The Australian Labor government launched a $6 million Social Cohesion Education Hub (SCE Hub) on June 30, to ‘address antisemitism and support respectful, inclusive and welcoming learning environments’.
The SCE Hub is a website that ostensibly ‘provides access to free, quality assured resources, professional learning and guidance to support educators to address antisemitism and other forms of racism and strengthen social cohesion in schools and early childhood education centres’.
Overall, the SCE Hub dangerously misses the mark.
Instead of inoculating Australian children against racism, antisemitic lies, and hatred the SCE Hub resources are contradictory, and ideologically constrained. The SCE Hub, rather than inducting children in a common culture that fosters liberty, equality, tolerance, and civic responsibility, by attempting to insert antisemitism education into an ‘antiracism framework’, reinforces an ideology that increases grievance, racism and division.
Instead of providing a short series of clear lesson plans this Hub is using antisemitism as a vehicle to force more political activism and partisan talking points into the curriculum.
A telling inclusion in the SCE Hub is a resource about the Manosphere.
Curiously, the document does not mention the antisemitic conspiracy theories promoted by the grifters and misogynists of the ‘manosphere’. Yet it ties ‘manosphere influencers’ to ‘conservative political communities’ and critics of ‘diversity, inclusion, and anti-discrimination initiatives’, critics of ‘woke-ism’, cancel culture and political correctness.
The internet is full of the worst mankind has to offer, including Andrew Tate and his facsimiles, preying on the young, ignorant, and aggrieved. However, the resource presents a ‘manosphere’ dragnet that encompasses all not-on-board with increasingly authoritarian left-wing activism – a reflexive accusation that increases polarisation and is used to justify censorship and repression.
Any resistance to their subversive cultural revolution (even the promotion of personal responsibility of making your bed) is painted as an inevitable trajectory towards misogynistic extremism and ‘gendered violence’.
Where is the equivalent document discussing left-wing extremism that is dominated by female activists and academics who glorify violence?
With Australian teachers and students celebrating convicted terrorist Leila Khaled, glorifying the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell, or the indicted murderer Luigi Mangione?
Or the overlap between ‘manosphere’ influencers and Islamic extremism: Tate has publicly embraced Islam and an Australian hate preacher who spreads his message on the Salafist One Path Network, and preaches to young boys in Sydney mosques, yet is barred from entering the UK and Europe, for his Jew-hatred, support of Hamas, and for telling his hundreds of thousands of followers on social media that child rapists who abuse children on a daily basis, but pray, are better in the eyes of Allah than people who commit no sins at all but do not pray.
What I find revealing about this resource is its inability to reflect upon decades of feminist misandry, mainstream attacks on ‘cis-heteronormativity’ or broken homes that leave young boys bereft of positive male role models.
‘The future is female’ is not a movement for equality – but an inversion of hierarchy.
A culture of grievance and discrimination (affirmative action and quotas is discrimination against young men) in the name of righting past wrongs was bound (even intended) to inspire a regressive backlash.
The vacuum that pulls young boys to the online cults of Tate and Co. is instructive because a similar moral vacuum pulls young adults towards the mirror cults of left and right-wing antisemitism.
We Jews are a people, a nation – Am Israel – a joinable people with a religion. Yet the new SCE Hub resource for Increasing Knowledge about Jews and Judaism introduces Jews as ‘a heterogeneous group of people with different national origins, physical characteristics, and various levels and types of religiosity’ that emerged ‘as a distinct group in the Middle East in the second millennium BCE’. The emphasis on heterogeneity, ‘with different national origins’ dilutes, fractures and thereby delegitimises Jewish nationhood and Jewish ancestral origins in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel).
It seems doubtful that this fact sheet was written by Jewish people – page five calls the nine-branch candelabra a ‘Chanukah’.
This same Fact Sheet seeks to explain how to dispel the mistaken belief that ‘all Jews are Israelis’ stating that this misunderstanding ‘can be a dangerous one, as it can lead to Jews being closely identified with the policies of the current government in Israel’. Obviously not all Jews are Israelis, however the idea that connecting Jews to Israel or Zionism is antisemitic or dangerous is common in anti-Zionist discourse, mistakenly believing that antisemitism can be countered by severing the connection between Jews and their ancestral homeland. Where once the Nazis and their collaborators mobilised state apparatuses for the sole purpose of exterminating Jews, the modern anti-Zionist uses language games to erase Jewish peoplehood and rights. Instead of helping to increase understanding of Jewish peoplehood and Jewish civilisation SCE Hub resources corroborate anti-Zionist narratives of Israel being a colonial settler state by failing to assert Jewish nationhood, born in the land of Israel.
If it is to meet its own purported mandate, the SCE hub should be providing resources that inoculate young students against Jew-hatred. To do this it needs to be very clear in defining Jews as a people indigenous to Israel and anti-Zionism as antisemitism.
