The government created a legitimate comparison when it appointed envoys for Islamophobia and antisemitism, and Muslim communities are entitled to ask whether both responses reflect equal protection.
The multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, is troubled by the “consistent comparison” between the government’s responses to Islamophobia and antisemitism.
“First of all, I take a bit of issue between this comparative and this consistent comparison between, what are we giving to antisemitism, what are we giving to Islamophobia. Both are worthy of pursuit in their own right, both the elimination of Antisemitism and the elimination of Islamophobia, and racism in all its forms are worthy pursuits. I don’t want to get into a competitive kind of environment of Islamophobia versus Antisemitism, and I take issue with that.”
Anne Aly cannot refuse such comparison, for many reasons. The most glaring one is simply the fact that the government invited it. The moment it named these two distinct forms of racism and granted each a special envoy at a volatile time, it made its two responses comparable, and it made the difference between them a legitimate matter of public judgement.
Equality is a comparative judgement
Discrimination, unequal treatment, only becomes visible through comparison. You establish unequal treatment by asking how a differently situated group is treated in similar circumstances. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework calls for consistency across all forms of racism, a standard that can only be checked comparatively. A minister asking a community not to compare is asking it not to perceive discrimination.
And government has routinely used comparison to measure Muslim communities: their sense of belonging, trust, employment, education, economic participation, and public attitudes towards them, are indexed against national averages and other groups. The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion reports, conducted with universities and routinely cited in government contexts, are a prime example.
Why, then, is comparison acceptable when it travels downward but impertinent when it travels upward? Government may compare Muslims against the rest of the nation when designing action plans and programs for them. But when Australian Muslims draw the comparison themselves, exercising the ordinary democratic right of telling their government where discrimination sits and where its response falls short, the same act is recast as unhelpful. Comparison cannot be an instrument of administration and an act of impertinence at once.
Nor should the minister treat the comparison as a nuisance, because social cohesion within multicultural societies requires that communities feel heard and feel equal. In Professor Fethi Mansouri’s words, successful multicultural governance requires leadership, vision and commitment to fairness. Dismissing a community’s concerns over the government’s own lack of fairness contradicts the minister’s portfolio’s core task.
There is also a cost to the dismissal. Researchers describe as racial gaslighting the pattern in which a community’s account of unequal treatment is waved away rather than answered. Muslims’ concerns, many supported by evidence of hierarchical treatment, are being met with dismissal and annoyance instead of genuine engagement. This compounds the harm and feeds the very social alienation the social cohesion portfolio exists to prevent.
A comparison the government itself performs
Comparison also appears in the government’s account of itself. Announcing the response, the minister observed that “for the very first time, the very first time in the history of this country, we have a government that is willing to recognise that Islamophobia exists”. That, too, is a comparison, between this government and every government before it, offered as grounds for Australian Muslims’ appreciation.
Recognition of Islamophobia offered on the government’s own terms, with Muslims’ gratitude expected in return, is not fairness. And gratitude is a difficult thing to ask of a community that has spent two years asking the same government to hear and respond to its grief over Gaza.
Moreover, the claim that this government has recognised Islamophobia should not be taken at face value. Muslim Votes Matter examined the response line by line: of the 83 identifiable initiatives, only 19 were genuinely new, fewer than one in four. More than half were existing or previously announced measures; the remainder sit under development, unclear, or amount to routine operational activity. Only $2.6 million over four years is clearly identified as new funding directed exclusively at anti-Islamophobia measures, set against the $604.2 million package mobilised in response to antisemitism after Bondi.
This is what Mansouri means when he describes the response as “big on lofty ideals, short on details”: a collection of extensions to existing programs that treats anti-Muslim racism as a problem of social harmony to be managed, rather than a question of equal citizenship and institutional discrimination to be answered.
Even the Muslim organisations that welcomed the response as “an important step in the right direction”, pointed to the “one glaring omission”: the absence of legal consequences and enforcement, of the kind afforded to antisemitism this same year.
