Friday, July 17, 2026
From Ian:
Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return,' Jewish leader tells 'Post' after emigrating
Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return,' Jewish leader tells 'Post' after emigrating
Australian antisemitism “has passed the point of no return,” former president of the Australian Jewish Association, Dr. David Adler, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Adler recently relocated to Israel, citing the surge in antisemitism in Australia.Nicole Lampert: How Amnesty International lost its way
While the family only arrived on July 9, Adler told the Post that aliyah has been in “preparation for a long, long period of time.”
“We’ve seen a general deterioration in Australia for a long time,” he told the Post. “Australia has essentially outsourced its manufacturing. Its defense capacity is down. National identity is being lost. Education standards are down. There is a crazy socialist activism, left-wing activism. Those things have been building gradually. But no doubt October 7 unleashed a level of antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism that I didn’t think could occur in Australia.”
“On October 8, there were some leaders of the Muslim community and some Muslim groups in Australia celebrating on the streets. On October 9, we had the riots in front of the Opera House.”
What Adler found the most shocking was that the authorities “failed to act” after these incidents.
Australia passed point of no return, 'all downhill'
“There was not a single arrest from the riots at the Opera House, despite a number of laws being broken. And that area, I know from security experts, is covered by high-definition CCTV. However, the authorities chose not to act and instead warned the Jewish community not to go there,” he explained.
Since then, Adler said it’s “been all downhill.” He said he has lost track of the number of threats made against him, including death threats.
This led him to arrive at the viewpoint that the trends in Australia “have passed the point of no return.”
“The tipping point has been reached and passed. And even though there’s a Royal Commission running at the moment, and it’s doing a good job in exposing some of the accounts and evidence of antisemitism, I do not have confidence in efficient action being taken to deal with it.”
Adler told the Post that anti-Jewish violence is predominantly coming from Islamic extremism, but that “Australia has taken nowhere near enough action” to combat this. “It should do things like expel the hate preachers, deport the hate preachers, close down mosques that are teaching extremist and radical views, and in fact has done some things in the opposite.”
“The whole antisemitic, anti-Israel extremism is on a level that no one forecast.”
There was a lot of internal discussion about how to retain and attract progressive donors, many of whom were critics of Israel, Malekar adds. “I clearly recall that sections in Western Europe and the USA saying we were losing ground and membership because we were behind others in progressive circles who were criticising Israel.”Must Durham’s miners be forced to celebrate Palestine?
“Until then, Amnesty had held to its core values of judging things on international and humanitarian laws, but slowly I saw how the line was being blurred as the work became more politicised and standards went down.
“The organisation became more and more led by political ideologies such as theories around colonialism and seeing everything through the lens of the victim vs the oppressor. Younger people were joining from universities who were imbued with these political theories in which Israel is only ever viewed as an oppressor.”
In 2021, Amnesty became a champion of the politically charged Black Lives Matter campaign, a source of further controversy. Tim Gudgion, a former Amnesty member, says he resigned his membership at this point, regarding its involvement as “very, inappropriately, political”.
Then, the following year, an Amnesty report claimed there was apartheid across Israel and the occupied territories. It caused huge anger in Israel.
“Even if you agree the occupied territories are using a form of apartheid, none of us would accept that it is the same in the state of Israel,” says Malekar, who is one of a number of whistleblowers featured in a report by the campaign group, EiGHT, on alleged double standards by human rights organisations in their approach to Jews and Israel. “And we tried to argue that in making these two territories one land, they were actually joining hands with the most Right-wing Israeli politicians who want to annex the occupied territories.”
The head office in London didn’t appreciate the Israeli branch’s pushback, she says. “These are people who are very committed, and it surprises them if someone would dare to question them.”
And what happens when the perceived oppressor becomes the victim, as it did on October 7, 2023?
Malekar recalls an exchange of emails between head office and other department heads as she hid in bomb shelters not knowing how bad the war was going to get. “One of the things I remember from that horrible night was communicating with London as they considered how to phrase their condemnation. They could never just say, ‘this is wrong’. Not even for one minute. There were discussions over how to frame the narrative.”
The Durham Miners’ Gala – ‘the big meeting’, as locals still call it – took place last week. Once, every coalfield had its gala. Now Durham’s is the last great survivor. But survival is not the same as relevance.
In recent years, the question hanging over the ‘big meeting’ has become harder to avoid: what is it for, and who does it now belong to? That question became sharper still after County Durham, long impregnable Labour country, turned into something much closer to a Reform UK stronghold in last year’s local elections.
The gala itself remains organised around a politics that belongs to another century. It is caught between three worlds: the culture of the old industrial working class, the socialist politics of the 20th century and the activist liberalism of the contemporary left. Add to that the visible support for Reform among the families and descendants of Durham colliers, and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The big meeting can no longer pretend that these tensions are merely background noise.
Over the past few years, the Gala has become less a living expression of working-class politics and more a stage for the narrow concerns of the Corbynista activist class. A clip from this year’s event made the point brutally. The ‘Palestine Bloc’ – around 30 (mostly white) activists carrying Palestine flags and wearing the keffiyeh uniform of the modern protester – moved through Durham behind a few dancers in traditional Palestinian dress. They shouted ‘free, free Palestine’. Some in the crowd clapped. Others booed. John Cleese posted a video of it on X, with the observation that it would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch. He’s right.
This wasn’t the first time the gala has embarrassed itself. The flashpoint last year was the invitation to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. It seems that every year the gala is dragged into another controversy because the activist left insists on making it speak the language of identity politics and middle-class luxury beliefs. As a result, the working class has been turned into a costume, a backdrop, a set of banners and brass bands to lend moral weight to causes that often have little to do with the people whose history is being borrowed.
