I was targeted, my family was targeted in our homes. Quite early one morning, I think it was about five in the morning, my wife says to me, our former homeless, our old house got hit. You know, she's showing me this footage, basically showing this kind of inferno right in front of our old house. And then a car in the driveway of the adjoining property.
They dauged it with, as you said, fuck the Jews on one side, fuck Israel, which I thought was very poetic because it's like two sides of the same coin and two sides of the same card. This is the reality of life in Australia right now. Hello, welcome back to The Brendan O'Neill Show with me, Brendan O'Neill, and my special guest this week, Alex Rivchin. Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Great to chat to you again, Brendan.
So good to have you on. As you know, I've been an admirer of your campaigning for a long time. And some listeners will know that you are co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which means that you spend your time... advocating on behalf of Australia's 120,000 Jews. And that means that over the past 16 or 17 months, you've found yourself at the front line of a really sometimes quite ugly battle because Australia, like other Western countries,
has found itself in the grip of a kind of Israelophobia and outright anti-Semitism since the events of 7th of October 2023. So to kick us off, I guess I just want to ask you about how... bad things have got in Australia? What is it like to be a Jew in Australia right now? Well, the very first thing I have to say, Brendan, is that the admiration is very mutual. I've been reading this stuff for as long as I can remember.
And you've truly made a profound contribution to this space in Australia as well. You've got a great audience and following here. So I truly thank you for everything you've done. In terms of the situation in Australia and what it's like to be a Jew. There's kind of two realities. One is the everyday...
you know, normality of being a Jew. And if you were to come visit us in Sydney, you'd see that Jewish life continues as normal. Synagogue attendance has never been greater. Participation in communal organisations has never been higher.
When at last Hanukkah we had, you know, public lightings of the menorahs we do each year, there were record attendances. So these sorts of things which would... kind of test the you know take the pulse of the jewish community show we're in good health and good spirits but there's a second reality to it and i think all the good stuff has come
as a reaction to the bad. It's almost an act of defiance. We've needed the anti-Semitism to make people appreciate their Jewishness and also seek the company of other Jews. And I think there's something beautiful in that, but also something... you know, quite sad in the fact that we do feel
like we're kind of estranged from wider society and we do feel more comfortable, more safe, if you will, in the company and presence of other Jews, because we've seen not only the large-scale attacks that have been reported globally, but... a lot of kind of silent boycotts of Jews, Jews being pushed out of certain industries, particularly the creative industries. You know, when you see your favourite restaurant post on the social media really ugly things about Israel.
you know, you feel you don't want to go there. And so the Jewish community is feeling that way. But there's a degree of terror running through the community as well because we've seen things in this country over the last 16 months. that we never thought we'd see. You know, when you have fire bombings as the fact of life, like race related fire bombings.
are now a normal thing in Australia. No one is shocked by them. It's just a question of what the next target is going to be. You know, when you see a synagogue... virtually burned to the ground and a child kiss and a firebomb in people's homes and you know you wake up and you see cars dogged with Fuck Israel and fuck the Jews and these sorts of things. And, you know, it's a horrible thing to have to encounter and people are concerned about the safety of their children.
People are having conversations about their future in this country. So there's a kind of duality to being Jewish. You know, the resurgence of pride is manifesting people getting tattoos of stars of David, which isn't really Jewish custom, but people are... determined to show that they won't be cowed by what's happening. But at the same time, I think inside people are feeling quite fearful and they're feeling let down by society. That's a really useful outline of both the
seriousness of the anti-Semitism problem in Australia right now, but also the defiance with which many Jews are greeting it and treating it. And I think that's something I want to ask you about. And I want to dig down into some of the incidents that you mentioned there, which have made global waves. I mean, the attacks on synagogues, the attacks on the daycare center.
the incident outside the sydney opera house on the 9th of october 2023 when people chanted fuck the jews and possibly even gas the jews i want to talk to you about that stuff but i i first want to just ask you if i'm being naive because
I always had this impression, it's a known fact that Europe has a long historical problem with antisemitism going back centuries and centuries, and that history is very well known. There's always been a... undertone of anti-Semitism in the United States in various different ways different to the European experience but it has been there I guess I imagine that in a country like Australia which is you know the lucky country a country in which
people kind of muck along pretty well most of the time. I thought that maybe antisemitism and the problems we've seen over the past 16, 17 months in particular, that it wouldn't impact there as much as it does in other parts of the world. historically, what has it been like for Jews in Australia? Have there been periods like this before, or is this something new?
This is very much new. And as you've laid out there, the Jewish experience in Australia has always been fairly tranquil and uneventful. I mean, we started in this country, I think we're... probably the only community anywhere in the world that can pinpoint the day that our existence began in a particular country. We were on the first fleet that came from the mother country.
some say eight, some say 14 Jewish convicts that came from predominantly London's East End. And from that time, Jews have settled in Australia. you had those initial waves of convicts and then free settlers from England and from the Empire. Then post-war you had Holocaust survivors coming and Australia has per capita the highest number of Holocaust survivors. other than in Israel. You had in the 70s and 80s and early 90s another wave of Jewish vibration.
during which time my family came out fleeing the Soviet Union. You had a lot of South African Jews coming. So we very much contributed to the kind of melting pot that is Australia and Australian multiculturalism. And this is a country where... There have never been anti-Semitic laws. This is a country where some of the most revered figures in Australia and Australian culture...
Our greatest ever soldier is regarded as Sir John Monash, who was a Jew and founded the Zionist Federation in this country. The first Australian-born Governor General was Sir Isaac Isaacs, a Jew. all the way through when you look at the arts and business and the professions and academia and the sciences there's so much Jewish contribution and the extent of anti-semitism would be
the sort of stuff that I encountered growing up, which is schoolyard nonsense, which people go out of. But in terms of, like, organised movements that profess anti-Semitism, it hasn't been there. But at the same time... All of the same kind of transcultural and political that you see in Europe and the United States exist here. There is a neo-Nazi movement in this country, and there has been. You know, there'd been Holocaust denies in this country. When ISIS became a fact of life.
