Address, The Second International Conference on Anti-Semitism
“Keeping Wolves from the Flock: The Case for Good Religion to Fight Anti-Semitism”
27 January 2026 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Binyaney Ha’uma Conference Center, Jerusalem, Israel
Following the end of the Second World War, Australia became a place of refuge for Holocaust survivors seeking a new and peaceful life. Those survivors became part of the broader Australian success story of post-war migration that produced what I believe has been the most successful immigration and multicultural nation on earth.
Today, one in two Australians is either born overseas or has at least one parent who was. We have become a global standard-bearer for cultural diversity and social cohesion.
The events of December 14, when two extreme Islamist terrorists, a father and his son, opened fire on a joyous and innocent gathering of Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach, forfeited Australia’s claim to that story.
The place to which Jewish people once fled has become a place many Jewish Australians now fear. This is a desecration. We are a broken-hearted nation. But for our Jewish community, we are a nation that has broken its promise to them. A promise of safety and freedom from persecution and fear.
The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned that “when antisemitism becomes violent, it represents the first and clearest sign of a civilisation in crisis,” and that “the hate that begins with the Jews does not end with the Jews.”
After the worst mass terrorist attack on a Jewish community anywhere in the world since October 7, Australians must confront not only the security and intelligence failures exposed by these attacks, but the fragility of our own society that was shredded by the antisemitism unleashed in Australia after October 7, long before these murders were committed.
According to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, in the two years following the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, antisemitic incidents in Australia increased five-fold, from an annual average of 343 over the previous decade to an average of 1,659 in 2024 and 2025. There were more incidents in those two years than in the previous eleven years combined.
Within 48 hours of October 7, pro-Palestinian protestors gathered at the Sydney Opera House chanting violent antisemitic slogans. Regular protests followed in Sydney and Melbourne over the next two years, culminating in an estimated 100,000 people marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge alongside those calling for a globalised intifada, death to the Israel Defense Forces, the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” and even the display of portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali observed of similar protests in the UK, many participants were compassionate people seeking peace, but they chose to march side by side with those promoting hatred.
During this period in Australia, Jewish professionals, artists and journalists were doxxed. Jewish businesses were targeted and forced to close. Homes were vandalised with violent slogans. Synagogues were attacked, including firebombings while worshippers were inside. Jewish students were ostracised on campus, and academics intimidated into silence or conformity with a rigid activist orthodoxy on Israel.
At the policy level, the Albanese Labor Government ended 75 years of bipartisan support for Israel by unilaterally recognising Palestinian statehood, a move praised by Hamas itself.
In this environment, it is unsurprising that radicalised Islamists bent on violence convinced themselves their moment had arrived and that another Australian icon, Bondi Beach, should be the scene of their atrocity.
Australia must now write a new chapter and honour those we mourn by confronting hard truths. This story must begin with disarming Antisemitism, which was the primary weapon responsible for the December 14 attacks.
Dr Jordan Peterson has warned, like Rabbi Sacks, that “the Jews are the eternal canary in the coal mine,” and that their persecution signals the collapse of a society. Antisemitism, he argues, is a by-product of resentment, not reason, where malice replaces self-examination.
On the progressive Left, it is rooted in neo-Marxist identity frameworks that reclassify Jews from a historic minority to an “oppressor class,” with Israel used as a proxy for animus that already exists. As Peterson has said repeatedly, “anti-Zionism functions psychologically as antisemitism with plausible deniability.” It also conveniently aligns with fashionable anti-US, anti-capitalist and globalist narratives, where Israel and Jews are treated as a shopfront for US led Western imperialism.
On the radical Right, antisemitism takes conspiratorial and ethno-nationalist forms. Peterson condemns this outright as intellectually primitive, myth-based and historically catastrophic. It is a pathetic projection of personal failure and insecurity.
In all its forms, antisemitism flourishes where responsibility is replaced by grievance politics. Liberal societies depend on individual moral agency. When failure is moralised as systemic injustice, liberal norms collapse. Individual responsibility is excused in the name of grievance and Institutions - universities, cultural bodies, media and even religious organisations - that become infected with this culture become seeding grounds for those who wish to destroy the very liberal society they are supposed to nourish and protect.
All of these antisemitic strains and influences exist in Australia and must be addressed by the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and implementation of the recommendations of the Special Envoy for Anti-Semitism. However, given the specific involvement of radicalised extremist Islam in the Bondi terrorist attacks, Australia’s response must pay explicit and specific attention to this issue. And I’m not just talking about immigration.
The December 14 terrorists were homegrown. Their radicalisation did not take place in a Madrasa in South East Asia or Afghanistan or an Iranian Hawza, but in the suburbs of south west Sydney. The father arrived decades ago from India on a student visa and his son was born in Australia.
Extremist Islamist antisemitism draws on all the threads identified by Peterson. It is not a religion but an ideology that weaponises faith for political ends. Within it, antisemitism is not incidental, it is core doctrine. Selective religious references are fused with imported European conspiracy theories, recasting Jews as a hidden enemy responsible for global disorder. Israel is not treated as a state to debate, but as proof of a Jewish conspiracy that must be annihilated - ‘from the river to the sea’.
