Germany, 9 November 1938: Shops, houses, synagogues are set alight. Earlier, piles of books are burned. Innocent civilians , including children, are vilified and physically attacked. Men have their beards cut off, their trousers pulled down. Women are terrorised. All these innocent civilians are labelled with a yellow star so the people will know it’s OK to abuse, humiliate and betray the citizens thus marked. In fact it is government policy. All these actions are not only ignored by police and other government officials – they are encouraged. The victims of abuse have only one thing in common: they are Jewish or have Jewish heritage, no matter how tenuous.These atrocities were government policy, sanctioned by the State.  

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the Nazi dictatorship’s declaration of war against German and Austrian Jews in November 1938.

Algemeiner.com

Today, 6 December 2024, I woke to the news that arsonists have set alight a synagogue in Melbourne while worshippers were praying inside. Unlike pre-War Germany, our Australian government expressed condemnation of the attack: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has denounced a suspicious blaze that tore through a Melbourne synagogue as a violent act of anti-Semitism aimed at creating fear in the community. (ABC News 6/12/2024). This attack has now been termed a terrorist attack, as if somehow this label could dignify what was a hate-crime against a hated people. For however “woke” the good citizens of Melbourne are, there are very few who would stand and defend the most persecuted race in human history. They rightly bemoan the forced colonisation of our land, the unjust and cruel treatment of our Indigenous Australians to whom this land belongs, the terrible violence towards women in Australia which is becoming a terrifying scourge – but had nothing to say about the Jewish women who were raped, mutilated and murdered in front of their children on October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and started a bloody, murderous war.

Antisemitism is the most insidious form of racism yet it is not called out by the Left. Blaming Jewish Australians for the shocking deaths in Gaza is meshugge (crazy). I and most Jewish people I know are heartbroken by the cruel actions of the Israeli government. The extrême left is villifying the most persecuted race in human history. How ironic when their platform purports to fight racism and oppression! As a Jewish Australian who has always held Left wing values, I feel absolutely betrayed. 

Like Kristallnacht in Germany when Jewish buildings were set alight in a violent act of antisemitism leading to the Holocaust of World War II, is this act of arson against a Jewish synagogue in Melbourne a macabre warning of worse to come?