I couldn’t have been more than 10, maybe 12, years old when my parents walked with me to the local synagogue. They wanted to show me vile graffiti, the swastika, sprayed on the side of the building. It was proof to them, both Holocaust survivors, that antisemitism was alive and sick in this country.

Fast forward a couple of decades from that moment. Two buildings, one a mosque in Rooty Hill and the other a Jewish kindergarten on Sydney’s north shore, are devastated by fire attacks. Sympathy and support for the “other” group. Condemnation of the attacks. Council of Arab Australians head Eddie Zananiri denounced the arson attack on the kindy and “all acts of violence and racism which serve to threaten Australia’s multicultural society”. The then acting head of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Gerry Levy described the arson attack on the mosque as “totally unacceptable”. Leaders of both those communities behaved like leaders.

Credit: Illustration: Dionne Gain

Not sure what you’d call that. Love speech (eye roll). Support speech (sounds like therapy). Unity speech. Harmony speech. Maybe just leaders revealing themselves as decent human beings, showing empathy and kindness. We need so much more of that.

There have always been attacks on synagogues in this country. Always. Sharren Haskel, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, lived in Australia for six years and told the ABC this week that the most recent attacks show this country has changed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here we are, more than 30 years on from the 1991 attacks; and still, they keep coming. Another antisemitic attack........

© The Sydney Morning Herald