'It’s really just an embarrassment'

The firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue has already provoked an outpouring of commentary, much of it in bad faith, patently stupid or both. Labor Premiers Chris Minns and Jacinta Allan have tacitly laid blame for the attack on the pro-Palestinian movement by flagging potential bans on protests outside places of worship.

Such bans would do nothing to stop antisemitic attacks — antisemites don’t typically foreshadow hate crimes by standing peacefully near their intended targets with slogans on cardboard signs. Nor would they functionally impede the pro-Palestinian movement, which has no history of protesting outside synagogues for the simple reason that the target of their anger is the Israeli state, not the Jewish religion.

I don’t want to rake over all the aspects of this that are already doing the rounds online, like Dave Sharma’s blatantly racist dismissal of “a fictitious Islamophobia which [is] not going on” or Sarah Ferguson’s braindead interview with Jillian Segal last night. Instead I want to focus on an aspect of the whole thing that I haven’t seen much mention of.