There were about 200 Australians that travelled mainly from Sydney, from the western suburbs, to fight in Iraq and Syria with ISIS. So we've had that issue as well. You know, there's far left ideology in this country. We have a political party, the Greens, which gets about 10% of the national vote. And that is increasingly becoming a hard left, you know, neo-Marxist party.
with all the ideology that that entails, including anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and of course anti-Jewish is wrapped up in all that. So it's there. But because of that kind of benign history, we never thought we could see it with the sort of intensity that we've seen. And we believe that if there were spurts of anti-Semitism, that they would be quickly shut down through...
a kind of national movement of solidarity and support and very clear political leadership to stamp it out. And that hasn't happened. There's been a lot of good intention on the part of some politicians, less on the part of others. But things have been allowed to fester. And you mentioned some of the incidents in No Doubt. We'll speak about them in greater length, what happened at the Opera House. And things have just very clearly progressed. You know, you can plot it on a chart from the chance.
to increasing support for terrorism in a very brazen way, and then to the fire bombings and the physical violence that we're seeing. On the one hand, it's shocking. On the other hand, it's so completely predictable for those who know Jewish history and who know how quickly things can slide and how a small number of people in a society...
if not confronted firmly and quickly, can cause immense damage and harm. Yeah. You know, the way you describe the history of the Jews in Australia there... makes the current climate all the more tragic because, you know, you think about the fact that Jews in Australia have had a better time than Jews in Europe by a long margin and then still, you know, over the past 16 or 17 months, you have this outburst.
Let's talk about some of the stuff that's been happening. I think it's important for listeners to know that you are not only campaigning against the anti-Semitic outbursts that we've seen in Australia and other parts of the world since Hamas's pogrom of 7th of October. But you've also been the target of this.
I want to start off by asking you about the event that took place at your former home a few weeks ago, where the house that you used to live in with your wife and your three kids was attacked. And it was attacked by... anti-semites so uh i believe they set a fire outside your former home they wrote fuck jews on a car near to your former house um just explain to us
what happened there and what it felt like for you and your family to know that you were presumably the target of that attack, even though you no longer live in that place. Yeah. So the way it all kind of transpired. My wife and I were woken up quite early one morning. I think it was about five in the morning. And my wife says to me, our former homeless, our old house got hit.
You know, she's showing me this footage which was taken by our old neighbours across the street who we were very, you know, very warm and familiar with, basically showing this kind of inferno. right in front of our old house. And you can see red paint splashed all over the facade. It's a semi-detached house.
um where we lived for five years it was a really beloved family home you know like i have a lot of fond memories from that place it's when we bought it i thought we'd be there forever And actually, funnily enough, I gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago about the incident.
The journalist asked me a very curious question. He said, why did you buy that house when you bought it? I thought, that's an odd question. Why does anyone buy a house? But it compelled me to actually reminisce and kind of think about... why i did buy it and there was a very specific reason why i bought that house we bought that house it was the only house we looked at it was because when we first migrated to australia from the soviet union my grandfather
who had been an engineer in Kiev and couldn't find work because he had health issues and couldn't speak English. The only kind of useful thing he could do was he drove a bus for a kind of Jewish social club. of Holocaust survivors and he would pick them up and drive them to the club and the club would give him five dollars a day as kind of lunch money and he would bring it home as wages because that's all he was able to earn at that time.
And I would go with him before and after school, and I would sit in the bus as he would pick these people up. And we would drive up and down this road called Military Road, which is this beautiful, long winding road in eastern suburbs of Sydney. And on one side of it, you can see views of Sydney Harbour. On the other side, you've got the Pacific Ocean, and it winds all the way down to Bonnard.
beach and we would drive up and down that road and I just remember my grandfather how he would look at that road and look at the houses and to him it was like a utopia. It was everything that he knew he personally would never have. but that he thought that he could create and enable me and my now late brother to have his free people, free from discrimination in Australia.
And so we weren't even looking really. But then I saw a house on that street. I think I was jogging one day and saw it. And two weeks later, we'd signed a contract and we bought it. So the house represented a great deal to me. you know, not merely a place to live, but something far greater, had a lot of meaning. And so I'm watching the surveillance footage of this kind of inferno in front.
And then more CCTV footage came out and you can see this car pulling up. Two guys get out. They have a can of petrol, which they pour like a fuse across the width of the street. going from one side to the other leading up to cars parked in the driveway of my old house and then they light it and these cars just ignite and then a car in the driveway of the adjoining property
which was still owned by a Jewish couple in the 80s who lived there for like 50 years. They dauged it with, as you said, fuck the Jews on one side, fuck Israel on the other, which I thought was very poetic because it's like two sides of the same coin and two sides of the same card. and and yeah and it was a terrible thing but in terms of how it impacted me um i i to be honest i don't think i fully even processed it because it came in a period of really intense work.
The day before, my wife and I and kids, we'd been in Brisbane for a much-needed long-awaited holiday. But the whole time I spent in TV studios and giving press conferences in the park because there'd been other attacks on Jewish synagogues. So that was just full-on work. And then we landed back in Sydney. The next morning, this happens. And then 6am the following morning, I'm on a flight to Poland for events to do with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
It's all been so hectic that I haven't really paused to really think about it and the safety of my family. I really, I think, treated it as another anti-Semitic incident. I don't think I've fully grasped how personal this is. and what it means. And I'm not a person who really frets about security. People ask me about it all the time, but I don't really think about it. But, you know, when I do pause and contemplate it, it's obviously a horrible thing to know that...
you know, that I was targeted, my family were targeted in our homes, you know, in a... residential street where the houses are close to each other where a fire at that scale was lit and could have incinerated people in their beds you know that's what could have happened so This is the reality of life in Australia right now. You know, everything seems placid and calm, but really beneath the surface, it's anything but that. Hi, it's Brendan here. I have some exciting news to share with you.
