Apologies, devoted Echidna readers. A gremlin in the burrow sent out the wrong column earlier. Here's today's letter from Steve Evans.

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People I count as friends told me recently: "It wasn't only Jews who died in the Holocaust, you know." Another young person told me: "Jews don't get discriminated against." The ultra-liberal sister of a friend told him: "Jews seem to control everything."

I find these statements deeply depressing. The last is an ancient anti-Semitic falsehood and I was amazed that a highly-intelligent person could utter it in 2025. I'm glad I wasn't there when she did.

And for a person of my generation, born to parents who lived through the war and for whom the Holocaust was a horrifying fact - to my mind, the central fact of our times - minimisation of its import seems to me to be anti-Semitism. Six million Jews were murdered compared with half a million Roma and Sinti. Nobody's suffering should be underestimated but the Holocaust was a genocide primarily of Jews. They were the Nazis' obsession.

For half a century, such doubting of the truth of the Holocaust was unsayable apart from by crazies, and least of all by bright young people who imagined they were "progressive".

But the definition of anti-Semitism seems to have changed in my lifetime. Antipathy towards Jews (to put it at its mildest) has become conflated with anger at the brutality and expansionism of the Israeli government, and that has opened the door to anti-Semitism among those who would be horrified to think of themselves that way.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Israel are different. It seems odd that this needs to be said. We do not have antipathy towards Russians because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. I don't tar all Americans with the Trumpian brush.

So it seems to me that the decision by Wollongong City Council to fly the Israeli flag at half mast in memory of those who died at Bondi was a mistake, a mistake by the council but a mistake by the Jewish community to ask for it.

Conflating a condemnation of anti-Semitism with being pro-Israel muddies the water.

Two groups have not helped.

Defenders of Israel have been too ready to accuse critics of Israeli brutality in Gaza of anti-Semitism. In an American context, the historian Mark Mazower writes in his new book On Antisemitism: "Part of the problem is that it is very easy to label an individual or........

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