This is a community doing precisely what governments have done to it for decades: comparing, measuring, and naming the gap. So, again, why is comparison welcome when it commends the government’s record against other governments, and refused when it scrutinises it for inconsistencies? In a liberal democracy, it runs both ways.
‘In its own right’ has a history
Anne Aly says: “Both [Islamophobia and antisemitism] are worthy of pursuit in their own right.”
What does that mean in logic and in practice? Alana Lentin provides an answer.
Lentin argues that antisemitism has been exceptionalised. After the Holocaust, European states and their settler offshoots detached it from the broader history of racial thinking that also produced colonialism, slavery and contemporary Islamophobia, recasting it as an inexplicable, irrational hatred rather than one rooted in political and social structures. Placed at the ‘pinnacle on the hierarchy of racisms’, the Shoah became the measure of what ‘real racism’ looks like. The experiences of racialised people today, from systemic discrimination to the legacies of colonialism, are then scrutinised in perpetual comparison to that exceptional standard, and dismissed as ‘exaggerated complaint’, as ‘not racism’. This is how the Black Lives Matter movement, and even critical race theory, could be branded extremist by some critics rather than answered.
What holds the exception in place, Lentin argues, is philosemitism: a declared love of Jews that has less to do with Jewish safety than with the state’s image of itself. Drawing on Houria Bouteldja’s notion of ‘state philosemitism’, she shows how governments answer antisemitism with exaggerated displays of devotion that turn Jews into symbols and prove of the state’s anti-racist work, even while they actively engage in or ignore the repression of other racialised groups.
She gives the example of how France invoked the protection of Jews to justify an anti-separatism law that polices its Muslim communities. In this way, opposition to antisemitism becomes a proxy for anti-racism, and at times a licence for it: a state can prove its anti-racist credentials through the pinnacle racism while practising a pick-and-choose anti-racism everywhere else.
Once antisemitism is set apart in this way, “in its own right”, two things follow. A government can respond to one racism with the full weight of the state and to another with programs and pamphlets without appearing inconsistent. And its treatment of the Jewish community becomes the credential that shields it from criticism over its treatment of others.
Islamophobia and antisemitism are relational to context and power
The deeper problem is that the two racisms currently emerged within the same context to begin with. As David Theo Goldberg argued, racisms are not sealed compartments; they are produced relationally, through the same institutions, histories and policy frameworks.
The two envoys were born of the same concern, appointed as the war on Gaza reshaped Australian public life, and they sit within the same social cohesion agenda, reporting to the same government departments. But the communities they serve do not stand in the same place. One is aligned with the commitments of the state itself: Australia’s strategic partnership with the United States and its longstanding support for Israel give the campaign against antisemitism institutional backing at the highest levels. The other sits at the margin of those commitments: Muslim communities’ central political concern, Palestine, is the very issue on which the government’s alliances run the other way.
The two categories of racism are not context-free; they are context-charged. They entered the government’s files at the same time, but from oppositional positions: one adjacent to power, one at its periphery.
What is being compared, then, is not two responses to two unrelated problems. It is one government’s application of one standard of protection to two communities positioned very differently in relation to the government’s own interests, and separated by a severe disparity in power and influence.
A government confident it had applied equal standards would have no reason to discourage comparison; it would invite it. Comparison is not competition between racisms. It is how citizens of a multicultural democracy hold their government to one standard of protection, and it is the only means by which a community at the periphery of power can name the structural discrimination it faces.
Sara Cheikh Husain
Dr Sara Cheikh Husain is a researcher and writer specialising in Islamophobia, social justice, and human rights, with a focus on Palestinians, Muslim communities in the West, and refugees. She completed her PhD in Social Sciences at Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute, supported by the UNESCO Chair for Cultural Diversity and Social Justice. Sara has published widely in leading academic journals and policy reports, co-authored A War of Words on media coverage of the Israel–Gaza war, and has a forthcoming book with Palgrave (2025): The politics of anti-Islamophobia in Australia: The case of the Muslim community organisations. She serves on the Executive of AAIMS and advises the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Anti-Racism Campaign.