Ever since the Hamas atrocities of October 2023, it’s not been easy being Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Following the infamy of 7 October, Albanese’s government presided over a surge in anti-Semitism that is a huge and indelible stain on Australia’s international reputation and moral character.
The government’s policies on the Israel-Gaza conflict were designed to appease Australia’s significant Muslim minority – which, uncomfortably for Albanese’s Labor party, largely is concentrated in a sizeable cluster of Labor federal seats in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Labor’s foreign policy progressively abandoned any pretext of support for Israel’s campaign to defend itself from the nest of terrorist vipers on its doorstep. Domestically, the government paid lip service to condemning anti-Semitism, but mostly stood by anti-Semitic incident after incident.
In trying to please everyone, you please nobody
Then came the Bondi Hanukkah massacre by two alleged Islamist jihadists last December. For weeks, Albanese was a rabbit in the headlights, slow to respond to the grief of Australia’s Jewish community and bewildered by the anger so many showed, even to the point of shutting him out of funerals of some of the victims. His political and leadership response to Bondi, and the shameful anti-Semitic climate leading up to it, was too little too late. But he was at least given credit by Jewish leaders for seeking to make amends in strengthening hate speech laws and legislating to proscribe Islamist hate groups, notably the jihadist and fanatical Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
Having been seen as pro-Muslim for so long, Albanese’s advisers must have felt confident he could visit the largest mosque in Sydney to mark the end of Ramadan this morning. So the Prime Minister went to the western suburb of Lakemba to join a thousands-strong Muslim congregation as they celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr.
How wrong they all were. Instead of a rapturous, or even a warm, reception, Albanese was at best tolerated by the congregation of the mosque, located in the centre of Australia’s largest Muslim community. Worse, he was jostled and jeered by some, called a ‘putrid dog’ and ‘genocide supporter’ and even worse in relation to Gaza and the government’s support – even though it is proving little more than lip service – of the United States and Israel’s campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Albanese’s reception by Islamic leaders at the mosque was polite, but the damage was done by the images that flashed around the world. Even so, Albanese sought to brush it off, more like Monty Python’s Black Knight with his ‘’tis but a flesh wound’ insistence:
Overwhelmingly. the reception was incredibly positive. I walked through the crowd to the mosque, and not a single person heckled.
There were a couple of hecklers inside. They were dealt with … by the community themselves because overwhelmingly, they did not want that to occur. Some people don’t like the fact that we’ve outlawed extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir. And that brought a response from a couple of people. But if you’ve got a couple of people, heckling in a crowd of 30,000, that should be put in that perspective.
Maybe so, Prime Minister. But Albanese and a Labor party have, for over two years, put electoral politics before principle in dealing with successive Middle East conflicts and the domestic anti-Semitism they have spurred. This embarrassing experience was a jolting reminder for them that there is no reward for equivocation.
Some might say Albanese’s experience at the Lakemba mosque did him a favour by highlighting a dark well of Islamist hate that still dwells within Australia’s Muslim community. Perhaps that’s true, but the episode still more is a reminder that Albanese responded to 7 October and its aftermath by studiously avoiding any Australian foreign policy position on Israel, Gaza, and now Iran that could antagonise Muslim Australian voters. Today was a humiliating demonstration of the political reality that in trying to please everyone, you please nobody.
Anthony Albanese is a decent man. But, like Britain’s Keir Starmer, he is proving himself to be a weak leader.
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