Antisemitism in Australia

Antisemitism is not something one normally associates with Australia and antisemitic public utterances are very rare in Australia.  Though "Anti-Zionism" does pop up among Leftists  occasionally.

I am myself rather philosemitic.  I even donate at times to Israeli charities.  For the avoidance of doubt, however, I hasten to add that NONE of my best friends are Jews (!)

So it has always surprised me how often I encounter anti-Jewish utterances among people I meet here. Just about any mention of Jews that I hear is negative to some degree.  I even hear it from otherwise kindly people and I even recently heard one person say that they would like to kill all Jews. My usual response to such utterances is to listen but keep my mouth shut.  There are some ideas that it is pointless to argue with.

And I have been noting such utterances for a long time.  In 1973 I had published (in a Jewish journal) a summary of the different antisemitic utterances I had heard at that stage.

So this note is essentially an update.  Nothing has changed:  For one reason or another, antisemitism is actually still quite common in Australia.  It is mostly low-level but not entirely so.

So why is it so?  At some risk of being misunderstood, I did at one stage put together an article which attempted to trace the origin of one type of antisemitism but in the present era of greatly inflamed political correctness I suppose I take some risk of great opprobium in referring to it