The almost complete omission of Zionism and anti-Zionism from the SCE Hub – except for one resource – shows that it is woefully inadequate to tackle the current pervasive form of institutionally sanctioned antisemitism: anti-Zionism.
The only resource to mention Zionism, Educate against Hate, writes: ‘Anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic (for example if someone is generally anti-nationalism and believes in abolishing nation-states) but it can be, if for example criticism of Israel goes beyond that of its government’s policies and uses antisemitic tropes.’ This legitimises anti-Zionism with a non-existent hypothetical. Without ever defining anti-Zionism this resource mystifies concepts that demand moral clarity.
Another resource: Racism No Way: Antiracism Education for Australian Schools, features antisemitism in a category of religious discrimination and states that, ‘Antisemitism and Islamophobia have been identified by some academics as contemporary forms of racism.’
The video on that page defines Islamophobia ‘as a form of racism – that’s why we call it anti-Muslim racism’. Islamophobia is not racism, they are distinct phenomena; like Christianity, Islam is a universalist proselytising religion, and not a race. Anti-Muslim prejudice, bigotry, discrimination, hostility etc. all exist and require scrutiny but it is a category error to state it is racism.
We can track the inception of this tactical ‘racialisation’ that is now ubiquitous.
In 2015 Mariam Veiszadeh, the founder of Islamophobia Register Australia, wrote:
‘The category of an ethnoreligious group was created to cope with anti-Semitism as a special form of racism. This was the right move, in my view. This grouping was created because this particular group of vulnerable people went through a process of “racialisation” over time.’
She could not be more wrong: Jews have always been a people, an ethnos – Jew-hatred has had racial elements for centuries before Nazi racial laws.
For instance the limpieza de sangre ‘purity of blood’ codes of the Spanish Inquisition or Arab racial invective against Jews: the Arabic writer al-Jahiz (d.869) wrote:
‘Our people [Muslims] observing the occupations of the Jews and the Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavourable as do their profession, and that their unbelief must be the foulest of all, since they are the filthiest of all nations… The Jewish race therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys and pigeons are inbred.’
Veiszadeh shamelessly argues that Islam should be seen as an ethnoreligion like Judaism, not because Muslims are in fact an ethnoreligion but rather because to not do so denies protections to Muslims afforded Jews.
Antisemitism is hostility toward Jews as a collectivity, manifested as a denigration of, malicious lies, discrimination, political mobilisation, and violence against Jews – as individuals, as a people, as a religious community, as an ethnic group, or as a nation. Antisemitism, although it functions often as racism, reducing it only to racism (as unfortunately even the Jewish Museum does in its resources Antisemitism is Racism) simplifies a complex and mutating form of hatred, and obscures the way antisemitism functions as a conspiracy theory. Antisemitism, to quote Matti Friedman, ‘…is using Jews to illustrate the evil you see in the world.’
The repeated equation of Islamophobia with antisemitism throughout this Racism No Way: Antiracism Education for Australian Schools resource is alarming. This is important because in order to fight antisemitism our society must contend with Islamic antisemitism. Criticism of anti-Jewish Islamic invective, often sourced in the Qur’an and Hadith is reflexively suppressed as Islamophobia.
The SCE Hub links to the vic.gov ARC Holocaust Education guidance, Why Study the Holocaust — there is no mention of Jews or antisemitism. On a linked page Holocaust Education Resources it offers guidance for school leaders:
‘If programs are seen as political or religious: Holocaust education is historical learning that also helps prevent racism and discrimination. It is not about religion or political views. Antisemitism is taught as one form of discrimination among many, and the focus is not on current conflicts but on helping students recognise and challenge hatred.’
This defensive stance and ‘decentering’ of Jews from the Holocaust to appease students/parents who oppose the teaching of history is disturbing. The implication is that Jewish specificity is somehow incidental or even inconvenient to a universalist message. This generalised treatment of the Holocaust as a ‘lesson’ to teach students how to ‘recognise the causes and consequences of prejudice, discrimination and genocide’ is so often why Holocaust education quickly becomes instruction in Holocaust inversion.
Not long ago I walked passed graffiti in a child-like hand ‘Free Palestine. Who occupies Israel – the Jews. Still think the good guys won WWII?’
When Jews are painted as the new Nazis, the Holocaust, instead of inspiring horror and compassion, is retrospectively given new justification. This Holocaust inversion, we see, describing the war in Gaza as a genocide, propaganda of Netanyahu as Hitler, the Star of David distorted into swastikas, is a product of teaching the Holocaust through the lens of ‘antiracist’ and decolonial ideology.
