in just one month. Coverage clearly existed for both communities.
The actual victimization data also cut against the Foreword’s framing. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded 65 physical assaults against Jews, while the Islamophobia Register Australia documented about 28 physical assaults against Muslims in a larger timeframe starting in January 2023. Given that Australia has over 800,000 Muslims but fewer than 100,000 Jews, a Jew is far more likely on a per-capita basis to be physically attacked for who they are. Minimizing that is unconscionable. (General antisemitic incidents also far outnumber total reported anti-Muslim incidents.)
The report also imports contested international narratives. It highlights accusations of “genocide” in Gaza, quoting critics like Raz Segal who called Gaza a "textbook case of genocide" on October 12, 2023 - within a week of October 7. No alternative legal opinions are mentioned, nor any recognition of the debate about whether the term applies. In a domestic report on Australian Islamophobia, this is an extraordinary and politicized inclusion, mentioned repeatedly.
Perhaps most striking: the report never defines Islamophobia. There is no working definition. Without clarity, anything from physical assault to criticism of Islamist politics can be swept under the same label. This vagueness is not an oversight; it is strategic. It allows maximum elasticity in branding criticism as bigotry.
The conflation is made explicit when the report references advocacy materials like APAN’s Anti-Palestinian Racism Report, which treats opposition to Hamas and pro-Israel slogans as racism. By citing this, the envoy’s report blurs political critique with racial prejudice — a dangerous move in a free democracy.
The lack of a definition, or even to call for a definition, makes the Recommendations section problematic. The recommendations raise three broader risks.
First, they call for Islamophobia to be treated with “equivalent urgency to other discriminatory practices, and [given] the same rights, protections, and legal recourse”. Without a working definition, this could stretch to criminalizing legitimate political speech, including criticism of Hamas or Islamist ideology.
Second, the framework demands whole-of-government adoption. The envoy urges National Cabinet to formally place the recommendations on its agenda, and lists nearly every major department — Prime Minister & Cabinet, Home Affairs, Attorney-General’s, Education, Health, DFAT, Social Services, even the Australian Sports Commission.. That scope would effectively embed an undefined, politically elastic category into the machinery of government at all levels.
Third, it proposes an oversight task force chaired by the Secretary of Prime Minister & Cabinet, with senior officials from multiple agencies and the Special Envoy given a permanent seat.. That structure ensures ongoing influence by the envoy’s office without parliamentary scrutiny, and without clear metrics for accountability.
Taken together, the lack of definition, the breadth of the mandate, and the institutional entrenchment make the Recommendations section less a policy framework than a mechanism for enforcing a politicized agenda under official cover.
The exact (false) criticism leveled at the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism is being allowed and even encouraged by the authors of this report that highlight political speech as Islamophobic or adjacent to bigotry.
This is not an NGO pamphlet. It is authored by a government envoy, published by the Office of the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, and sits on an official .gov.au domain. It calls for multiple departments and Parliament itself to adopt its recommendations. Yet its methods — celebrity testimonial, selective statistics, omission of counter-evidence, politicized framings — are closer to propaganda than policy analysis.
A sober policy framework would define its terms, present trends honestly, weigh competing evidence, and avoid importing Middle East narratives into Australian cohesion debates. This report does the opposite. Its authority should not go unquestioned.
(h/t Jill)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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