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President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Daniel Aghion has called on the Australian government to provide an urgent response to special envoy Jillian Segel’s report into antisemitism to secure the safety of Australian Jews following a deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester this morning.

“The Jewish community here in Australia, we’re devastated and we’re angry … We’re angry because yesterday at Yom Kippur, I had to walk through multiple layers of security, like every other Australian Jew, just in order to go. No other religious community in this country has to go through what we do just to practise our religion,” Aghion told Sky this morning.

“There are multiple vectors all pointing towards … the Australian Jewish community. And those vectors are Islamist extremism, left-wing activism. Through the pro-Palestinian movement, Neo Nazis, we’ve had those marching in Melbourne and state-sponsored terror. We now know that there have been firebombing attacks on the Australian Jewish community committed by Iran here, and the trouble is these are all feeding off each other and giving each other social licence.”

Aghion also said that upcoming pro-Palestine protests will put Jewish Australians in danger and called for them to be cancelled.

“Let’s just think about what’s coming up. We just had Yom Kippur. We’ve got 7th of October coming up, where there will be memorials within the Jewish community. And then don’t forget, as was just seen on screen, two to three days after that, we had the protests at the steps of the Opera House calling for attacks on the Jewish community. This is the sort of thing that is going to be celebrated and confirmed … if the protest on the 12th of October goes ahead.”

He said it was an urgent matter for the government to accelerate delivering a response to special envoy Jillian Segel’s report into antisemitism.

“The antisemitism envoy Jillian Segel has delivered her report. It is now a matter for the government to respond to it, but they’ve had it some two months now, and this is a matter of urgency … we need a whole of government response so that we have a community here in Australia that is safe for all of us, not just Jews. So what we’re calling the government to do is respond to the report, provide the tools to government to tackle the problem of antisemitism that we have in this country.”