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donate. That's spiked-online.com slash donate and donate £25 or more to help keep us going for another 25 years. Now on with the show. You know, hearing you talk about it is really interesting and I think very important as well. And I guess this might not be a nice question, but I wonder if you've thought about...
what the aim of the attack was. Do you think it was to harm you, to physically harm you and your family because these people might have mistakenly thought that you still lived in this house? Or was it to send you a message? Was it to try to silence you? Which I guess might serve as a testament to the brilliant work that you've been doing since 7th of October 2023.
What do you think was the aim of this attack? What do you think they were trying to achieve with this antisemitic barbarism that they visited on your former home? You know, I haven't actually thought about that. I really haven't stopped to think about what the precise motivation was.
and what they're hoping to achieve. I guess we won't really know that until, I mean, just in the last 24 hours, they've arrested a couple of guys in connection with this as potential accessories. So hopefully the investigation will... you know identify whether because there's speculation that this is all centrally coordinated even funded from abroad so we'll see what the motivation is um look it could be any number of things i mean over the years have been reports about
the Iranian regime targeting Jewish leaders abroad. That could certainly be something, you know, there's always concerns about Iranian cells and Hezbollah operatives in Western countries. That's really a fact of life. It could have been, you know, I don't know. It's difficult to determine whether they wanted to physically harm us, whether they knew that I'd moved on from that house or whether they thought I still lived there.
whether it was to send a warning to silence me, to silence the community, to make us fearful, to make us stop speaking out. You know, I have been extremely visible and vocal. since October 7 and before, but particularly since October 7. And not everyone likes what I have to say. And I've obviously attracted a lot of people who despise me, despise what I stand for, and despise the things that I say and believe.
But I speak every word that I say, I believe. And if people don't like what I have to say, then I'm not concerned. I know I have the overwhelming support. certainly the Jewish community, there's no question about that, but also the vast majority of Australians who just want to live peacefully in this country and abhor extremism and Islamism and far-left ideology and terrorism.
I don't want any of this nonsense in our country. And, you know, if their attempt was to silence me, they'd fail dismally. I can tell you that. Yeah, absolutely. And you have been very visible since 7th of October and before it, of course. And I think you've played an incredibly important role in... reminding people of the values of Australia and the values of the West more broadly against these mobs who have risen up against the Jews and who are expressing this extreme hostility towards Israel.
I want to take you back to the first incident that made me think, oh God, it's happening in Australia as well, which is what happened outside the Sydney Opera House on the 9th of October. you know, I think less than 48 hours after Hamas's pogrom. And there was a gathering of about a thousand people, so-called pro-Palestine activists. There were radical Islamists there.
um various groups of people and they chanted fuck the jews uh there is some uh suspicion that they also said gas the jews but other people are saying they said where are the jews you know i'm I'm an old-fashioned person who thinks that any menacing chant about the Jews is a bad thing to do regardless of what the actual content is. But that event sent shockwaves around the world. I mean, we saw something similar in London where there was a gathering outside the Israeli embassy.
on 9th of October as well. And it was essentially a celebration of what Hamas had done. People were playing pop music, they were dancing, they were waving the Palestine flag. It was a celebration of the pogrom. And we saw similar incidents in the US as well, where very early on, before Israel had even properly responded to Hamas's attack.
people were essentially celebrating Hamas's evil deeds. But to see it outside the Sydney Opera House at Sydney Harbour, what I've always considered one of the most... beautiful and civilized places in the world. That felt genuinely shocking. And for you, and I guess for the Jewish community in Australia,
Was that an early sign, do you think, of how bad things could potentially get in the aftermath of 7th of October? Yeah, it really was. And it revealed so many elements of what was to come. But actually...
There was an incident before even what happened at the Opera House steps on October 9th that showed us that things could get really nasty. So the previous day, October 8th our time... when the full news of what had transpired in Israel hadn't even really come out, when Hamas was still in southern Israel, in some of the kibbutzim there. But it was known that something horrendous and unprecedented had happened. Mass slaughter. You know, we'd seen the footage of...
You know, the Bibas family, we'd seen the footage of Shani Rook and her broken body being paraded through the streets of Gaza as people spat at her and hit her with sticks. We saw... Images of Nam Eleven being dragged by her hair in her bloody tracky pants into captivity. We'd seen this. We'd seen images of a Thai worker getting his head locked off with a shovel.
And a gathering took place in West Sydney, about half an hour from where I'm sitting now in the western suburbs of Sydney, where a sheikh, a preacher, took to the streets and a mob there gathered. and he chanted and he screamed with great elation and this kind of real sense of frenzy about how this is a day of joy, this is a day of pride, today I'm happy. And the mob chants back, I'll laugh at every point. And convoys of cars drove through the streets of West Sydney, letting off fireworks.
This was the greatest day of their lives. And, you know, when you look later at the footage, and I've seen very little of it, it's too horrendous to watch. body cam footage from hamas that's the thing that really struck me about all other things the fact that they were in this frenzy of elation and joy. This day of rape and killing and looting and destruction, just pure destruction.
was the greatest thing that ever experienced. And that was the mood in West Sydney on that day. And so the following day, as you described, Brendan, there was a gathering, a pro-Palestinian gathering there. A part of it kind of peeled off and you had probably 50 or so, maybe 100 youths, heads covered, faces covered, so they couldn't be identified. And they were chanting these things.
