'Anti-Jewish racism ... [is] not generally coming from the neo-Nazis'

Note: this article contains examples of racist and antisemitic language and violence.

Last week Joel Schneider at Red Flag published a great rundown of how the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s annual ‘Report on Antisemitism in Australia’ conflates opposition to Zionism and pro-Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism, and how it’s also appallingly lazy and badly written.

I’m annoyed with myself that Joel got to the report before I did, because it’s been on my radar for a while. It receives enormous amounts of media attention every year and is regularly cited as the authoritative source on levels of antisemitism in the community, even as it counts expressions of opposition to Israeli apartheid alongside Nazi graffiti scrawled outside Jewish schools.

The most recent report only covered the year ending September 30, 2023; ECAJ has flagged that its next report will have a particular focus on expressions of anti-Zionism in the year-plus since October 7, which means that comethe next one there’ll be an avalanche of “huge rise in antisemitism” articles based off ECAJ including every “Boycott Israel” sign at a Palestine protest.

It’s worth it, then, to dig a bit deeper into the ECAJ report to illustrate how atrociously bad it is, and how wild it is that the media widely accepts it as the gold standard of research into Australian antisemitism.