An Open Letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

Your woeful actions suggest a problem far greater than incompetence or cynical political expediency. These are the actions of someone who does not know right from wrong, or good from evil.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese viewing the arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in 2024 (photo: Anthony Albanese/Instagram)

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Besides the obvious horror, the most frustrating thing about the murder of 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration near Sydney on Sunday is how Australia’s political leaders still do not understand their role in creating the environment that made this possible.

The Hanukkah killing was the most severe and latest in two years of worsening antisemitic incidents that made many in Australia’s Jewish community feel an attack on this scale was inevitable. As Lynda Ben-Menashe, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, said afterward: “I’m horrified and devastated that this happened, but not shocked.”¹

Australian leaders from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese down to police chiefs and mayors have issued token condemnations of antisemitism, but not meaningful enough to stop it. The reason is because nobody in the Federal Labor Government seems to understand the link between their rhetoric and policy towards Israel and rising antisemitism in Australia.

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Dear Prime Minister Albanese,

I write to you as an Australian living abroad. I have been away a long time, but when I read the news, I sometimes feel that I should go home because it seems my country needs me.

I have an unusual criterion for assessing political leaders. I like to think the person running the country should be smarter than me. That is not a big ask. I am a scribe, not a particle physicist. Yet, I am afraid that you do not fit the bill.

An antisemitic plague has swept across Australia and your response has been abysmal.

On your watch, synagogues are being set ablaze, cars in Jewish areas torched, Jewish parliamentary offices ransacked, anti-Jewish graffiti stains public spaces, Jewish business have been vandalized, and “pro-Palestinian” activists roam unchallenged.

Since the October 7th attacks in 2023, there have been more than 2,000 reported cases of antisemitic attacks and incidents, making a mockery of your claim that Australia is the world’s most successful multicultural nation. This is up 500 percent, according to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Especially disheartening has been your shallow and tokenistic response, and your inability to understand your government’s role in fueling antisemitism and failing to stop it.

Seeing as neither you, your ministerial peers, advisors, and other hangers-on can grasp the connection between your policies and what is happening on Australian streets, allow me to spell it out in terms that a macaque toddler can understand: You have shamefully put politics over people, and you have put your own political fortunes over Australian Jews’ welfare and safety.

You watched in horror as Hamas terrorists stormed across the Gaza-Israel border and butchered Israelis on October 7th, in scenes of bloodlust unseen since the Holocaust. You issued the mandatory condemnations and then, like a grubby politician, you sat down with your apparatchiks to work out what it meant for you electorally.

With nauseating cynicism, you saw that disturbingly many of your constituents were Hamas supporters, and you decided to appease them. You recognized that your Labor Party needed Muslim votes, especially since that Islamist senator of yours, Fatima Payman, proved to be a rat and scurried off to introduce Islamic sectarian politics to Australia.

You also calculated that you need to win preference votes from the Australian Greens, a quasi-Stalinist party popular in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne, who support the Islamist maniacs because they share a hatred of Australia and the West. Far too many Australians think that your elections should be single-issue contests about a war on the other side of the world between a liberal democracy and jihadist terrorists, and that Australia should support the latter.

Your mollification of these extremists has been morally abominable.

Your government and your hack Foreign Minister Penny Wong have treated the 24-hour news cycle as fact. You promenaded in front of journalists’ microphones and condemned Israel for doing things it never did — such as targeting aid workers, journalists, and being purposefully reckless about civilian life in Gaza — giving these carefully crafted lies an unfounded legitimacy. In an era where accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing are modern blood libels, this is unforgivable and crosses the line to complicity with Hamas.

Yet, you still fail to understand that, when you validate the blood libel lies about Israel doing horrific things, it makes it seem more reasonable for antisemites to target Jews in Australia. This alone should disqualify you from high office.

Somehow, you cannot connect the dots between your policies and the racism Australian Jews are facing because you do not understand antisemitism, its uniqueness as an evil, and how it differs from other forms of discrimination. Your generalized statements about opposing all forms of racism and bigotry and the importance of “community harmony” are banal; they just do not cut it.

Jews face specific and unique challenges that require specific solutions. Your appointment of an antisemitism czar — whatever that means, because you never properly explained the role — was welcome. Yet, your appointment of an Islamophobia czar showed the stupefying degree to which you do not get it: Anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia is of nowhere near the same scale as antisemitism. It is a lie to pretend otherwise. This lie has the nefarious purpose of trying to obscure the fact that Muslims are committing most of the attacks on Jews, while your Jews don’t generally engage in anti-Muslim incidents, or anti-Australian for that matter.

