Burns describes relentless online abuse

Federal member for Macnamara Josh Burns told the Royal Commission on Tuesday that the firebombing of his St Kilda electorate office and the relentless online abuse directed at him and his family carry a common message to Jewish Australians: that they do not belong.

The arson attack, which he said cost about $100,000 to repair, was accompanied by graffiti reading “Zionism is fascism” over an image of Burns with horns drawn on his head.

“If they thought that smashing up my office was going to bring about peace in the Middle East … all it did was cost $100,000 to fix it and scare a lot of people,” he said.

Burns, a proud member of the Jewish community, said the deeper danger was not overt hatred but the subtler logic that holds Jewish Australians responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.

“I’m not an Israeli citizen. I’ve never been an Israeli citizen. I have no desire to be an Israeli citizen. I’m a proud Australian,” he said. To attribute dual loyalty to a Jewish person, he said, was “a complete dehumanisation”.

He described the experience of being blamed for the antisemitism directed at him as “like being stabbed twice – once for the antisemitism and once being blamed for being stabbed in the first place”.

Burns told the commission he had submitted 44 reports of offensive and antisemitic material to Meta, of which only three resulted in removal, nine received no response and 32 resulted in no action taken. He said he had lost faith in the reporting process and no longer reported everything.

He also spoke of the abuse directed at his partner, Victorian parliamentarian Georgie Purcell, who is not Jewish. She faced the same questioning of loyalty and attribution of blame that he did, he said, with “a layer of misogyny and a layer of … violent, sexualised comments on top of it”. Knowing she had to endure abuse because of her relationship with him was, he said, “devastating”.

He closed by reflecting on what he called the erosion of a sense of belonging. The Australia he grew up in, he said, was a place where he never had to hide the Magen David under his shirt or worry about being identifiably Jewish.