Antisemitic abuse has increased by more than a third in the past year, according to a register of incidents kept by Australian Jewish groups.
A Bondi gang attack on five Jewish people, two of them aged over 60, and a Jewish family being pelted with dirt from a car after leaving a synagogue were among the incidents logged in an annual report on antisemitism by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).
Also recorded was the August attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren by drunken teenagers, one of more than 75 incidents of verbal harassment and physical intimidation detailed in the report. The number of physical assaults tripled to 15.
Overall there were 312 incidents of antisemitism recorded, an increase of 35% on the previous year. The ECAJ attributed the rise to the 50-day conflict between Hamas and Israel in July and August, and the “hostile media coverage” it sparked.
Hate speech increasingly originated online, the report found, noting a sharp drop in threats by mail and a spike in abusive emails and Facebook messages. This “may well reflect a shift to a younger demographic as the source of antisemitic hate messages”, the council said.
It warned of an “escalating use of antisemitic motifs” in the mainstream media, singling out claims by the former foreign minister, Bob Carr, that Australian politics was subject to a “very unhealthy influence” by a pro-Israel lobby, and a Sydney Morning Herald cartoon in July that “unambiguously portrayed an ugly stereotype of a Jew”.
The cartoon by Glen Le Lievre, depicting a man on a couch emblazoned with the Star of David using a remote control to blow up Gazan homes – echoing television scenes of Israeli villagers cheering the bombing of Gaza City – was retracted by Fairfax Media in August.
ECAJ has produced the annual report for more than two decades. The record year was 2009, which saw 962 antisemitic incidents logged.