Emblematic of this turn is the SCE Hub’s provision of the NSW Department of Education’s Racism No Way’s: Anti-racism education for Australian Schools. A section on White Privilege with an American video that starts with ‘from the moment a white person is born they are afforded certain privileges.’
This is racism. This is an importation of American Critical Race Theory into Australian schools. The website then provides a student activity ‘Privilege for Sale’ developed by the Safe Zone Project ‘to achieve an understanding of privilege and oppression’. This is an ideology based on incontestable axioms; denying ‘white privilege’ is a sign of ‘white fragility’ and further proof of systemic racism.
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism promotes ‘combatting antisemitism within Australia’s Anti-Racism Framework’ developed by the AHRC. This approach is fundamentally flawed. There is a gulf between what the general public understands ‘antiracism’ to represent and the ideology espoused by the AHRC and ‘antiracism’ academics and teachers.
‘Antiracism’ is an ideology – distinct from opposing and tackling racism. It is Critical Race Theory praxis. The important thing to understand about praxis – the union of theory and action – is that it is at work without any theory being explicitly taught – it is evident in the ‘de-centering’ of the Western cannon and science, constant emphasis on power, race, oppression, and privilege.
It perpetuates antisemitism first by defining racism as bigotry plus power.
Resources in the SCE Hub use this definition. In the year 6 Lesson Plan, on Multiculturalism Attitudes and Perspectives provided by the Department of Education, racism is defined ‘as the process by which systems and policies, actions, and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race. It occurs when this prejudice – whether individual or institutional – is accompanied by the power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others any individual action or institutional practice which treats people differently because of their colour or ethnicity’.
By redefining racism as a systemic power dynamic, ‘antiracism’ divides individuals into rigid groups of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ based on their race. ‘Antiracism’ explicitly rejects ‘colour blind’ justice and requires treating people differently based on ethnicity/skin colour. Progressive ‘antiracism’ and de-colonial ideology, hijacks instincts for justice and fairness and smuggles in antisemitic ideas through this oppressor/oppressed binary.
‘Antiracism’ then excludes white people as potential victims of racism. Giridharan Sivaraman, the Race Discrimination Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission, asserted in his 2024 presentation How to be an anti-racist in the workplace that ‘…racism is rarely about race. It’s usually about power and privilege. Structural racism ensures that power and privilege is maintained by the dominant race. In Australia that dominancy is white. It is white Anglo race, culture, and identity which remains dominant, and structurally so.’
As part of their Racism. It Stops With Me Campaign, the AHRC released a document responding to the Myth of Anti-White racism:
‘Can white people experience racism? Whilst white people can experience multiple forms of discrimination or prejudice based on gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, or class; they cannot experience racism. Racism is more than just prejudice, and is accompanied by power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others.’
What goes unwritten is the assumption that Jews are ‘white’.
As Harvard psychologist Pamela Paresky writes, ‘Jews who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as “white” by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.’
Many antisemites, including ‘antiracists’, categorise Jews as white by resurrecting the disproven and antisemitic Khazar theory. Where past antisemitic libel saw Jews as non-white ‘semitic’ rootless cosmopolitans and race polluters, antiracist zealotry views the ‘Zionist’ as the uber-white settler-colonial oppressor: ‘An embodiment of supremacy, privilege, and dispossession.’
By linking Jewish identity to ‘white privilege’, ‘antiracist’ ideology sees Jews as having intolerable, undeserved hyper-privilege that must be stripped.
Jewish-ness (especially that of Ashkenazi Jews) is equated with ‘White Supremacy’.
By categorising Jews as powerful, and as ‘white’ – corroborating antisemitic tropes about Jewish power, wealth and privilege – Jews are racially invalidated as potential victims of racism: antisemitism is disqualified by antisemitic tropes. The Holocaust and millennia of expulsion, persecution and pogroms are held in resentment, envy or suspicion as disingenuous shields against criticism.
Failing to teach about Jewish origins in the land of Israel, and presenting a distorted ideological definition of racism, unfortunately the SCE Hub, by trying to insert antisemitism education into an ‘antiracism’ framework, is unable to help inoculate against Jew-hatred in Australian schools.
‘Antiracism’ is the wrong vehicles for tackling antisemitism. Not only because the institutions that endorse these policies persistently ignore antisemitism and are helmed by antisemitic activists, but because dogmatically and in practice, the ideology of ‘antiracism’ promotes antisemitism.
‘Antiracism’ by first defining racism as bigotry plus power and then disqualifying Jews as potential victims of racism, perpetuates antisemitism. ‘Antiracist’ ideology classifies Jews as white settler-colonialist oppressors. In this way many ‘antiracist’ scholars and activists defend terrorism as decolonial and ‘antiracist’ action. Discrimination, hate and terrorism (re-styled as resistance) are justified and seen as moral and a political good.
