As someone who campaigns against all violence and for those suffering in Gaza (and other zones of violence), I am appalled by the attacks on synagogues in Australia. Deeply, deeply appalled. Some of you might have read my On the Outskirts collection with poems such as 'Denkmal' which try to challenge antisemitism across history. The conflating of 'Jew' with the Israeli military/govt is fundamentally wrong (it is supported by WASP America etc, what’s more) and is a typical and toxic bigotry come of an unwillingness to analyse closely. Anyway, this is not my point. My point is that as someone who tries to speak out against injustice, I feel I must speak about and against these attacks.
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I call from the haze of illness
to the perpetrators of hate against Jews
in Sydney and Melbourne, I call across
the continent to those who have lost
their way by substituting the actions
of government and military for the lives
of those who would worship in peace,
who are not wielding weapons. You
will define prayer as you define prayer,
you will make arguments of association
and excuse or seek to legitimise
your cause of DNA and deculturism.
You have blamed and judged and held
responsible and converted your rage
to hate or, most likely, you have simply found a way
to express your deeply entrenched antisemitism
while denying it’s that, or not. I address
the perpetrators, I address those who have
lost their way and shifted blame in the signs
of Nazism while deploying Brown Shirt tactics,
those who search for symbols and accelerants
to focus their own violence, their own anger
that has been dislodged from compassion,
making one place stand for another,
burning the holy as others have burnt
the holy, and reasoning that it is justifiable.
It is not. It never was. You operate by stealth
lodged in your hoodies, you speak among
yourselves to justify your racism, your bigotry,
and you turn your backs on all the suffering
in all places. You’ve tapped into violence
begets violence to use as an excuse, an action,
when your hatred makes and undoes
history by unequal, bloody measures.
John Kinsella
