Driven by the overwhelming insistence of Australians, Anthony Albanese – increasingly afraid to appear in public – finally agreed to a royal commission into antisemitism.

No one would have been surprised by his typically devious suggestion that the government had been working to achieve this.

He is clearly a faithful student of the most devious politician Europe ever produced, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who believed that ‘speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts’.

Opposed to a royal commission, Mr Albanese’s reserve position – easily developed when you have 61 personal staff – is to ensure he and Labor are shielded from blame for Labor’s own two-decade-long unlawful abandonment of the Jewish community.

Betrayed for electoral advantage, and condoned by Left ideology, antisemitic toleration was raised to a crescendo with the officially chaperoned and effectively protected riot by antisemitic thugs at the Opera House, followed by two years of violence and culminating in the horrific blood-letting at Bondi Beach.

Let us hope the royal commission will not swallow the line that Mr Albanese and his cohorts were so naïve as to believe that their stepping up the official toleration of antisemitism would not make such an attack more likely.

This tolerance has long been a hallmark of Labor in office, extending into law enforcement, immigration, and even foreign policy, where Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s adherence to Australia’s bipartisan position on Palestine’s UN status was reversed by Foreign Minister Bob Carr, reportedly arguing: ‘How can I defend that policy from the steps of the Lakemba Mosque?’

That this tolerance is morally wrong is self-evident; that it is unlawful is clear.

Despite class actions probably being readied in lawyers’ chambers, it says much for the integrity of the Jewish community that they have not yet pursued mass civil litigation to right this wrong, as far as damages can.

And although High Court justices find much when they peer into the penumbrae or shadows of our Constitution, to date, a majority has not been persuaded to find the general right to equal protection that logic and common sense tell us must be somewhere there (Leeth v. Commonwealth; Krueger v. Commonwealth).

This is especially true when we are reminded that not so long ago, the High Court justices – yet again peering into the shadows – effectively accorded such a protection to the lowest of the low: violent criminal aliens. In the landmark case NZYQ v. Minister for Immigration, the Court ruled that the government cannot indefinitely detain aliens, even those with criminal records, when deportation is not prospective.

So, how acceptable will it be if, after the horrors of Bondi, Jewish Australians continue to be denied a similar level of protection through the proper exercise of the executive police power and the judicial power, all because of a long-ago deal stitched up across Labor’s factions – a deal that the Devil himself could have designed?

How fortunate it is that as long ago as 2004, a man of principle – Labor’s own Barry Cohen – went to the Age to reveal that antisemitism was rampant in Labor. Like some latter-day John the Baptist, he called on his colleagues to repent.

They did not.

Like Kevin Rudd, they chose to ‘see no evil’.

The NZYQ reasoning officially depends on the separation of powers.

Surely the protection of Jewish citizens to the level normal for everybody else depends on the proper exercise of various powers, police and judicial.

Common sense insists that all this must also be there in those shadows of our Constitution where, incidentally, also lurks the Prime Minister – as the proponents of the ‘politicians’ republic’ lamented in 1999.

They assumed Australians would be so outraged to know the prime minister is not named in the Constitution that they would instantly give him the unheard-of power to sack a president without notice, without grounds, and without any right of review or appeal.

But with their usual common sense, Australians knew better.

In any event, absent a general right to equal protection, the toleration of antisemitism must involve a veritable string of criminal offences: misconduct in public office, perversion of the course of justice, and conspiracy, alongside the civil tort of misfeasance in public office.

So, the royal commission must go back to at least 2003, when evidence of governments’ abandonment of Jews became undeniable.

Albanese’s capitulation comes too late for the innocents slaughtered at Bondi Beach, a day that should have been defined by the light of Hanukkah but was instead stained by blood.

This rot was famously made manifest in 1990 with the decision to reward extremist Sheik al-Hilaly with residency after blocking his intended deportation by Labor backstabbing a Labor minister trying to do the right thing.

The message to antisemitic thugs was clear: your vice is Labor Party-approved.

The result was a modern-day Jizya, a ‘security tax’ the Jewish community has to pay for the protection everyone else is entitled to without additional charge.

By appointing Justice Virginia Bell as sole commissioner, Mr Albanese is banking on protecting the Labor machine.

Justice Bell’s history with the ‘implied freedom of political communication’, is about the wide and unpredictable discretion judges enjoy regarding legislation restricting speech.

I had unsuccessfully argued for the Press Council in the leading case Lange v. ABC  that it should resemble the US First Amendment.

Under the High Court’s formulation as applied by Justice Bell and others, legislation protecting abortion clinic ‘safe zones’ was upheld in Clubb v. Edwards, but legislation protecting workplaces in Brown v. Tasmania was rejected. As a result, this freedom has permitted the far left to occupy our inner cities and endlessly pronounce genocidal slogans like ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’.

To break the shield the Prime Minister envisions, we need three royal commissioners. Justice Bell, as a progressive, should be joined by two others of different backgrounds, I suggested here.

The royal commission must not skirt around the heart of the matter: the long and unlawful governmental toleration of lethal antisemitism. It is difficult to contemplate a more egregious example of misconduct in public office in the history of this Commonwealth.