Labor MP Says Anti-Semitic Abuse Was a Rare Occurrence, Then Oct. 7 Happened

Until Oct. 7, 2023, Labor MP Josh Burns could count the anti-Semitic messages he’d received “on one hand.”Now, he says the abuse has become a constant feature of public life, reflecting a broader shift experienced by many Jewish Australians.Burns testified before the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on June 30, which is in the middle of its third block of hearings into the Bondi terror massacre that will inform its final report due in December.The MP’s Melbourne office was vandalised with anti-Semitic graffiti in late 2024, but he told the commission that he began receiving abuse even before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, though they were so infrequent he could “count them on one hand.”“That was probably a reflection of the fact that it was just the game [politics] was getting a little bit heated,” he said. But after the attacks there was a spike in both the tone and volume of anti-Semitic messages.He said his heritage was never something he felt he’d have to hide.“Something that would prohibit me from reaching any part of Australian society or reaching any of the goals that I would have for my life or for my family.”He had met with a range of constituents in his inner Melbourne seat who’d also experienced anti-Semitic abuse, he said.“I think this needs to be considered in the sense of how do we protect people from vilification while also enabling free and full participation in our democracy?” Burns said.He also told of meeting a group of Year 9 girls from a Jewish school who‘d come to Canberra for civics education. He asked them to raise their hands if they’d ever experienced anti-Semitism, and all of them did.“I said, ‘Alright, let’s dissect that. Put up your hand if you’ve had someone shout at you,’ and barely a hand went down. These are year nine girls [and people] are pulling up on one of the high streets in and around my community near where I live, screaming at them because they’re Jewish.”Burns said he hoped the Royal Commission would “lay out a pathway to return our country back to all of the people who live in my electorate, [so they’re] not worrying about whether or not they’re dressing or identifying themselves as being visibly Jewish.”Speaking about the attack on his office, Burns asked rhetorically, “How is this going to solve anything in the Middle East? I mean, I said at a press conference the next day, if I thought that smashing up my office was going to bring about peace in the Middle East … [but] all it did was just cost $100,000 to fix and scare a lot of people.”He said a lot of the criticism he’d seen online held Jewish people responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.“It’s a sort of us-and-them narrative,” Burns said.“It’s that I’m somehow celebrating the death of Palestinian kids. I’ve said on so many occasions that if I could see one thing in my lifetime, it would be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.“To blame the Jewish people for anti-Semitism, or for attacks against the Jewish community—you wouldn’t do it to any other community. It’s like being stabbed once for the anti-Semitism and once being blamed for being stabbed in the first place.Meanwhile, Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser, who is also Jewish, told Sky News he is often called a “traitor and a Mossad agent.”“My family has been here since the 1840s. My great grandfather was at Gallipoli … my grandfather was a prisoner of war in Changi [in Singapore] and fought on the Burma Railway,” he said.Yet his social media posts attracted abuse he said was too graphic to repeat publicly.“That’s what Jewish Australians are coping with today,” he said.