And the things that ensued from that really showed us that we're in some trouble here because, again, it was such an outrage for it to occur at all and to occur at the Opera House, which was a national disgrace broadcast throughout the world.
And we thought that it would stop there. But several things happened which showed us that things are going to get really nasty. The first thing was the police, who don't like this stuff, don't want this stuff, but didn't really know. They were kind of paralysed. They didn't know what to do.
And one Jew had defied police and government recommendations to not go anywhere near the area, which in itself is a travesty, the fact that Jews were locked out of our own CBD area and told not to go there when a mob was rampant.
They controlled the area, but the Jews couldn't go there. And one Jew went there with an Israeli flag, and he was quickly detained and hauled away. And from a policing... point of view i understand why because when you have a mob like that anything can happen and it's easy to remove the one jew who will be the victim of the mob rather than the mob itself but it also sent a signal that the mob will be left alone
that they're entitled to do what they're doing. And the second thing that really disturbed me about that whole incident was you spoke about the things that were chanted. So originally it was reported that they were chanting, gas the Jews. Other thing, you know, they were definitely chanting, F the Jews, no one questioned that. They were chanting the medieval battle cry of Kaiba, Kaiba, O Jews, the armies of Muhammad are coming. So you can chant the battle cries, which mean killing Jews.
chant, F the Jews. But part of the press, the activist hard left press, got bogged down deliberately on whether gas the Jews was actually chanting. And the reason why they did that was it was a way to sow doubt. to say that don't trust the claims of the Jewish community about anti-Semitism. They're misleading you. They're deceiving you. And ever since that time...
Every time there's been an attack, including the attack of my former home, you see, and even from relatively mainstream characters, talk about a false flag, an inside job. You know, the same sort of pathology that causes people to question the Holocaust or to say that Israel killed its own people on October 7 and the whole thing was planned to justify genocide. That same psyche.
is on display all the time here in Australia. And again, I think the starting point was the reaction to what happened on the steps of the Open House on October 9th. That's such an important point because I was going to ask you about... the response to what happened on the 9th of October because... In some ways, that terrified me even more than the event itself. And similarly, in the UK, when I saw people celebrating the pogrom outside the Israeli embassy.
That was a horrifying image, but it was the lack of anger about it and the lack of commentary about it that chilled me even more. So when I was following these events in Australia and I was watching them on the news and reading about them in the press.
the thing that really chilled me to my bones was the fact you know anti-semites are going to be anti-semitic that's a given and it's a it's a tragic given but that is what they're going to do they're going to gather in public and say anti-semitic things but the refusal the flat-out refusal or the unwillingness of the left and other sections of polite society to
very loudly condemn those actions. That was one of the most worrying things because I think that pointed to where things were going to go, which is not only that we would see... a minority of vocal anti-Semites on the streets, but also that we would see a betrayal of the Jews by the opinion forming classes. So what did you make of the response to the events outside the Sydney Opera House?
I mean, obviously there was official condemnation, as there should be, but it felt like there wasn't the kind of anger that one would expect in response to such an act of virulent racism against Jewish people. Look, I think that's right. And again, to refer to the incident the day before on the streets of Western Sydney.
That occurred within the electorate of a very senior government minister who now holds the portfolios of, interestingly, multiculturalism, immigration and also home affairs. And it took him weeks, weeks to condemn that. and under duress and a lot of political pressure. And again, that showed us we're not in good shape here. We don't have a political leadership that is strong enough to recognise what's happening, where it's going to go and what they need to do.
And you also contrast that, you know, we periodically have in this country, it's happening more and more because they sense the opportunity. Gatherings of out and out near Nazis on our streets. And you contrast the reaction to that with the mob. at the steps of the Opera House, and both were obviously anti-Semitic. No reasonable person could deny or question that. But when it's neo-Nazis, no one takes them seriously. Everyone...
condemns it with no political loss or implications and therefore they are isolated and their influence is not really able to grow or to kind of seep into mainstream Australia. But when a mob... subscribes not to neo-Nazi ideology but to a different ideology but still expresses desire to kill Jews.
and relive glory days of the death of Jews, if not the Holocaust, then Khyber, whatever, as though there's a difference, that still chants these things about Jews. But because it happens... with a Palestinian flag being waved, or through the prism of Israel and some connection to it, suddenly it's complicated, suddenly...
we shouldn't take sides or there's nuance or there's context or there's history and it's not condemned. And so the very clear message that's sent is that this is permissible. This form of expression of anti-Semitism is okay. And so it continues, and it continued with no police implications and no social ramifications, which I think is probably greater, the fact that there's no price socially or professionally or in one's interactions.
to be paid when being an anti-Semite. As long as you wave a Palestinian flag or have a watermelon icon, suddenly it's all good. Suddenly you're a human rights activist. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And we've seen...
Very similar things in Britain and across Europe where, you know, if white neo-Nazis take to the streets and say racist things and including anti-Semitic things, they are very roundly condemned as they should be. But if... you know, a multicultural gathering of people waving the Palestine flag takes to the streets and chants for
the army of Muhammad to come back and kill the Jews, as I witnessed with my own eyes on the streets of London shortly after 7th of October, that's not condemned as loudly. In fact, it's often not condemned at all. So there is an extraordinary double standard there. I want to ask you about some of the other events that we've seen in Australia over the past few months. And it's really quite shocking because, you know, there's been a huge spike in antisemitism in Europe, including in the UK.
