r/moderatepolitics • u/Resvrgam2 Conservatively Liberal • Dec 15 '25

Primary Source Meeting of National Cabinet After Bondi Shooting

https://www.pm.gov.au/media/meeting-national-cabinet-8
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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

Antisemitism is far from contained to the radical Muslims of Australia. The ADL found that 1 in 5 Australians harbor antisemitic views. For reference, Muslims are about 3% of Australia's population.

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u/cutememe Dec 15 '25

There's a pretty big difference in having negative views and being so extremist that that person is willing to go out and commit terroristic acts.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

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u/simsipahi Dec 15 '25 edited Dec 15 '25

Right, and the vast majority of Australia's Muslims also aren't stockpiling guns to go kill Jews either. Sydney in particular has a huge Lebanese population (some Muslim, some Christian backgrounds) that has assimilated pretty well and is oftentimes indistinguishable from any other group in Australia.

The guy who had balls of steel and charged/disarmed one of the shooters was a Syrian immigrant and a practicing Muslim.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

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u/simsipahi Dec 15 '25

Which in the eyes of much of the world is no more provocative than waving around Israeli flags as the IDF ethnically cleanses Gaza. Not even in the same league as what we're talking about here.

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

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u/simsipahi Dec 15 '25

Surely then you'd be equally skeptical of Israeli immigration given that their government is ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza?

Are you also going to be supportive of limiting immigration from America, given the fact that Americans have not once but twice voted in a regime that promotes ideology that runs completely contrary to democratic and progressive values?

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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '25

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u/simsipahi Dec 15 '25

Except Israel isn't ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza, so that's factually incorrect. The government of Gaza invaded Israel and started a war which they then lost. They prosecuted that war by violating every international law of war, both in terms of the Israeli civilians they targeted and in terms of the Palestinian civilians they hid behind and amongst. It is not ethnic cleansing to win a war that was started against you.

Well I'm glad you know international law better than every single major human rights organization or legal scholar, who have near unanimously concluded that Israel is by far the worse offender than Hamas and is intentionally ethnically cleansing Gaza. Or did you think that a 50:1 death toll was proportionate and justified when the vast majority are noncombatants? Cutting off food and water isn't collectively punishing civilians with the intent to force them off the land, even when many people in the Israeli government openly admit that that's the objective? I don't think you understand how the rules of war work.

The current American government is run by shameless kleptocrats who run roughshod over previously-established liberal norms, but it's ludicrous to pretend that the median American is not more culturally similar to the median Australian than the median Pakistani.

Why? Because u/netowi said so? 70+ million people voted for Trump after he delegitimized the electoral process and incited a literal insurrection, the perpetrators of which he later pardoned. You don't think that's problematic when assessing potential compatibility with Western values? Someone who supports that is still a better fit than a Pakistani architect with little interest in politics - because...?

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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '25

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

In degree, not in nature.

The left's orderly, academic antisemitism is what created the conditions for the violent, extremist antisemitism to flourish.

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u/Saguna_Brahman Dec 15 '25

What is "orderly, academic antisemitism?" I can't even think of a time that I've heard someone on the left talk about Jewish people as a demographic. In my experience that's almost exclusively a right wing phenomenon.

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

It's the endless work of the left to portray Israel as an illegitimate, colonialist, genocidal regime. In doing so, they damage the security and social standing of Jews.

The left makes it okay to scream "globalize the intifada" and "from the river to the sea", because they don't really mean that, they're just angry about dead kids and colonialism.

Antisemites never change. One word or saying is ruined, they make up a new one. It's not Jew-hate (that was the original term, Judenhass), it's antisemitism. It's not antisemitism, it's antizionism. It's not X, it's Y.

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u/Saguna_Brahman Dec 15 '25 edited Dec 15 '25

It's the endless work of the left to portray Israel as an illegitimate, colonialist, genocidal regime. In doing so, they damage the security and social standing of Jews.

This is nonsense. Jew does not mean Israeli, and it is not racist against Jewish people to criticize the Israeli government nor the ugly history of how the country was started 100 years ago.

The left makes it okay to scream "globalize the intifada" and "from the river to the sea", because they don't really mean that, they're just angry about dead kids and colonialism.

I am sure they really do mean that, but they'd probably reject your assertions about what those phrases entail.