This pattern is consistent across movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and ISIS. Antisemitism becomes a tool to simplify grievance, deflect responsibility and justify violence. It is a mechanism of radicalisation, not a side-effect.
In a Western secular context, Rabbi Sacks argued that the answer to such antisemitism was not less religion, but better religion. He quoted Jonathan Swift who said “we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love”.
Sacks warned against the pathological dualism of extremist belief systems where enemies are dehumanised and victimhood weaponised, paving the way for cruelty committed in the name of God. It would be comforting to believe the perpetrators were simply bad people. The truth is more disturbing.
Good religion, Sacks argued, looks inward. It recognises that the struggle between good and evil, faith and fear, retribution and forgiveness is first and foremost an individual one, a human one that rages within each of us. Extremism externalises that struggle and too often onto a real battlefield as we saw on October 7 and December 14.
For this reason, Sacks warned against the marginalisation of religion in Western democracies as an antidote and even a trend. Such dualism is equally present in secular politics.
The answer is not to blame faith, but to enlist faith and religion in our response. Good religion strengthens the art of association that de Tocqueville identified as the foundation of free societies. Properly grounded faith can anchor unity in humility and shared human frailty.
Many Islamic states seem to have shown a better understanding of these issues than liberal western democracies. Over the past decade, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Oman, as well as Egypt and Jordan, have taken deliberate action to confront radical Islamist ideology. They have reasserted state authority over religious teaching, standardised sermons, licensed imams, and shut down informal or foreign-funded networks that acted as vectors for extremism.
Political Islam has been curtailed. The Muslim Brotherhood has been designated or treated as extremist. Funding channels disrupted. Charities re-regulated. Overseas ideological influence constrained. Education curricula revised to remove antisemitism and sectarian incitement.
The UAE has gone further, building a formal counter-extremism architecture, including controls on education. Just last June it excluded UK universities from scholarship recognition to prevent their students being radicalised on UK campuses.
While such state centric measures would not always align with the principles of western liberal democracies, in particular freedom of religion, there are lessons to be learned. No freedom is absolute and with such freedom always comes with responsibility.
In western liberal societies religious leaders have responsibilities not only to their congregations, but to the wider society. Religious institutions must maintain sound governance to ensure proper teaching, accountability and discipline.
Christian denominations in Australia learned this painfully through the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Accountability was rightly imposed and reforms followed.
While strong structures exist for most Christian and Jewish denominations, the governance of Islamic institutions in Australia is inadequate and requires reform.
Islamic leaders have a pastoral duty to protect their communities from radicalisation. I believe most take this responsibility very seriously, however, stronger institutional frameworks would assist them and would also expose those who do not share their commitment.
It is time that Islamic institutions in Australia adopted nationally consistent, self-regulated standards, including a recognised accreditation framework for imams, a national register for public-facing roles, clear training and conduct requirements, and disciplinary authority for their governing councils. This requires a peak body that goes beyond representation to be given the authority and tools to enforce membership standards. This does not currently exist.
Religious education should promote coexistence, civic responsibility and respect for Australia’s pluralism, explicitly rejecting antisemitism, sectarianism and incitement. Teaching should be transparent, with English translations available. Religious leaders must also clearly reject political Islam and transnational movements that weaponise faith for power rather than worship and warn their faithful about such movements.
Mosques and Islamic organisations should commit to safeguarding standards, supported by independent complaints and review bodies with audit powers that extend to dangerous teaching and unhealthy influencers, particularly among the young.
Stronger governance also requires proper incorporation, capable boards, conflict-of-interest controls and transparent financial reporting, especially where overseas funding is involved.
Specifically Australia’s Foreign Interest Transparency Scheme should be expanded to capture foreign funding, direction, training, doctrinal alignment or governance links with overseas religious authorities, currently limited to only where overt political lobbying occurs. This creates a structural blind spot for foreign-funded religious networks, clerics appointed, trained or paid by overseas bodies long-term ideological or organisational alignment short of formal lobbying.
For the overwhelming majority of Australian Muslims, and Imams, these reforms should change little. They are not designed to police the mainstream, but to protect it from a potentially very dangerous and even deadly fringe.
Where similar weaknesses exist in other faiths, including my own, the same reforms and requirements should apply.
And where institutional safeguards are absent for any such religious organisations, favourable tax treatment and public funding should not be granted. This is not the state dictating belief, but holding religious leaders accountable for what they preach and permit in their religious community and requiring them to exercise that responsibility. It is the least they should do.
These reforms, led from within communities rather than imposed by government, would preserve freedom of religion, strengthen credible leadership, protect the vulnerable and rebuild trust.
Some will seek to characterise these remarks as hostile to Australia’s Islamic community and even multiculturalism itself, trolling out the usual accusations of Islamophobia. To the contrary, I am advocating reforms that I believe will help religious leaders in our Islamic community keep the wolves from their flock. To treat such issues as taboo serves only those who wish to keep these influences opaque and in the dark, where our two home grown extreme islamist terrorists were radicalised.
After December 14, all options to combat antisemitism, must be on the table without fear or favour, this includes how Islam is practiced and governed in Australia.
