The Litmus Test

A Warning from the Past, Present and Bondi Beach. There will be more Bondi Beaches.

I write this in the immediate aftermath of a massacre.

How a society treats Jews functions as a litmus test in the strict sense, not the rhetorical one. A substance placed against litmus paper must fall within a narrow range to remain stable and habitable. Outside that range—too acidic or too alkaline—it becomes corrosive, unfit for life.

Civilisation is no different.

When a society drifts too far in either moral direction—toward ideological frenzy on one side or moral indifference on the other—it begins to dissolve. And when it dissolves, Jews are among the first to be targeted. This is not because Jews are uniquely powerful or uniquely resented beneficiaries of social arrangements. Antisemitism does not require a grievance economy. Jews are not advantaged by affirmative action.

They are not protected by institutional indulgence. They are not insulated from power. Antisemitism flourishes precisely when moral restraint weakens—when judgment becomes conditional, when responsibility is deferred, and when the distinction between right and wrong is replaced by ideology, grievance, or procedure.

This is why antisemitism does not behave like an ordinary prejudice. It functions as a diagnostic. It tells us whether a society still possesses the capacity to draw firm moral boundaries—or whether those boundaries have dissolved into explanation, euphemism, and managed ambiguity.

By that measure, our civilisation is drifting out of range.

Across the United Kingdom, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, and the United States, antisemitic incidents—harassment, vandalism, intimidation, and violence—have risen to levels not seen in generations. Jews are threatened in public, their schools and synagogues targeted, their visibility increasingly treated as provocation. This violence is not driven by material resentment. It is driven by moral collapse.

Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was an indicator.

Moral Evasion and the Architecture of Harm

The deeper danger here is not hatred alone. Hatred is ancient. The danger is the illusion that civilisation is permanent. Liberal democracy, individual rights, and democratic capitalism are often spoken of as though they were the natural end state of human development. They are not. They are a historical anomaly—a brief, fragile interruption in the human default, which remains barbarism, tyranny, sectarian murder, and rule by force.

Civilisation survives only so long as individuals are willing to exercise moral judgment.

Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political theorist and refugee from Nazism, saw this with unsettling clarity. Writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she did not argue that evil is trivial. She argued that it often advances without hatred, driven instead by thoughtlessness—by people who stop asking what they are doing and whether it is right. Evil, in her account, flourishes not because everyone becomes a fanatic, but because ordinary individuals surrender moral judgment to procedure and conformity.

Karl Popper issued a related warning in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Societies that place their faith in closed systems—systems insulated from criticism and incapable of admitting error—lose responsibility along with truth. Once error cannot be named, wrongdoing cannot be judged.

Immanuel Kant understood the danger earlier still. Moral action, for Kant, requires autonomy: the capacity of a rational agent to ask whether an action can be willed as a universal good. When that question is replaced by Is this permitted?, Is this compliant?, or Is this defensible?, morality has already been evacuated.

Zygmunt Bauman brought these insights together with devastating force in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). The Holocaust, he argued, was not a relapse into medieval barbarism but one of modernity’s products. It was made possible not despite rational bureaucracy but because of it. Planning, compartmentalisation, role specialisation, procedural obedience, and moral distance did not prevent atrocity; they rendered it administratively feasible.

Bauman’s most important insight was the division of moral labour. Responsibility is sliced into pieces so thin that it disappears. One person drafts the policy. Another enforces it. Another audit compliance. Another communicates outcomes. Another sign letters. No one performs the whole act. No one experiences themselves as morally responsible for the result. Each can say, truthfully, that they merely did their job.

Modernity also creates distance—physical, emotional, linguistic, and moral. Decisions are made at desks, not in the presence of those harmed. Files replace faces. Procedures replace judgment. Language replaces conscience. This distance is not accidental. It is structural.

What unites Arendt, Popper, Kant, and Bauman is a single, devastating insight: conscience can be outsourced.

Institutions, Academia, and Moral Permissibility

Modern institutions actively encourage this outsourcing. Moral judgment is displaced into policy. Responsibility is transferred to process. Decisions are attributed to “the institution,” a fictive entity that acts but never thinks, harms but never repents.

Individuals are trained not to ask whether something is right, but whether it is permitted, defensible, or sustainable.

This is why moral evasion always produces permissibility.

