Henry Ergas addresses AIJAC luncheon
It has become 'entirely acceptable to view Australia as a project that is reprehensible at best, genocidal at worst, forever scarred by the defects of its birth'
“In the end, antisemitism is a moral failing, not an intellectual one. It arises not from ignorance of facts, but from inability to recognise and value a common, shared humanity.”
Professor Henry Ergas, an economist, academic and regular columnist at the Australian, told the above to an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) luncheon last week.
Ergas was addressing contemporary threats to Australian social cohesion stemming from a variety of structural factors as well as the sinister ideological alliance between segments of Australia’s Muslim communities and the progressive left.
According to Ergas, “The pressures that made for integration and moderation [in Australia] were far stronger in the past, while those that made for separation and intolerance were far weaker.”
These included, among other things, sheer distance from culture and homeland, a shared and patriotic Australian identity and broad-based communal and political organisations. Sectarianism and general attacks on the Australian project were universally viewed as un-Australian.
Now, he said, these pressures have reversed. Social media and communications technology has made it “entirely possible to live in hermetically separate communities, completely immersed in one’s culture of origin and hostile to the culture of the country in which one has chosen to actually live,” Ergas said.
The broad-based organisations, meanwhile, have virtually collapsed, leaving many in tribal echo chambers in real life and online.
Finally, it has become “entirely acceptable to view Australia as a project that is reprehensible at best, genocidal at worst, forever scarred by the defects of its birth. Turning against that project is no longer to be dismissed as un-Australian,” he lamented. No longer is there a generally shared pride in a common Australian identity.
But while these changes impact all Australians, he said there are unique elements related to Islamic doctrines towards other religions and warfare against outsiders and, especially, antisemitism.
“The vituperative references to Jews in the Quran and the Hadiths are well known, but what really distinguishes Islam from Catholicism, which also has a long and sorry tradition of Judeophobia, is that Islam has never had its Vatican II moment,” Ergas said, referencing the 1965 declaration absolving Jews of deicide, the primary driver of antisemitism in Christianity. Contemporaneous Muslim leaders vehemently rejected this and continue to do so.
But Muslim hostility would not be as powerful without its alliance with the progressive left, which revolves around “common enemy politics” and mobilises based on hatred rather than shared aspirations, unlike the old left, he added.
Ergas delivered the talk in both Sydney and Melbourne.
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