Rates of antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia have risen sharply since 7 October 2023, according to almost every source that has tracked incidents or surveyed attitudes.
But the extent of the rise has been questioned.
Since the deadly 7 October Hamas attacks and throughout Israel’s brutal retaliation, tensions related to the conflict have flared up in Australia.
The firebombing of a synagogue, concerns about protests (and the possible curtailing of those freedoms), and police investigations into antisemitism have sparked political battles and inquiries, and claims and counterclaims about the definition and prevalence of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The nation’s race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, says Australia is in a “febrile time”.
“Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both real, are both increasing, and are both significant concerns,” he says.
In recent days the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has written to the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, calling for urgent action to tackle Islamophobia, and the Australian National Imams Council has said it is appalled by biased reporting and pleaded for balance.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (Ecaj) has claimed public spaces are “no longer safe for Jews in Australia”. Albanese has described antisemitism as a “scourge”.
Tracking the rise
Peak bodies and academics have used two primary methods of measuring rates of antisemitism and Islamophobia: tallying incidents according to a prescribed set of criteria; and asking in surveys about the respondents’ experiences of racism or about their attitudes to specified groups.
Ecaj has reported a “massive increase” in antisemitic incidents since 7 October, using the definition of “racist violence” developed by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1991: “A specific act of violence, intimidation or harassment carried out against an individual, group or organisation on the basis of race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin.”
In its 2024 report Ecaj gives examples of physical attacks such as rock throwing, vandalism of synagogues, Hitler salutes, and abusive graffiti and chants.
Of 2,062 incidents, 670 were posters or stickers, 393 were graffiti, 622 were verbal abuse and 65 were physical assaults.
The Islamophobia Register has been similarly inundated.
Since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, 932 incidents have been reported to the register – eclipsing the entire 930 incidents logged in its first eight years of operation, the executive director, Dr Nora Amath, says. Since 7 October 2024, another 92 incidents have been reported. The Islamophobia Register aims to publish a full report in March.
Some examples provided by the register include a man physically and verbally abusing a group of friends, calling them “fucking terrorist Muslim cunts”. There have also been three separate threats that referred to the Christchurch mosque terrorism attack, talk of killing “all Muslim scum”, and a case where a woman’s hijab was ripped off.
The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) – a liberal group that has been critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza – has analysed a different dataset of reported antisemitic incidents against different criteria.
In preliminary, yet-to-be published research, it identified 389 individual incidents contained in 501 submissions to a parliamentary inquiry on antisemitism at universities and classified just one in five of those (79) as antisemitic under its definition of “discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews, or Jewish institutions as Jewish”.
The JCA concluded that almost half of the incidents amounted to support for Palestine or criticism of Israel or Zionism, but did not meet its definition of antisemitism. This included cases where people had used the phrase “from the river to the sea” or the word “intifada”, the Arabic word for uprising.
Its preliminary findings suggest a “significant conflation between ‘antisemitism’ and ‘support for Palestine, or criticism of Israel or the political ideology of Zionism’”.
Prof Kevin Dunn, the leader of the Challenging Racism Project at Western Sydney University, gathered data on people’s experiences of racism for a report commissioned by the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies.
Dunn’s research found 61% of people said they would be concerned if a close relative married a Muslim, and 46% said they would be concerned if the spouse was Jewish.
“Our observation has long been that Islamophobia is the strongest form of racist antipathy that we have in Australia,” Dunn says. “Having said that, 46% is still very high.”
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When it came to people’s experiences of racism, including people being distrustful, being called names, and workplace discrimination, both were on similar levels.
The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute surveys Australians annually to measure social cohesion. Its latest report, based on a sample size of 8,000 and released in November, found that violence in the Middle East had “strained interfaith relations”.
One in three adults (34%) held a “somewhat or very negative attitude towards Muslims”, up from 27% the previous year.
Negative attitudes towards Jewish people also increased, from 9% in 2023 to 13%. There were also increases in negative attitudes towards people of other major faiths.
Acknowledging racism
Muslim leaders say Islamophobia has been “normalised” and there is a “double standard” in reporting on Islamophobia compared to antisemitism.
The Australian National Imams Council and the Alliance of Australian Muslims said in a statement in December there were “double standards” in the media “that often see specific attacks or instances of hatred being amplified whilst others – particularly those targeting Muslims – are downplayed or ignored”.
By contrast the opposition has accused the Albanese government of not doing enough to combat antisemitism, and some of its supporters have decried any equivalence with Islamophobia.
The Liberal senator Dave Sharma was heavily criticised in December for referring to Islamophobia as “fictitious”.
Asked on Sky News about Anthony Albanese’s response to the Melbourne synagogue attack, Sharma said: “Any time any senior minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.”
Sharma says he accepts Islamophobia exists and did “not seek to discount the experience of those who have suffered from it”. He claims government ministers have been hesitant to call out antisemitic attacks, and that when they do they will “bracket” it with Islamophobia. It is this “false analogy or equivalence”, he claims, that is fictitious.
Sivaraman says the debate and language about divisions can itself contribute to overall racism.
“It’s creating this notion of communities fighting with each other and therefore [they’re] the problem, but it’s so much more nuanced than that,” he says.
“That avoids looking at and interrogating whether our structures are racist, because you can just blame communities, which is unfair.”
Dunn says while claims of Islamophobia and antisemitism might be weaponised and used politically, that’s “not the overwhelming concern”. Rather, it’s that racism is consistently underacknowledged, he says.
Dunn says racism “fades and flourishes” according to the political environment. And that discussing antisemitism and Islamophobia in the same frame can “generate allyship”.
Consensus theory, Dunn says, holds that people who have racist views are “much more likely to do and say racist things when they feel like that’s the majority view”. “If there’s anything that’s been said in the news that affirms their view of the world, they feel much more emboldened to act,” he says. Dunn says political statements can give licence to racism, but can also disrupt it.
“You can change norms, in workplaces and sporting clubs … you can have an effect on what’s tolerated and what’s not,” he says.
“The big, untapped political potential for anti-racism is bystander action.”
