Henry Ergas speaks to AIJAC

Professor Henry Ergas, an economist, academic and columnist at the Australian, recently addressed an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) luncheon on the threats to Australian society and multiculturalism from the alliance between sections of the Muslim community and the progressive Left.

“It is hard, if not impossible, to find any precedent in this country’s history, for [this] kind of behaviour, at least on the current scale,” Ergas said. “The question therefore naturally arises: why are we now observing phenomena that were previously marginal, if not largely unknown?”

Juxtaposing historical tensions between the Irish and English – Catholics and Protestants – in Australia with modern multicultural issues related to segments of the Muslim community, Ergas says one of the key differences was that “the pressures that made for integration and moderation were far stronger in the past, while those that made for separation and intolerance were far weaker.”

These, Ergas explained, included the fact that in the past, the sheer distance between Australia and the homelands of immigrants forced them to rapidly integrate as well as interact with and work alongside people from different backgrounds and cultures. Moreover, there were mutually reinforcing communal and political institutions that brought people of all backgrounds together for a common goal and rigidly rejected ethnic or religious sectarianism. Finally, Ergas emphasised, the shared Australian patriotism and pride facilitated integration and common identity, and it was simply assumed that new arrivals would abide by Australian rules and norms and not assert their separate identity too strongly.

Ergas added the caveat that the differences were smaller between the Irish and English, and that even the most extreme of the Catholic preachers never expressed or entertained the murderous or racial sentiments towards Protestants that one regularly hears coming out of certain mosques.

The pressures have unfortunately now reversed, Ergas lamented, and certain doctrines unique to Islam are only one factor.

Firstly, thanks to social media and communications technology, the distance issue that once forced integration has disappeared. Ergas says it is now “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.” Modern rhetoric surrounding multiculturalism also emphasises separatism as a virtue and stresses ethnicity as destiny, Ergas said.

Furthermore, “membership in broadly-based organisations” has been drastically reduced or disappeared entirely, meaning that people are progressively more embedded in tribal and sectarian echo chambers both on social media and in day-to-day life.

In addition, the collapse of patriotism and national pride has worn down the common identity and aspirations for integration. “It has instead 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.”

While these issues affect all Australians, the effects are particularly strong in segments of the Muslim community, in part related to deeply held and long-standing doctrines regarding other religions and warfare against outsiders, which was preserved in Islam.

But worse is the deeply rooted antisemitism, Ergas says. “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,” where the Church absolved the Jews of deicide in 1965. Muslim leaders vehemently rejected this and continue the charge the Jews with, among other things, playing a role in the death of Jesus, considered by Muslims to be a prophet.

“There is, in at least parts of Australia’s Muslim communities, a deep well of hatred, far more extreme than any of its predecessors, less diminished by the integrative pressures that historically tamed ethnic and religious animosities in this country and kept them firmly under control,” Ergas asserted.

But even more important and sinister is the role of the modern progressive Left, in alliance with these sections of the Muslim community, Ergas said.  “What brings [the identity groups comprising the progressive Left] together is not, as was the case with the Left in the past, a shared project, much less shared hopes and aspirations. They have none. What they share is enemies.” Ergas bemoaned this “common enemy politics” and “the rise and rise of the politics of hatred” upon which the progressive Left is dependent to mobilise. This outlook, Ergas says, has captured most major institutions and will not be receding anytime soon.

Among the reasons the Jews are a particular target for the progressives, according to Ergas, is that they represent everything the far left rejects: “Fidelity to faith and tradition, pride in achievement, commitment to excellence, enormous attachment to this country and its values, affection and admiration for Israel.”

“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,” Ergas concluded.

Henry Ergas addressed AIJAC supporters in Melbourne and Sydney.