Yesterday afternoon, I was standing on the sideline at my child’s sports practice, doing what parents do. Watching. Chatting. Half following the training, half listening to the conversations around me.

Before long, the talk turned to petrol prices and supply. Nothing unusual. Just the sort of conversation Australians are having every day.

And then it happened.

One parent piped up and said, “Well, it’s the fault of America.” Then came the rest, words I wish I could say shocked me: “America and the Jews’ fault that we have this problem of petrol availability and prices because of the war that they have dragged us into.”

Not Israel. The Jews. And that matters.

Because it tells you exactly what this was. Not criticism of Israel. Not a debate about foreign policy. Not even a confused swipe at Zionism. It was plain, old-fashioned antisemitism, spoken openly and without embarrassment.

I had to hold on to everything to control myself. The comment was so over the top, so obscene and so brazen that for a moment you could feel the ugliness of it hanging in the air.

For those of us who spend our days confronting antisemitism, anti-Israel falsehoods and anti-Zionist incitement, the pattern is all too familiar. Complex issues such as geopolitics, foreign affairs, economics, and world events are reduced to crude scapegoating, with Jews cast as the convenient target for other people’s anger, confusion, and ignorance.

This is how antisemitism embeds itself. Not only through protests, slogans, vandalism, or online abuse, though we have seen plenty of that. It also........

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