The interim report of the antisemitism royal commission in Australia, led by Virginia Bell and delivered to Governor-General Sam Mostyn, was always going to be closely scrutinised. Its fourteen recommendations are careful, institutional, and deliberately restrained. Yet in that restraint sits a glaring omission.

The report catalogues the symptoms of antisemitism while avoiding one of its most uncomfortable drivers: the convergence of radical Islamist ideology and hard-left Marxist political activism at their extremes.

This is about what happens at the ideological edges, where movements that would otherwise be in conflict find common cause in hostility toward Jewish identity, Jewish sovereignty, and the state of Israel.

Ordinarily, these ideologies do not align. History makes that clear. The Iranian Revolution brought together Islamists, liberals, and socialists in a shared effort to overthrow the Shah. But once the regime consolidated power, it turned ruthlessly on its former allies. Leftist groups that had helped usher in the revolution were among the first to be purged, imprisoned, and executed. This was never an alliance of values—only of convenience.

Today, that convergence has re-emerged in a different form. Radical Islamist rhetoric and segments of activist politics shaped by rigid binaries of oppressor and oppressed intersect around a shared narrative in which Israel is cast as uniquely illegitimate and Jews as symbols of power rather than a people with a history. In that framing, antisemitism is not recognized as hatred; it is reframed as resistance.

That convergence also produces contradictions that would once have seemed irreconcilable. Movements grounded in identity politics and LGBTQ+ rights have, in some cases, found themselves aligned rhetorically with causes and actors whose social frameworks are fundamentally at odds with those values. Groups such as Queers for Palestine illustrate this tension. In parts of the Middle East, including under authorities such as Hamas, same-sex relationships are criminalized and met with severe punishment including thrown off rooftops. Yet in Western activist spaces, these realities are often downplayed or ignored when they complicate a preferred political narrative.

The result is not principled solidarity but selective moral vision where the language of human rights is applied inconsistently, and where hostility toward Israel becomes the unifying thread that overrides otherwise fundamental differences. It is a convergence not built on shared values, but on shared opposition.

In Australia today, antisemitism is too often treated as a secondary concern – something to be explained away, contextualized, or tolerated under the banner of political expression. Increasingly, it re-emerges through the language of anti-Zionism, providing a moral vocabulary in which hostility toward Jews can be recast as virtue.

And that is where the convergence becomes dangerous.

Because when radical ideology meets moral justification, it gains legitimacy. What would once have been dismissed as extremist rhetoric is instead absorbed, rationalized, and, in some cases, amplified.

And escalation is exactly what follows.

History offers a warning. The Holocaust did not begin with violence. It began with words—conspiracies, libels, and the gradual normalization of exclusion. Only later did those ideas harden into policy, and policy into atrocity and genocide. To dismiss rhetoric as harmless is to misunderstand how prejudice takes root.

Similarly today, Normalizing attacks on Australian Jews has been normalized and the ‘globalize the intifada’ slogan has become acceptable. Bondi Beach on December 14, 2025 showed us just that. Despite that, it is still chanted on our streets, and the ‘Globalize the Intifada’ event is still proceeding in the centre of the Jewish community next week despite calls for it to be cancelled.

When hatred toward one group is permitted to fester, it does not remain contained. It mutates, spreads, and finds new targets. The same permissiveness that allows antisemitic graffiti to be dismissed as “fringe” is what allows the vandalism of war memorials to be minimized as mere “property damage.” What begins as tolerated rhetoric ends as normalized behavior—and, eventually, something far more serious.

It is in this context that the commission’s recommendations feel not just cautious, but inadequate. A proposal that security procedures applied during Jewish High Holy Days should simply be extended to other “high-risk” holidays and festivals may sound even-handed, but it solves nothing. Higher walls, more guards, and expanded security perimeters are not a strategy; they are an admission of failure.

Security can mitigate risk. It cannot address cause.

By focusing on protection rather than prevention, the report risks entrenching the very dynamic it seeks to contain—treating antisemitism as an inevitable condition to be managed, rather than a problem to be confronted at its source. It asks how to defend Jewish communities more effectively, but not why those communities require such defence in the first place.

That is precisely the question Scott Morrison forced into the open in his recent address in Jerusalem. His speech was never going to pass quietly, particularly given the Anthony Albanese government’s widely criticised response to the October 7 attacks, in which Foreign Minister Penny Wong was seen by many allies as offering the bare minimum, carefully avoiding the moral clarity the moment demanded.

Nor should Morrison’s intervention have passed quietly. By linking the December 14 terrorist attack in Sydney—carried out by a father and son with extremist associations—to a broader rise in antisemitism, he forced Australia into a debate it has spent years deferring. His warning—that Australia risks becoming “one step behind the UK”—was not rhetorical flourish. It was a diagnosis.

The backlash was immediate. Critics accused him of stigmatizing an entire faith. But that criticism misses the point. The issue is not Islam, but its radicalization. The issue is not progressive politics, but the point at which ideology becomes so rigid it excuses or rationalizes hatred.

A minority can still be consequential. History has shown that repeatedly.

The uncomfortable truth is that Australia has, for years, treated the discussion of radicalization as more dangerous than radicalization itself. The fear of causing offence has too often overridden the need for clarity.

Even now, the instinct is to manage rather than confront. To secure rather than to diagnose. To respond rather than to prevent.

But process cannot substitute for clarity.

At its core lies a question Australia has long avoided: how should a liberal democracy respond when religious or political ideology is used to justify hatred?

A society that cannot name its problems cannot solve them. Let us hope that after reading through the submissions and hearing the testimonies, the final report will name the problem.

If not, one that treats the discussion of those problems as dangerous has already conceded more than it realizes.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)