When institutions refuse to take moral stances, they do not preserve neutrality. They create permission structures. What is not named is normalised. What is normalised is repeated. What is repeated escalates.

The academic class has been especially instrumental in this process. Moral clarity is treated as vulgar. Judgment is dismissed as “simplistic.” Condemnation is recoded as intolerance. The result is an intellectual culture in which antisemitism is endlessly contextualised, reframed, and managed—never confronted plainly, never named without qualification.

This posture bears the unmistakable imprint of post-Foucauldian deconstructionism, in which nothing is allowed to be what it is, and everything is reinterpreted as the contingent product of competing power interests. Truth becomes positional. Morality becomes suspect. Judgment is dismissed as naïveté. To say that something is simply wrong is to mark oneself as unsophisticated, authoritarian, or dangerously “essentialist.”

What began as an analytic tool hardened into an institutional reflex. Academia and politics now operate under an unspoken prohibition against absolute moral claims. Outrage is permitted, but only briefly, ritualistically, and without moral teeth.

After Bondi Beach, as after every such event, we are offered carefully engineered statements of distress—condemnations of “violence in all its forms,” assurances of concern, expressions of solidarity so diffuse they bind nothing and accuse no one. These are not moral judgments. They are risk-management exercises.

This moral evasiveness is politically safe. Contextual language maximises vote-getting across fragmented constituencies. It minimises backlash. It keeps bureaucrats employed, academics insulated, and politicians out of trouble. But it cannot draw boundaries.

The cultural cost of this abdication is enormous. To refuse to say plainly that antisemitism is always wrong is to concede that sometimes it is permissible. To contextualise hatred rather than condemn it is to license its reappearance in more explicit form. Seeds planted in institutional ambiguity do not remain theoretical. They grow.

We can see this growth in plain sight. In Australia, how many rallies have now featured chants of “globalised intifada”—a phrase whose meaning is neither metaphorical nor obscure. Intifada has a fixed historical referent: organised political violence, overwhelmingly and explicitly directed at Jews. It has never meant peaceful protest. Yet these chants are tolerated, euphemised, or waved away as rhetorical excess. In doing so, institutions do not merely fail to intervene; they transform incitement into atmosphere.

The same pattern is visible across Western cities. In Toronto, London, Paris, and elsewhere, demonstrations have been permitted in which Jews are publicly vilified, told to “go back” to Europe, subjected to genocidal jokes, or confronted with praise for historical mass murderers. These are not fringe murmurs overheard in dark corners. They are repeated statements made openly in public space under police protection, later explained away by officials as expressions of anger, grief, or political speech.

What follows is always the same choreography. Politicians issue carefully worded statements of concern. Police promise to “monitor the situation.” Academic and civic leaders urge calm, dialogue, and context. Outrage is expressed, but never enforced. Condemnation is voiced, but never acted upon. The language is mealy-mouthed, evasive, and consequence-free.

At the end of the day, nothing happens.

And when nothing happens, something has been decided. Permission has been granted. When institutions allow calls for violence to circulate without consequence, they do not merely fail to stop hatred; they normalise it. When they respond with ritual indignation and no action, they teach that this behaviour is survivable, tolerable, and ultimately safe.

This is precisely the permission structure Zygmunt Bauman described. When institutions fragment responsibility and replace moral judgment with procedure, they do not prevent wrongdoing; they create the administrative conditions in which it can occur repeatedly, openly, and without consequence.

When you permit something to happen, you have permitted it. You have said it is acceptable. No amount of waffling indignation—however carefully phrased, however sincerely performed—can undo that fact.

In my own case, this logic was not theoretical. I was dismissed as a professor for stating publicly that Hamas is a Nazi organisation. At the same time, my accuser—acting in direct alignment with the university’s senior leadership—was permitted, without reprimand, discipline, or investigation, to publish an extensive body of material deploying explicitly Nazi-era language about Jews, including the use of the German term Untermenschen—“subhuman”—alongside demonological accusations, collective denunciations of Jews as Nazis, and a steady recycling of classical antisemitic calumnies.

This was not an isolated remark or a momentary lapse. It was prolific, sustained, and public. And it was allowed.

