Shortly before last summer, the main Jewish institution monitoring anti-Semitism warned of the rise of this feeling around the world following the outbreak of the Israeli war in Gazawhich started in October 2023. According to ‘The Times of … Israel,” rejection of Jews has increased over the past two years in the seven countries with the largest Jewish communities. The list compiled by the Anti-Zionism Monitoring Committee includes Australia, where one of the cruelest anti-Jewish hate crimes in decades has just been perpetrated.
Anti-Semitic sentiment is generally linked in the West to far-right parties, but it has worsened in two of the countries where the left comfortably won, Canada and Australia, who made their fortune thanks to the cartoon of Donald Trump because of its proximity to Israel. The other five countries with the largest Hebrew communities, which have also seen an increase in anti-Semitism, are Argentina, the United Kingdom, France, the United States and Germany.
The J7 report was presented in Berlin last May, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. As reported by the European Jewish Congress, it said that in Australia the number of incidents against its large Jewish community increased by 317% last year, while in the United States the increase was only 5%. The left-wing government only began taking tentative steps after the burning of a synagogue in Melbourne in December 2024. The J7 Committee also warned of more attacks in another left-ruled country, Canadawhere the Jewish minority was the victim of “hate crimes” in the form of shootings at Hebrew schools and attempted burnings of synagogues.
Between 2021 and 2023, anti-Semitic incidents increased by 11% in Australia, 23% in Argentina (before Milei), 75% in Germany (under social democrat Olaf Scholz), 82% in the United Kingdom (under the Labor government), 83% in Canada, 185% in France, and 227% in the United States under the Biden administration.
Besides the cliché that anti-Semitism is linked to neo-Nazi ideology, the supposed harmony between Arabs and Jews due to their common Semitic roots is also demolished. Historically, anti-Semitism was, until the Second World War, an essentially Western phenomenon – although the term was apparently only coined in 19th century Germany. Today it is, to a large extent, a scourge of the world of Islamwhere it reaches the popular strata and is of course engraved in the official doctrine of Islamist regimes.
In the worldview shared by Sunni jihadist movements such as the Islamic State (Daesh) – which is credited with inspiring the attack in Australia – and their Shiite counterparts in Iran or Lebanon, there is a dark Jewish hand in world events, one that turns Hebrews into satanic instruments, whether they practice Judaism or not. Thus, the terrorist target is also a religious holiday – such as the celebration of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights – on a beach in Sydney or a modern music festival in the Israeli desert. It is not the rejection of religion but the blood that flows in the veins of the Hebrews which makes them the victims of prejudices and clichés, and which throughout history has ultimately led them to the ghetto and expulsion. For the anti-Semite, friction with the Hebrews is source of misfortune for other peoples.
The Christian West was largely responsible for some of these prejudices, but the passage of time – and the maturity of the doctrine – have gradually put things in their place. In 1937, the Pope Pius XI He takes up the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church, notably Saint Augustine, and affirms that anti-Semitism is not Christian. His famous expression was that “spiritually, all Catholics are Semites.” The doctrine that anti-Semitism is anti-Catholic was finally enshrined at the Second Vatican Council, notably with the 1965 “Nostra Aetate” declaration.
Feeding stereotypes
Until the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish Islam had a hospitable attitude towards Jews, even if it continued to fuel certain stereotypes of anti-Semitism. The British Orientalist Bernard Lewis jokes – based on real events – that during the death throes of the Ottoman Empire in 1912, Jews living in the Balkans, in a fit of patriotism, asked the sultan to form a volunteer Hebrew brigade to fight against the enemies of the empire. Instructors and equipment were sent to them, and when they were going to be taken to the front, they sent a letter to the sultan asking for police protection because they had heard that the roads were full of bandits.
This Muslim prejudice about the Jews’ lack of military spirit collapsed in 1948, shortly after the UN resolution of late 1947 which created the State of Israel. As a coalition of five Arab nations formed to destroy the new Jewish state – announced along with another Arab state, with Jerusalem as its international zone – the secretary general of the Arab League boasted that the war would be brief and that Palestine’s half a million Jews would be thrown into the sea within days.
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