Andrew L. Urban
Senior Jewish community leader, businessman and philanthropist Steve Lowy told the Royal Commission into antisemitism that of the thousands of online attacks against his family extended to his wife, a board member at Sydney Jewish school Moriah College, which left-wing activist Clementine Ford described to her 238,000 Instagram followers (fellow travellers) as “a cult which takes pride in genocide”. Lowy calls for action.
Ford’s message massages stupidity and lies into a ball of hate, and she is not alone. Lowy also told the Commission how his family received 1,500 antisemitic threats in just one month. In the 12 months to February, the total exceeded 15,000. (Ford’s foolish followers no doubt approve …)
As Lowy showed, the antisemitic bigotry virus infects all walks of life, from rabble like Ford to the elite professional class. He revealed that he nearly walked away from his charitable work at the Victor Chang Foundation over St Vincent’s Hospital cardiologist Peter Macdonald’s antisemitic claims that Mossad was behind attacks on Australian Jews.
“These were not the musings of a fringe figure,” Lowy said in his submission. “Professor Macdonald is a world-renowned cardiologist/researcher and a person of the highest professional standing and public prominence, and it is precisely that standing that makes such statements so damaging.
“I served for 19 years as a director of Victor Chang, eight years as its chair. I am a life governor and patron today. This type of behaviour by one of its senior faculty made me seriously question my future involvement with Victor Chang.”
Lowy told The Australian he felt compelled to “stand up” and contribute to the royal commission, even if it carried further risks to him and his family. “We’re now in a royal commission that has the opportunity to be the catalyst for major positive change in our country, and I felt it important to be a part of that,” he said.
Wishing to contribute positively, he also offered a list of recommendations as a call to action:
- A new policing capability to be set up in every state and territory “for the protection of Jewish Australians and Jewish communal life”, staffed by permanently assigned officers;
- New intelligence cells within state, territory and federal police commands to deal with antisemitic threats, with formal information sharing links with the Australian Federal Police and ASIO;
- New protective units inside each of the nation’s police forces “providing a permanent visible presence at Jewish schools, synagogues, community centres, sporting and cultural facilities, and major communal events”;
- Specialist training for police on Jewish community life, the history of antisemitism and current threats;
- Funding to cover the costs of Jewish community security, which is estimated to cost about $100m a year and has largely been borne by the community itself;
- A program of national service – civil or military – to create “the conditions in which young people from different backgrounds encounter one another as fellow citizens”;
- A new national curriculum on antisemitism examining its history and contemporary manifestations;
- A national framework for businesses and public institutions to combat antisemitism; and
- An enforceable requirement that social media companies remove antisemitic content.
He also called for the harm of antisemitism to be explicitly recognised in the royal commission’s findings, acknowledging the damage “across years, across generations, across the multiple dimensions of community life”.
The proposals come just days after ASIO director-general Mike Burgess warned that an Iran-aligned group waging terror in Europe could co-ordinate assassinations, arson and vandalism in Australia.
“Australia should look to Singapore, where national service aims to build defence capacity while constructing a national identity,” Lowy said; “it would reinforce in young people a sense of belonging and national responsibility. Diverse societies do not become cohesive by accident. They become cohesive through shared experience and mutual obligation.”
As we have noted before, society can’t stop antisemitism by law or by force; it is a psychological virus. But we can control its physical manifestations by law and by force.