Based on Lies
Antisemitism does not begin with hatred. It begins with permission.
Something has shifted in our public culture, and it is most visible not in extremists, but in ordinary conversations. I share here, without attribution, a message I was sent earlier today by an Upstander — a decent, non-Jewish Australian woman working quietly and diligently to correct an inversion that has taken hold in our society as it relates to Israel:
“I don’t need you to reply, but I would like to understand something. I have a group of Labor-voting acquaintances, all aged between fifty-five and seventy-five. I would say that many of them now exhibit antisemitic traits — not always overt hostility, but a marked lack of empathy for Jewish people, a readiness to dismiss Jewish concerns, and an instinctive suspicion of Jewish power, influence, or motive. I am not suggesting this out of malice. I am trying to understand how this took root. When did it happen? How did it happen? And what, exactly, is it?”
That question sits at the heart of this article.
Antisemitism rarely announces itself with swastikas. More often, it enters quietly — as moral certainty, ideological fashion, or the comforting belief that one is standing on the “right side of history.” Historically, this is how it has always begun: not with violence, but with lies that soften conscience and dull compassion.
In my book, I wrote: “Antisemitism does not begin with hatred. It begins with permission — permission to believe things about Jews that we would never tolerate being said about any other people.” Once that permission is granted, everything that follows becomes easier.
History is unambiguous. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was triggered by a lie — a blood libel accusing Jews of ritual murder. That lie was printed, repeated, and tolerated by respectable society before violence erupted. In Weimar Germany, the “stab-in-the-back” myth blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War. It did not emerge from the gutter; it was cultivated in universities, newspapers, salons, and political movements that regarded themselves as enlightened.
Violence followed lies — not the other way around.
So what is happening now?
From the late 1960s onward, large parts of the Western left underwent a profound ideological shift. Class struggle gave way to identity politics. Power displaced evidence as the organising principle. Groups were no longer judged by behaviour or values, but by where they sat in an invented hierarchy of victimhood. In this framework, Jews — inconveniently successful, stubbornly non-compliant, and possessing a sovereign state — ceased to qualify as victims and were reclassified as oppressors.
This is not a fringe observation. As the late Christopher Hitchens warned, “Anti-Zionism is the gateway drug to antisemitism.” Douglas Murray has put it more starkly: “The world has decided that Jews are no longer allowed to be victims — only perpetrators.” Historian Bernard Lewis noted decades ago that antisemitism survives by mutation, adopting the language of each new age while retaining its essential animus.
This reframing was not accidental. It was driven by intellectual movements that fused Marxism with post-colonial theory, recasting Jews as “white,” “colonial,” or “privileged,” while erasing both Jewish indigeneity and Jewish history. The Holocaust became a museum piece — acknowledged, ritualised, then quietly bracketed off as no longer relevant to contemporary moral judgement.
As I observed in A Light Still Burns: “When Jews are weak, the world pities them. When Jews are strong, the world resents them.” That resentment now routinely masquerades as progressivism.
Australia did not invent this phenomenon, but it imported it wholesale — through universities, activist networks, and, critically, through publicly funded media institutions. Over time, these ideas filtered into mainstream left-leaning voters, many of whom still see themselves as anti-racist, compassionate, and morally serious. The tragedy is that they often do not recognise what they have absorbed.
Compassion is not withdrawn because Jews have done something wrong; it is withdrawn because Jews no longer fit the story.
Here the role of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation warrants scrutiny. As the nation’s most influential cultural narrator, the ABC does not merely report events; it frames moral understanding. Through persistent “contextualisation,” selective omission, and the normalisation of activist language, it has too often blurred the distinction between explanation and excuse — particularly when it comes to Israel and Jewish self-defence.
This confusion is compounded by a phenomenon unfamiliar to many non-Jews: that a very small minority of Jews actively promote narratives hostile to Jewish self-determination. Their presence is then weaponised to legitimise antisemitism under the guise of “Jewish dissent.” That such voices are frequently elevated by the ABC and other media outlets creates a distorted impression of Jewish opinion and provides moral cover for prejudice.
This is not about a single program or journalist. It is institutional drift — negligent at best, deceptive at worst — and it matters because trust in a national broadcaster confers authority. When that authority is misused, lies acquire legitimacy.
There is a bitter historical irony here. During the Second World War, both Britain and Australia enacted strict laws to prevent speech or conduct that might undermine morale or national cohesion. Governments understood that narratives could weaken a society long before an enemy ever fired a shot. Today, we appear to have forgotten that lesson entirely.
We now tolerate claims about Jews and Israel that would be socially — and in some cases legally — unthinkable if directed elsewhere. Assertions of genocide, famine, or apartheid are repeated as fact, despite failing legal, demographic, and evidentiary tests. Meanwhile, the documented radicalisation of parts of Gaza and the West Bank — funded in no small measure by international aid streams, including through UNRWA — is minimised or ignored. Australian taxpayers deserve better scrutiny of where their money has gone and what it has enabled.
This is not accidental drift. It is all based on a lie — the lie that antisemitism has changed its nature; that it is now virtuous; that it can cloak itself in the language of justice while retaining the same ancient animus.
History shows that when antisemitism becomes respectable — when it is explained away rather than confronted — violence eventually follows. In Australia, that warning is no longer theoretical. It is no longer future tense. We have crossed that threshold.
I did not write A Light Still Burns to sell books. I wrote it to sound an alarm. As a father, I wrote it as though the safety of my unborn descendants depended on its message — because history suggests that it does.
There is no easy fix for cutting through the lies, artifice, and deception now embedded in our institutions. But there is a starting point. Read A Light Still Burns as though your own children’s future depends on understanding what is unfolding. Then pass it quietly to five open-minded, non-Jewish friends. Change does not begin with mass movements; it begins with ripples — and ripples, over time, become waves.
And by the time violence becomes undeniable, the lie has already done its work.
A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending is available worldwide on Amazon, Audible, and Apple Books in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.
Michael Scott CSC is the founder of the 2023 Foundation, a charity dedicated to combating antisemitism. He is the author of A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending. The views expressed here are his own.
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