Sport no longer feels safe
From football fields to netball courts, antisemitism in Australia is becoming disturbingly normalised.
Just last Thursday, the president of AJAX Junior Football Club told the Royal Commission about Jewish players as young as seven being subjected to antisemitic abuse on Melbourne sporting fields.
Swapping Melbourne for Sydney and the field for the court, just two days later the now infamous incident played out of a netball mum allegedly saying “f**k the Jews, they all should be eradicated”.
If ever Commissioner Virginia Bell needed confirmation that the testimony she heard is still being lived by Jews in Australia right now, that was it.
42-year-old Jody Scarcella, who claims she “has absolutely no problem with the Jewish community” and that her words were taken “well and truly out of context”, may find herself embroiled in this and will have her day in court – that of the legal kind – but this isn’t really even about her.
It’s about what has happened to a society when no one thinks twice about the consequences of expressing hate against others. It’s about how fractured and broken that society has become.
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