What matters here is not the psychology of any individual, but the institutional response. One position—condemning a genocidal terrorist organisation—was treated as sanctionable. The other—using dehumanising language historically associated with mass murder—was treated as contextual, protected, or simply ignored. No inquiry followed. No boundary was drawn. No moral judgment was exercised.

This is how permissibility is established in modern institutions: not through explicit endorsement, but through selective enforcement; not through formal policy, but through what is punished and what is tolerated. The system did not malfunction. It communicated. And the message was unmistakable.

In such an environment, antisemitism does not need to be defended. It only needs to be left alone.

Permission, Normalisation, and the Fertile Soil

Polling across Western countries has made one element of this environment impossible to ignore. Antisemitic attitudes are expressed at significantly higher rates among Muslim populations than among the general non-Jewish public—four times higher¹. This fact indicts no individual by default. But it does impose an obligation on institutions charged with maintaining moral boundaries.

That obligation has not been met.

Instead, these views have been treated as sensitive, politically inconvenient, or culturally untouchable. They are explained away as grievance or trauma. At the same time, Jewish concerns are minimised, relativised, or dismissed. What matters in this calculus is not truth, but numbers. Votes count. Principles complicate.

This is not a clash of civilisations. It is the failure of one.

Antisemitism today is a composite phenomenon. It draws from Islamist ideology, far-left anti-Zionism, residual white resentment, and a broader cultural hostility that treats Jews as uniquely legitimate targets. The decisive factor is not which source supplies the hatred, but which institutions render it permissible.

White anti-Semites may not commit the most visible acts of violence. Still, they help fertilise the soil—normalising hostility, lowering thresholds, and ensuring that when violence arrives, it feels unsurprising.

Bondi Beach and the Rehearsed Response

And so the violence arrives. And the rituals follow.

There are candles. There are vigils. There are statements drafted by communications teams and interns who know the script by heart.

There are expressions of horror and shock, as though astonishment were a virtue rather than a confession of moral failure.

Almost immediately, the evasion resumes. Motive is declared irrelevant. Ideology is bracketed out—attention shifts from intent to tools, from responsibility to regulation. Even acts of courage are rapidly reprocessed into ideological currency, weaponised against the very community that has been attacked. Grief is policed. Explanation replaces judgment.

Even here—especially here—the Islamophobia narrative is advanced, as though Jews were required to suspend mourning to perform ideological obedience. Even in the immediate aftermath of murder, the priority is not naming evil but managing optics.

This is what moral outsourcing looks like in real time.

Bondi Beach is not the cause of this failure. It is its culmination. It is what happens when institutions fear numbers more than truth, when neutrality replaces judgment, and when moral clarity is treated as a threat.

This is the terminal logic of institutional moral evasion. When responsibility is deferred rather than exercised, wrongdoing does not remain abstract. What is left unchallenged metastasises. It spreads. And it eventually manifests in public space, against human bodies, in daylight.

The system does not collapse. It functions.

And because the soil remains fertile—because antisemitism is still contextualised, relativised, and bureaucratically managed—there will be more Bondi Beaches.

The Old Warning

George Orwell warned that the corruption of language precedes the corruption of thought, and the corruption of thought precedes the corruption of morality. When good is reframed as suspect and evil as contextual, inversion is complete.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood the consequence. A German Lutheran pastor and theologian executed by the Nazi state in 1945, he warned that “silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” Silence, he knew, is not neutrality. It is surrender.

The litmus test is being applied again.

And by the evidence before us—by the murders at Bondi Beach, by the normalisation of antisemitism in respectable spaces, by the fear of moral judgment in institutions, and by the retreat into contextual safety—the result is clear.

We are drifting out of range.

If that drift continues, civilisation does not fail dramatically. It becomes uninhabitable—quietly, procedurally, with everyone insisting they followed the rules.

As Isaiah warned, with unsettling precision:

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

There will be more Bondi Beaches.

1. Polling in the United Kingdom has found significant differences in attitudes toward Jews and related issues between Muslim and non-Muslim respondents. In a 2024 survey commissioned by the Henry Jackson Society, only about 24–25% of British Muslims said that Hamas committed murder and rape during the October 7 attacks, compared with roughly 62% of the wider public, indicating a marked divergence in underlying attitudes.

Earlier comprehensive surveys have also shown that levels of antisemitic beliefs among British Muslims have been multiple times higher than among the general population.