I know that you find this fact awkward, and politically inconvenient, but facts are a bitch like that, a bit like angry voters. Rather than listening to Jewish Australians’ concerns, you gave humanitarian visas to people from Gaza (a place with one of the world’s most Islamically radicalized populations) against your own security establishment’s advice and without proper security checks. This was pure madness.

You chose the political optics of this over Australian Jews’ security. To do so at a time when antisemitism in Australia is at record levels showed a pathological insensitivity towards Jews. You further legitimized these blood libels with an anti-Israel policy response that you deny is anti-Israel because you are clueless, delusional, or an inveterate liar.

Let us do a by-no-means-extensive tally of your policy missteps, by which I mean shambles. Your government’s constant calls for a ceasefire that would benefit Hamas was an anti-Israel position. Your government’s constant condemnation of Israel for alleged atrocities without verifying their truth was an anti-Israel position. Retractions and apologies were never made when the allegations proved false, which they were repeatedly.

Your harping on about the need for a “two-state solution” that would reward Hamas terror and make Israel less secure was an anti-Israel position (and a pro-terror one). Your obsession with the so-called “two-state solution” shows you lack even a basic understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is one between barbarism and civilization, not competing nationalist claims.

Australia voting at the United Nations to recognize Palestinian sovereignty in the Jews’ biblical homeland, Judea and Samaria, (an unannounced change in policy after two decades) was more than an anti-Israel position. It was a betrayal of Israel, hitherto a friendly state.

Australia voting at the UN to demand Israel undo its ban on the UN agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) was an anti-Israel position. UNRWA is indistinguishable from Hamas, so you are unequivocally supporting jihadist terror. This is so evil that it is something from which you can never atone. Naturally, you deny all of this. You may even believe your own denials, due to your sociopathic inability to engage in even the most rudimentary introspection. Do not feel bad about this; it is a common affliction among those in your chosen profession.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said your government’s anti-Israel positions had been “extreme” and that the Australia’s UN vote was a factor in contributing to the arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in 2024.

Your response to the Melbourne synagogue arson attack was parody. Talking to survivors, the best conversation you could muster was to marvel at the fact that Jews were in the synagogue at 4:10 in the morning and then launch into an inane discussion on the merits of early rising. I thought I was hallucinating. Did you really think these were the words these traumatized people needed to hear?

In the following days, you looked at the hole into which you had dug yourself and kept on digging like a marsupial mole. To be fair, at least you managed to clarify just how muddled you thinking is, and you also betrayed your true base instincts. You added insult by donning a kippah at the Sydney Jewish Museum — because that’s what Jews do, we wear kippot.

You proposed banning protests at places of worship because they cause “division.” Wrong. They reflect the hate and division that your government has allowed to fester, not the cause. You said these antisemitic attacks “diminished Australia as a nation.” Correct — and so have your anti-Israel policies and rhetoric.

You committed 8.5 million Australian dollars in new funding to the Sydney Jewish Museum to upgrade educational resources on the Holocaust, and it was just a stunt. A lack of Holocaust education is not the problem; the problem is there are people who want to commit another Holocaust, and they have been handed the keys to Australian cities and university campuses.

You failed to talk about taking a stronger stand against hate speech. Australia has such statutes, but you have lacked the courage to enforce them, lest they affect your support among Islamist terror supporters and their Woke lunatic allies. Protests at which calls for the destruction of Israel (and the resultant death of millions of Jews) continue because your government values “free speech” over Jewish lives.

Your measures have been reactionary, not preventative. Australian Jews were not surprised when the synagogue in Melbourne was attacked. They knew it was only a matter of time and that not enough was being done. While additional funding was provided to the Jewish community towards enhanced security — meaning the government knew the risk — it was only after the arson attack that police committed to a stronger and more visible police presence in Jewish communities.

You displayed no leadership. When jihadist mobs thronged the Sydney Opera House chanting “Gas the Jews!” you did nothing. (And please have the decency to spare me the nonsense that they were saying “Where are the Jews?” as if it would make any difference.) You could have coordinated a strong national response among state premiers and police chiefs to stop the antisemitic tide before it got out of hand.

Frankly, your woeful handling suggests a problem far greater than incompetence or cynical political expediency. These are the actions of someone who does not know right from wrong, or good from evil.

Australian Jews are not just scared; they are incandescent.

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1. “‘Horrified, not shocked’: Australian Jews blame Bondi attack on ongoing ‘incitement’.” Times of Israel.