In London, there was a 1,350% rise in anti-Semitic attacks after 7th of October. I mean, a really staggering rise in... antisemitic vandalism, antisemitic assaults, various other acts. But I feel like some of the events in Australia have been worse. I think they have been... bigger and more terrifying even than some of the stuff we've seen in britain and other countries in europe so synagogues have been attacked in um australia i mean and very seriously attacked so i want to
ask you about the Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. Listeners will be familiar with what happened there because it's another incident that made headlines around the world. In December last year, the end of last year, this synagogue in Melbourne was doused with flammable liquid and set on fire. And when I saw that, and when I saw the ruins of what was left behind by some of this attack,
I remember thinking, how can this be happening in Melbourne, in Australia? You know, it almost doesn't compute. You know, if it had happened somewhere in France, where tragically they... have a pretty serious anti-Semitism problem and have had for a long time, it would make a little bit more sense, even though it would be equally as awful. But to see it happening in Melbourne just felt really discombobulating.
What was that like when the Adas Israel synagogue was burnt with fire? How did that feel for the Jews of Australia? And what do you think that told us about what's happening in Australia right now? I mean, that was a horrible thing, to see this kind of... you know, burnt out wreck of the synagogue and smouldering holy texts. And, you know, the image, you know, we're always reluctant to draw comparisons with the Nazi era, but it's an image straight out of Kristallnacht.
um and it's something that just doesn't happen really anywhere in the civilized world like the notion of actually trying to burn down a place of worship, a place where people come together to say prayers solemnly, quietly, to celebrate. holy days to say the mourner's kaddish for loved ones and for people to think i'm going to burn that place down you know like it's just a crazy ideology that would compel someone to do this thing
And this was a synagogue built by survivors of the Holocaust post-war who settled in Melbourne. It's an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism that these guys largely keep to themselves. And this kind of happened, but this was seen really as a watershed moment in Australian history, I think, because prior to that, people were able to say...
You know, it's the importation of foreign hatred. It's Jews versus Arabs. It's all to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict and all that. And it doesn't concern us. Australia is overwhelmingly... And polling shows this consistently. They don't like being entangled in foreign conflicts. They don't like foreign grievances being brought here. As you've spoken about, Brendan, and it's true, you know, Australians are kind of laconic, easygoing people.
We're blessed people because we live in a wonderful country in every respect. And we want to keep it that way. And we know that by importing these conflicts, it's going to destabilise things. People don't like that. But when they see synagogue burning, I think that was something that really shocked the country. And it showed them the level of hatred that existed. or that exists in our society, that people would actually bring themselves to do such a thing.
um but you know it was kind of bookended by other attacks and it's now become normal it's now the media rattles off the anti-semitic incidents and it's just one of many and there have been others that have really shocked i mean The one on my former home, I think, shocked the country as well and made big news to have, again, a home attack and an individual attacked in that way. A couple of days after that incident, there was the burning almost to the ground of a childcare centre near a synagogue.
And again, like the news broadcast these images of Australian families, most of them not Jewish, you know, including in hijabs and Asian Australians coming to their childcare centre the following day. and seeing it incinerated and seeing fuck the Jews again, that familiar phrase, door on the walls. And these are things that have really, I think, shaken the country to its core. And if one positive thing has come from these incidents and...
Obviously, there's nothing positive to be seen here, but if the Opera House incident didn't shake Australia to its core... and show them what was at stake and what was going to happen, I think people now see that very clearly. And I think there's been a realisation that, you know, what's happening here...
It should have been enough that the Jews were being targeted. It should have been enough for Australia to stand up and say, Jewish Australians are Australians and we're not going to have this happen to them. Now it clearly shows that this is something that affects all Australians, that this is a national problem that we all have a responsibility to combat. Yeah, absolutely.
When I was in Australia last year, I had the privilege of speaking at the Caulfield Shul Synagogue in Melbourne. And it was just so interesting to speak to. people there, the Jews who came to that event and who wanted to speak about their experiences and how they felt about what was happening in Australia. And the message I got was that... Exactly as you've just outlined, which is this feeling that things are going off the rails and have been since 7th of October, 2023, but also...
mingled with the feeling that Australia is a great country and Australia is a country in which these kinds of events ought to be alien and were alien for a very long time. So has it felt incredibly jarring to... to experience these kind of things. You know, I guess because in Australia there have been attacks on the synagogues. We talked about the Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, which was burnt down.
Swash stickers have been painted on synagogues in Australia. We talked about the attack on your home, of course, and the daycare centre in Sydney, which was daubed with graffiti and attacked as well. I mean, these are very serious racist crimes, the kind that would be shocking even if they were to happen in Europe. So how jarring has it been for Jews in Australia?
Has it changed their view of the country or are they still clinging to their belief that Australia is a good place for Jewish people to live? I think, look, there's a mix of feelings and sometimes people feel and express. almost contrasting emotions and thoughts which may be irreconcilable. But, you know, I've had people say to me that they're happy in a way, relieved that they're...
Holocaust survivor parents and grandparents aren't alive to see what the country's become. I've had Holocaust survivors themselves say to me, like, I can't believe this, you know. I fled the ashes, the ruins of Europe. And I'm the sole survivor in my family. And I went as far as humanly possible from Europe to escape this. And now we're having burning synagogues and death that killed the Jews chanted in the streets.
And they can't believe it. But at the same time, you know, you speak to Australian Jews and they adore this country as I do. And they adore the people of this country. And they... They are determined to stay here and fight for it. But at the same time, others are saying, you know, it's not safe anymore. It's not safe. And if I can't walk the streets proudly and openly as a Jew...
I don't want to be in this country anymore because that's one of the things that made this country fortunate and great. The fact that people don't really care. People, you know, we talk about multiculturalism and it's almost a controversial concept, but my... My understanding of multiculturalism is that you can bring your culture, your language, your traditions, your food, your dance, whatever.
But you have to subscribe to a common ethos, a common set of values, adhere to the laws, and you'll be left alone. And you'll enrich the country with your traditions and with your culture. And we all get along. And that's generally how it's always been. But people feel like there's either been a failure of multiculturalism or the country has radically changed. or perhaps foreign ideologies are now penetrating the psyche and the ethos and the spirit of this country.
and the country is changing before our eyes. And for a long time, people would say things like, this is un-Australian, this isn't who we are. But I've been saying, this is exactly who we are. Because if this is happening with regularity, not as a one-off.