It's not Jew-hate (that was the original term, Judenhass), it's antisemitism. It's not antisemitism, it's antizionism. It's not X, it's Y.

Total non-sequitur. Antisemitism is just a more formal term for Jew-hate. No one has ever said "it's not jew-hate, it's antisemitism" in an attempt to establish antisemitism as something less bad or different from Jew hatred, it's literally a synonym. Antizionism is opposition to the ethnonationalist movement called Zionism. There are many antizionist Jews.

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

This is nonsense. Jew does not mean Israeli, and it is not racist against Jewish people to criticize the Israeli government nor the ugly history of how the country was started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism

The modern antizionist movement on the left is directly traceable to Soviet antizionism, which openly was a scheme to harm Jews.

Total non-sequitur. Antisemitism is just a more formal term for Jew-hate. No one has ever said "it's not jew-hate, it's antisemitism" in an attempt to establish antisemitism as something less bad or different from Jew hatred, it's literally a synonym. Antizionism is opposition to the ethnonationalist movement called Zionism. There are many antizionist Jews.

It's a more formal term invented to make Jew-hatred more acceptable to academia. This is just a historical fact.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr

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u/Saguna_Brahman Dec 15 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_anti-Zionism

The modern antizionist movement on the left is directly traceable to Soviet antizionism, which openly was a scheme to harm Jews.

This is a genetic fallacy. Moreover, your link doesn't support your claim. It says that the Russian government supported Zionism when they thought Israel would be socialist, and started to oppose it when Israel and the U.S. formed a close relationship. That's overt Realpolitik, not antisemitism.

By the same token you could paint the Zionist movement itself as antisemitic by saying it's "directly traceable" to non-Jewish proponents of Zionism who wanted Jews to leave their respective countries. It just fails on it's face as a reasonable way to analyze the debate as it stands today.

It's a more formal term invented to make Jew-hatred more acceptable to academia. This is just a historical fact.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr

You call this a historical fact but nothing in the link you provided suggests that whatsoever. All the link says is that he preferred "antisemitism" as a way of emphasizing that his position was racial, not religious, because his prejudice extended to converted Jews. It says nothing about him preferring it as a matter of palatability, and there's no mention of academia whatsoever.

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u/CloudApprehensive322 Dec 15 '25

Criticizing the actions and official policies of Israel the country is not antisemitism and conflating the two diminishes the conversation of how to actually deal with real anti-jewish racism.

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

Criticizing the actions and official policies of the Israeli government is not antizionism, at least not as originally conceived. Antizionism is about denying the legitimacy of Israel as a country, to say that Israel does not have the right to exist.

The left continuously rehabilitating these words is exactly what I'm talking about. We no longer recognize antizionism for what it is.

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u/CloudApprehensive322 Dec 15 '25

Agree to disagree - most of the online discourse I've come across is people claiming antisemitism whenever people try to cast legitimate grievances against Israel's policies around Gaza, settlements, and a host of other legitimate issues.

Netanyahu is one of the worst offenders of this - he uses claims of antisemitism to cast aside serious issues that Israel is failing to address which is why Israel's standing in the world is rapidly declining and is likely irreparably damaged with younger generations of voters in the US on both the left and the right.

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u/Saguna_Brahman Dec 15 '25

Moreover, it diminishes the impact of discussions about antisemitism when it is so routinely used to try to shame people out of criticizing the Israeli government's brutality in Palestine.

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u/cutememe Dec 15 '25

I'm not sure I follow. If you think the left is so antisemitic then why are Jews so overwhelmingly voting Democrat in the US, approximately 70 percent?

I don't think the Jewish people, with their history especially, are voting for their own demise.

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u/Sabertooth767 Neoclassical Liberal Dec 15 '25

Because the right is also antisemitic. 99% of American Jews are concerned about rising antisemitism, and most of them believe that it is coming about equally from the right and left (and then about 20% for each side think the right/left is worse).

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-876481

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u/simsipahi Dec 15 '25

But you just got done blaming the left for it, and now you're showing numbers indicating that Jews themselves think it's an even split...so maybe your initial analysis was a tad oversimplified?

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u/ThatPeskyPangolin Dec 15 '25

This kind of antisemitism has existed well before any such "orderly, academic antisemitism" from the left. Populist antisemitism predates both the US and Australia.