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Imagine it’s 1972. Thugs try to set alight the front door of Melbourne’s old St Francis Catholic Church while 20 worshippers, including children, are inside.
Up the street, more hoodlums storm a Celtic pub, screaming that the IRA are terrorists and should be eradicated.
Rabbi Dovid Gurnick (left) and Dvir Abramovich of the Anti-Defamation Commission outside the East Melbourne Synagogue on Saturday.Credit: Aaron Francis
Or reverse it. Thugs try to set alight one of Melbourne’s Protestant churches and a gang invades a British-style tavern in the CBD, terrorising patrons and chanting that British soldiers responsible for shooting civilians on Bloody Sunday in Derry should themselves be killed.
The shock and righteous outrage of Melburnians would be without end.
Happily, it never happened. Not in Melbourne.
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Yet 1972 was the height of what were known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Innocents were dying in bombing campaigns and being massacred for protesting. There seemed no end to the fury and the suffering, fuelled by hatreds going back hundreds of years.
Melbourne’s population at the time was still substantially tilted towards the descendants of British Protestants and Irish Catholics, both old and new.
Most of them, however, had left old grievances behind and were determined to live beyond the contemporary blood-letting, whatever their feelings about the Troubles.
A succession of arrivals from the Balkans, Asia, Africa, South and Central America and elsewhere have in the main managed to go about building worthy lives in increasingly multicultural Australia without taking revenge in the streets for old hostilities and often terrible injustices, too.
But today, real thugs, observing no such limits and wearing the false cloak of legitimate protest, are being hunted by police after trying to set fire to a Melbourne synagogue where parents and children were gathered, and a real mob was filmed invading a restaurant and terrorising patrons.
The front door of the synagogue was scorched in the arson attack.Credit: Aaron Francis
The targets of Friday night’s attacks were obviously chosen for the singular reason that they were presumed to be Jewish, though many in the restaurant, it happens, were not.
The excuse? The war in the Middle East, of course, where the Israeli government is taking bloody retribution on Gazans for the October 7, 2023 attack on Israelis by Hamas terrorists who still hold Israeli hostages.
Every night, our TV screens are saturated in images of unbearable suffering in Gaza and accusations of atrocities by the Israeli military acting on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration.
You’d need a heart of ice not to be shocked or angered.
A Miznon staff member cleans graffiti from outside the Melbourne restaurant on Saturday.Credit: Aaron Francis
But to seek violent revenge and to extend the blame for whatever is occurring on the other side of the world to Jewish citizens of Australia in Melbourne, most of whom live in this city because they or their descendants fled Europe after World War II and the Holocaust, is as imbecilic as it is inexcusable.
To attack a Melbourne synagogue or the patrons of a restaurant clearly achieves nothing beyond fuelling dread and stirring traumatic memories of past terror among innocent citizens and their communities, while stripping from the perpetrators’ cause whatever public sympathy may have existed.
It is as empty-headed as if the descendants of Irish or British immigrants to Australia were to have tried to settle scores emanating from the Troubles of Northern Ireland by visiting violence on the churches and the gathering places of Melbourne five decades ago.
It did not happen then, and hate crimes must not be granted any form of licence now.
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