You know, you may like to conceive of yourself as being something better or something different, but ultimately this becomes a part of who you are. Your behavior defines who you are. And this behavior... going back to October 7 and 8 and 9 and the things we spoke about, and the reluctance, the inability of the majority to put an end to this, to speak out against it and say, we're not going to have this here.
that shows that there is an element of sloth and indifference in this country that's not a good thing. and it makes it susceptible to extremist ideologies because the extremists are very determined, as we know. They're very determined to push their ideology to transform the country. And if the majority isn't equally determined to fight for it and keep it as it should be...
then that minority prevails. And so there's something that needs to change in this country, that kind of, that levity, you know, that sense that we're an island so far away from the rest of the world and its problems. that's an illusion and I think we need to snap out of it. Hi, it's Brendan here. I want to let you know some exciting news. My new book is out now. It's called After the Pogrom, 7th of October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. And it's available right now from Amazon.
I'm really proud of this book. It is an unflinching account of how the West failed the moral test of 7th of October 2023, which of course is the day that Hamas and other militants invaded Israel and unleashed barbarism.
The book documents in chilling detail how activists, academics and others in the West ended up making excuses for Hamas's violence, ended up taking the side of the pogromists against the pogroms' victims and ended up in the process... turning their backs on the values of civilization.
The book is fundamentally a call to arms for Western civilization. It makes the case for restoring Enlightenment values and standing with Israel while it's under attack by radical Islamists. I don't know if an author is allowed to describe his own book. is essential reading, but I really do think it's essential reading. It's called After the Pogrom, 7th of October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization, and you can get your copy right now on Amazon.
If you want a signed copy of the book, and why wouldn't you, you can get one by donating £50 or more to Spiked. Just go to the Spiked website. Look for the donate button, donate today and you will get a free signed copy of After the Pogrom, 7th of October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization. Yeah. It's such an important point. So often in history, we see that the silence of the majority can embolden.
the wicked minority and i think that's playing out in in lots of our countries right now at the moment sadly um okay alex i want to ask you about anti-zionism this is an issue that you and i have talked about before And you will know that a lot of people, you mentioned already that the car that was daubed with fuck the Jews on one side and fuck Israel on the other, which to my mind is a perfect distillation of what anti-Zionism is, which is.
In my view, it's hatred for the Jews in fancy language, in a pseudo-political language. But you will know that a lot of the people... will say in response to the kind of points that you've been making for the past 16, 17 months, people will say, A lot of this stuff is not anti-Semitism, it's anti-Zionism. It's anger at Israel's actions. It's anger at Israel's war on Hamas or it's genocide, as they call it.
How do you deal with those kinds of arguments? How do you push back against this notion that there is There are these two very distinct things, anti-Zionism, which is apparently a legitimate political view, and anti-Semitism, which is an illegitimate racial hatred. How do you... tease out those kind of differences? Well, in a way, it's kind of happened for me, it's happened for us. And we've often obviously made these intellectual arguments about
anti-Zionism. And I think one of the big problems is, again, in terms of language. So when you look at Zionism and anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism always ran in parallel to Zionism. when there were Jews in Europe in the late 19th century arguing for a Jewish national movement, a Jewish awakening, a Jewish in-gathering in our ancestral lands in order to cure anti-Semitism.
revive the Jewish spirit, enlarge Jewish contributions to the world. There was a stream running alongside of Antheists, mainly of Jews. including in the UK, people like Edwin Montagu, including in Australia. I mentioned Sir Isaac Isaacs, one of our eminent Australians, was a Jewish anti-Zionist. Not because he opposed Jews or hated...
Jewish self-determination, but because he believed that assimilation integration was the better way to cure anti-Semitism and improve the lives of Jews. So that established anti-Zionism as a legitimate point of view at the time. And of course, two major things then totally discredit anti-Zionism. Firstly, the Holocaust, which makes mockery of the notion that Jews can be secure and safe as long as they're good citizens and participate.
And then the creation of the State of Israel, which achieved Zionism. And so anti-Zionism is no longer a theoretical opposition to an idea or philosophy. It's the opposition to a country that exists with people living there. And so it's no longer a credible normal movement. But the term anti-Zionism survives. But it becomes something different to what it once was. And it becomes not opposition to Jewish self-determination, but it just becomes... this frenzied extreme hatred.
of Jews and of Israel all entangled together and an opportunity to lay every myth and stereotype that people once expressed towards Jews about being greedy and sinister. and bloodthirsty and all these things and all powerful and all controlling um and just to shift it to the state of Israel and to shift it to the Zionists. And, you know, if you look at Soviet propaganda in the 50s and 60s, they made that transition.
They spoke of their fondness for Jews, even while imposing quotas on Jews in professions and keeping them out of professions entirely and persecuting them wholesale. But they maintained they were very fond of Jews, but their opposition was to Zionism. The Zionist was the corporate Jew, effectively, the collective Jew. But now all of this discussion that we can have for hours and hours...
And it's very difficult to establish and prove to people who are generally carrying very little information and awareness of the things that we're talking about now. It kind of goes away and no longer matters. So when you had another shocking incident about a week ago. where you had these two nurses at a public hospital in a video chat with an Israeli guy talking about...
murdering Israeli patients. The interesting thing about that in the reaction to that, and that again shows that things have changed, that there has been an awakening in Australia. That was reported across the board. spoken about by every politician, federal, state. as being an anti-Semitic incident. No one questioned it, even though the word Jew wasn't used. So I think people have woken up to the reality that if you harbour this psychotic, consumptive hatred of Israel...
very distinct from a critique of Israeli politics and politicians, which is normal and reasonable and it's something very, very different. But when you have this frenzied hatred that compels you to burn things and threaten to kill people when you're a healthcare professional, people go...
