It is a great honour to address this con­fer­ence and I want to begin by paying respect to those Jewish and non-Jewish Aus­trali­ans who, for the past two years, and in many cases much longer, have stood up for our community, often at great personal cost.

In par­tic­u­lar, I wish to acknow­ledge the Special Envoy Jillian Segal AM, whose strategic plan to combat antisemitism rep­res­ents the way forward; the president of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry, Daniel Aghion KC who has led the community with great wisdom through unpre­ced­en­ted times; and one of our greatest Aus­trali­ans, Nova Peris, who has shown what it means to stand with a community in difficult times, with strength and dignity.

I’d also like to acknow­ledge His Excel­lency Amir Maimon, Special Envoy from Israel Michal Cotler-Wunch, David Gonski AC, state and federal members of par­lia­ment, community leaders, rabbis and other faith leaders.

And I want to thank and acknow­ledge the coun­cil­lors and mayors, from every state and territory, who have come here. Your presence is itself an act of support and solid­ar­ity and we thank you.

Over the course of the coming days, we will hear from experts about what has been happening to the Jewish community, the lessons we can draw from dis­turb­ing events and trends abroad, and the policy solutions that can be imple­men­ted by local gov­ern­ment to help push antisemitism out of the main­stream and back to the dark recesses of society from where its harm can be managed, if not defeated.

But the subject I wish to discuss tonight is “denial.”

Denial of antisemitism is the foremost obstacle to defeating it.

For decades after the Holocaust, denial of those crimes was a weapon deployed to cast the victims of the Holocaust, the survivors and their advocates, as frauds and liars.

The great Primo Levi, a chemist and writer, who survived Auschwitz, spoke of his return to his native Italy after lib­er­a­tion, and his anguish that he would not be believed, that his story was too bur­den­some or too fant­ast­ic­al to be taken seriously.

To deny in the face of the victims, to force them to plead to be believed, is a per­ver­sion, a heinous re-injury of those who had exper­i­enced the limits of suffering.

Often, it was done with a very specific purpose in mind – to undermine the study of the Holocaust so that it could happen again, and erode any empathy and under­stand­ing felt towards the Jewish people.

For decades, we wondered how anyone could deny what was not a single event, but millions of indi­vidu­al crimes carried out by hundreds of thousands of per­pet­rat­ors, metic­u­lously and con­tem­por­an­eously doc­u­mented, evidenced by the thousands of mass graves and the killing centres that per­man­ently dis­figured the European continent. Evidenced too by the homes and towns and city suburbs where Jewish life had bustled for thousands of years, that had been com­pletely emptied.

And yet it was denied. How?

We have in our time seen just how this was possible.

The crimes of October 7, were also not a single act but a col­lec­tion of scorched villages, the killing field at the Nova Festival, the lifeless bodies scattered through­out the south, that lay for all to see at bus stops, in mangled vehicles, bodies of families huddled and clenched in scorched saferooms, among the shrubs where the last moments of life were spent in prayer and plea and terror, are all there. Numbered, recorded, filmed.

And yet the crimes were denied. Hamas never targeted civilians. Women and children were not raped. The per­pet­rat­ors denied nothing. They took pride in their work, but others denied for them.

And those who could not plausibly deny crimes so grotesque and abundant, called it an inside job, a Mossad false flag. Women should not be believed. The first respon­ders could not be trusted.

And if all else fails, guilt could always be shifted to the victims. Every Israeli, the child, the invalid, is a soldier, past or present. And how dare they build their homes or dance near the Gaza border? How dare they live in their homeland at all?

And the crimes against Jewish Aus­trali­ans have been denied in the exact same way.

How often do we hear that Jews exag­ger­ate or falsify antisemitism? That we “cry” antisemitism, a crude for­mu­la­tion intended to silence and intim­id­ate us. And that we do so for some dark and insidious purpose. For money, for sympathy, to cunningly shield the gov­ern­ment of Israel from criticism.

And if the burning syn­agogues, the burning cars, the public abuse of school­chil­dren, the har­ass­ment of uni­ver­sity students and artists, are too blatant to deny, the Jews brought it upon them­selves.

Israel is to blame for the voluntary actions of those living here in Australia who commit violent or racist acts. Or it is a false flag. The Jews burned their own prop­er­ties. There is nothing these people won’t do.

Just a few days ago, a Sydney car­di­olo­gist spoke from the floor at an event that was held to smear this very con­fer­ence. He didn’t believe that Iran had carried out attacks on our

soil. He said he had naturally assumed that it was Mossad that had fire­bombed Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne, and clearly “the lobby” had gotten to ASIO too.

This was a most artic­u­late present­a­tion of how even a highly educated and accom­plished person, can com­pletely abandon their sense and reason when con­fron­ted with facts that clash with their prejudice.

So determ­ined are the enemies of the Jewish people that they would wage a relent­less campaign to smear and discredit a defin­i­tion of antisemitism to ensure the fight against antisemitism never even gets out of the blocks.

This has all meant that amid events that caused terror in an Aus­trali­an community, tarnished our inter­na­tion­al repu­ta­tion, threatened our very democracy and our mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, seen our community and our country targeted by a foreign regime, by hardened criminals, by neo-Nazis, religious extrem­ists and even by col­leagues and class­mates, the response has been paralyzed.

Instead of imple­ment­ing the policies that my organ­iz­a­tion, that the Special Envoy, have recom­men­ded, com­mon­sense measures to better educate about the nature of antisemitism, to address the foreign inter­fer­ence through bot farms and dis­in­form­a­tion campaigns, to ensure that publicly funded bodies receive the support to help them recognise antisemitism and require them to treat Jewish Aus­trali­ans equally, instead of imple­ment­ing these measures, denial of antisemitism means we’re still talking about the stat­ist­ics, we’re still talking about defin­i­tions, we’re still asking to be believed.

This is a scandal. And the fact that this gathering, should be made con­tro­ver­sial, should be subject to security assess­ments, and online petitions against it, is a scandal.

But this is precisely what antisemitism seeks. As Holocaust denial tried to break solid­ar­ity and reduce “never again” to a punchline, so too antisemitism denial seeks to shroud us in con­tro­versy, such that politi­cians, employers, uni­ver­sity admin­is­trat­ors, have to think long and hard of the political cost of acting.

Or, they can only act against this burning form of racism if they sim­ul­tan­eously acknow­ledge unrelated and far less prevalent forms of dis­crim­in­a­tion and hatred.

All the while, day by day, this country changes. It becomes more sus­pi­cious, less welcoming, more tribal, more extreme. Rigorous public exam­in­a­tion of critical policy issues is replaced by street marches where the most vicious elements of our society can spread their influence and recruit.

Antisemitism is not merely the enemy of the Jews. The Jews are not hated for what they are. They are hated for what they are seen to represent. Modernity, human progress, ration­al­ism. Those things with which the Jews, by virtue of their belief in an ethical mono­the­ism, in the sanctity of human life, in the dignity of the indi­vidu­al, pioneered and continue to stand for.

And so we ask you to stand with us. Be strong and of good courage. Resist the pressure. Not for our own sake. But for the sake of this great nation of ours. This Australia.