I don't think this is a political critique anymore. I think there's something more sinister and more deeply held than that. So really, I think these psychopaths have done our job for us. I think they've revealed... that there is critique of Israel and opposition to settlements and a view maybe that Israel didn't proceed in the war as it should have. We can discuss that and that's all fair game.
But when people are burning synagogues and cars and threatening to kill people, that's clearly driven by hatred for the people. And I think there's a realisation that finally it's happened. Yeah, I thought it was very heartening to see... Lots of leaders in Australia refer to those nurses' comments as anti-Semitic, including the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, who made that very clear. He called them anti-Semitic comments.
And they very clearly were. And then, of course, you had this gathering of Muslim representatives or self-styled Muslim representatives who wrote an open letter saying... Well, you know, the nurses were just being emotional and hyperbolic and they were only expressing their anger with Israel. And you just feel like that. didn't wash in the way that it might have done in the past. And lots of people could see through that. And they could see that these nurses were expressing
a vile bigotry, not a political criticism of Israel. I did want to ask you in relation to the Zionist question, and listeners...
should know that as well as being an advocate for the Jews of Australia, you are also an author. You've written numerous books on the Jewish issue and the Israel issue, including you edited a book called The Anti-Israel Agenda, Inside the Political War on the Jewish State, which is a very fine read and I highly recommend it, in which you explore... the interplay I guess between the
very palpable hostility towards Israel in much of Western society and the kind of growth of antisemitism or the return of antisemitism. I did want to ask you about one incident in particular, because I think it's quite instructive. which was the doxing scandal in Australia in early 2024. So this was when some leftist journalists doxed a group of...
Jewish creatives, Jewish activists, Jewish spokespeople who had set up a WhatsApp group after 7th of October in order to talk about things and to get their thoughts together and to put... ideas to each other about how they might tackle the problems facing Jewish people. Their names were doxed and their details were put out in public. And as a consequence of that, a lot of these Jewish people received extraordinary levels of abuse.
But it was justified by these left-wing journalists and left-wing campaigners that doxing was justified as an effort to unmask Zionists. That's how they presented it. They were doxing Zionists and exposing these. kind of secret conniving Zionist to the world. I mean, that was a very good example of what you've just been talking about, wasn't it?
People use the word Zionist when really a lot of the time they just mean Jew. Yeah, it was an extraordinary incident really because, you know, when the war started, people did what they tend to do, which is... form little groups and little WhatsApp chats and you suddenly had groups like Lawyers for Palestine and Architects for Palestine.
and health professions for Palestine that were, you know, organizing and, you know, trying to drive their agenda in their profession and trying to get their professional bodies to pass resolutions condemning Israel and all that sort of stuff. And the Jewish community did much the same thing. They created their own WhatsApp groups of lawyers for Israel, creators for Israel, where having been in a couple of these before very promptly muting them, there's just a lot of idle chatter.
Oh my God, have you seen this? What are we going to do about that? And it's a place for people to console and vent and that's it. Nothing untoward, nothing beyond what someone would expect in a chat group like this.
But the chat group swelled to about 600 members and obviously a group of that size, you know, it's not going to be carefully vetted and there's going to be people with different views there and people were just dropping their friends or colleagues in that they thought would be interested in. Most people, again, were passive. But then a few sinister people joined the group. And then a few what we would call social media influencers.
fairly well-known people who publish books and appear on TV and receive public grants and speak at festivals and so forth, decided that they were going to... use their enormous platforms attained in part of the public expense to expose every one of these people and not merely expose their names but expose where they work, in some cases their addresses and phone numbers. And the way they did it was with such sadistic pleasure, you know, where they would post.
little previews like this is coming, this is happening. And it just, again, it's that relish of the pogromists, that capital, that delight in degrading and humiliating people and drawing out their suffering. They ended up publishing the whole chat and it led, as you said, to people being extremely fearful for their safety and the lives of their children.
And a lot of people lost work and were quietly or loudly cancelled and had writing projects terminated and had gigs cancelled and things like that. It was a horrible thing that transpired. And for me, in my position, a large part of my time around that period was spent consoling and comforting people and just listening to them.
and try to tell them it's going to be okay without really knowing if it is going to be okay, because we're in a very uncertain security situation. This is before the Five Omens had started. But we, at that point, didn't quite know. how bad things could get and where things could go and whether people would act on threats.
whether people would identify individuals through this docs and try to physically target them. So there was a real degree of terror in the community caused by this. And again, as you spoke about, not only the act itself, which was just... inhumane and so clearly driven by this anti-Semitic view that any... plurality of Jews must be scheming and acting for some nefarious purpose and therefore to expose them is the just and right and good and righteous thing to do.
But, you know, the amount of people that defended them publicly and tried to turn these Jews into villains merely for being in a WhatsApp group with some of their colleagues, like, it was incredible. It was incredible. And at the same time... the fact that the Palestinian supporters were doing literally the exact same thing, and that was fine.
And it shows the double standards and how Jews are viewed. And there was this one very telling post, I remember, by one of the lead doctors at the time, where actually in response to a public statement that I had made about some issue. I remember her posting on Instagram, if this is what the Jews will say publicly, just imagine what they're saying privately. So if we come out and use our democratic right to advocate and speak.
then we're damned because imagine what they're doing privately. And if we speak privately, well, then it's obviously for some scheming nefarious purpose. So clearly you can't win with these individuals, which is why they need to be fought. That was a moment, I think, that really galvanised the community. It was no longer something that a few advocates could be fighting. I think people realised that this is something that concerns all of us.
And that was really, I think, again, you look at turning points and key moments. I don't think that led to this great Australian awakening, but I think certainly within the Jewish community, it just brought back a lot of, again, memories of lists. and, you know, and exclusion and, again, that clear intent to humiliate and degrade people, and that really mobilised the Jewish community into a force, into a coherent, powerful force.
that's been fighting back admirably. Yeah, so it backfired beautifully on the anti-Semites or anti-Zionists as they would imagine themselves to be. if it had that kind of impact. I think, you know, to my mind that doxing scandal was a classic. example of the socialism of fools where you have the left that imagines that it is standing up to the zionist entity or
the capitalist class, but in fact they're just bullying Jewish people and they're just taunting Jewish people and exposing their details to the public in order to whip up a storm against them. It was really, really repulsive. Okay, Alex, I've just got my final question for you. We've talked about a lot of grim things and a lot of grim things are happening. We can't look away from that, of course, on the day on which we're talking.
The four bodies of Israeli hostages were released, including the Bibas family from Gaza. to israel in and there were horrifying spectacles around the release of these bodies uh in gaza so awful things are happening dreadful things are happening there's no denying that but there is also
As you said at the very beginning of the conversation, there is also a culture of defiance and a feeling of defiance. And I think possibly a growing willingness amongst Jewish people, but also amongst their allies. to stand up to some of this stuff. And I was really heartened to see last year that you, alongside Deborah Conway and Josh Frydenberg, the former Liberal government minister in Australia, You were named as the Australian newspapers Australians of the Year, the three of you.
precisely for your campaign and against the scourge of antisemitism and against the post-7th of October delirium that infected Australia as much as it did other parts of the Western world. That's a good thing. And there are other good things happening too. So I just want to ask you.
What do you think about the future? I mean, there's a lot to be pessimistic about. But do you think that the pushback is coming? Has the pushback come? Where do you think things will go next? Well, it's hard to predict. there are clearly good things there are things which give me confidence and you know you mentioned that the honor that i received from the australian and that was very humbling and it was a a beautiful thing to to be acknowledged with but it showed me
something which I knew all the way through is that Jewish issues are no longer kind of peripheral or peculiar to our community. They are very much national issues. um which which is kind of a slightly precarious position to be in because with the jews being spotlighted to such an extent and they're being literally
every single day for 16 months, covers stories in all the major newspapers. And it's not just kind of the Australian, which is very supportive of the Jewish community, but, you know, the national broadcast of the ABC, which is akin to your BBC. You know, maybe their editorial line is different, but they've given probably equal prominence to these issues. So everyone is talking about it. And when everyone's talking about the Jews, that...
It's not necessarily a good thing because people are easily manipulated. There's an ingrained, I think, bias based on centuries of indoctrination and subtle conspiracy theories that have been spread through society. So I think it's a slightly dangerous thing. But at the same time, we've been given a platform where we can speak.
We can show who we are, what our values are, and that we're proud Australians and I value that opportunity. So I think that's a good thing. As I said, there's been this emergence of Jewish pride. You know, I can't tell you how many people have stopped me in the street or sent me messages. And it's not merely, I saw you on TV, good stuff. I never hear that. What I hear is...
very personal accounts from people who say things like, I lapsed as a Jew in my childhood, but now I've never felt more Jewish. I've started going to synagogue again. You know, I've reconnected to the Jewish community in some other way. And that is an incredible thing and a beautiful thing and a thing that makes all my, you know, exertions and all my work.
completely validated and worthwhile and that makes me extremely proud and i'm very glad for that um and then you look abroad and you know the horrors of october 7 They brought a very bloody war, a just and necessary but bloody war. But I think... you know, there's a prospect for redrawing the Middle East. And I think that's already happened to a large extent. I mean, incredible things have happened when you have a large scale ballistic missile attack from Iran.
which is thwarted by a coalition including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, it tells you that the world is changing, that actually those who have attempted to isolate Israel all these decades... have really failed quite this minute in fact in large part they're isolated um gaza will never be the same again. And it can't be the same again because something horrific has been revealed about that society. When you had thousands participate in the atrocities of October 7, when you had...
guards and doctors and journalists holding hostages in their homes, people lining the streets and still lining the streets to send off the corpses of children with jubilation. It reveals... a rot in that society that must be fixed. And so Donald Trump can talk about his reconstruction plans and whatnot, but the main reconstruction needs to be in the society rather than in its buildings. And I think now with Hamas...
all but destroyed or close to decimated, I think there's a prospect for that. So I'm by inclination an optimist and I see a lot of good things happening. But at the same time, you know, again, knowing Jewish history. Things don't turn out exactly as one would expect. Anti-Semitism, as we know, isn't a rational thing. It doesn't look at the Jews for who they are and their contribution to society and the world and their values.
and makes a negative assessment of them and makes them ripe for dehumanization and persecution. That's not how it works. The Jew is encased in mythology. And so when people attack Jews, they're not attacking the Jew, the flesh and blood Jewish person that lives amongst them and contributes and is a peaceful person and an educated person for the most part.
they're attacking this mythological version of itself, this grotesque monster that people have created just have something to kill. And so I worry that with the intense focus on the Jewish people, with the visibility of Jewish issues... And with the corruptibility of society, with the malice that exists in segments of society, with the stupidity that exists in segments of society, just where this will end. Rationally, I think good things will come, but...
You know, I think with a degree of scepticism and knowledge of Jewish history, I'm fearful of what might happen. But at least now the Jewish community is fully awake. mobilized, united, determined, and that puts us in the best possible position for whatever lies ahead. Alex, thank you very much. A great pleasure, Brendan. Great pleasure.
Thank you for listening to The Brendan O'Neill Show. We'll be back with another guest and more discussion. Don't forget to subscribe. And in the meantime, keep reading Spiked at... www.spiked-online.com