In the early hours of Shabbat morning on Jan. 10, the UC Santa Barbara residential AEPi house was trespassed on and vandalized with a swastika on a bathroom mirror. According to the ADL, this is the fourth time since November that this particular Jewish residential institution has been targeted with antisemitic hate. Isla Vista Foot Patrol, which is part of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, is actively looking into the incident and has yet to release any official information to the public.

This is not just another example of individual hatred, but a dangerous normalization of antisemitic behavior which perpetrators in our community now feel emboldened to cross personal and physical boundaries.

As the investigation in Isla Vista continues, the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League in Santa Barbara/Tri-Counties, Joshua Burt, released a statement: “The swastika is a symbol of hate and terror, and its use to intimidate Jewish students in their own home is reprehensible. This escalating pattern of harassment is unacceptable and has no place in our community.”

This wasn’t defacing the stall of a bathroom on campus or on a classroom whiteboard (which would be bad enough.) No, someone invaded a safe space created for young Jewish men and threatened them with the most potent symbol of their people’s genocide ever created.

Imagine walking into your bathroom and seeing a dehumanizing slur staring you in the face. How quickly would your feeling of safety erode? The anger and frustration students must feel from being victimized, while in a community that prides itself on diversity and inclusion is profound and deeply alienating.

How many members will think twice now before entering? How much of their budget will need to be allocated to extra security just to exist openly? Wiping away the shaving cream is easy, but feeling safe again is its own battle.

What’s all the more sad is that AEPi members aren’t surprised. “My initial reaction was disgust and fear, but honestly, I’m Jewish. To say this isn’t my reality, would be a lie. … I’m proud to say I’m Jewish, and I’m proud to say no amount of swastikas or attacks will ever change that,” shared Justin Shirazian, a pre-med junior and the Sentinel of AEPi UCSB.

Jake Zicklin, another AEPi brother, was asleep in his room at the time of the attack. He woke up from the noise and noted he was “horrified to leave my room because I was unsure if they were armed.” Thankfully, Zicklin was able to get a photo of the perpetrators’ faces before they left. “This has nothing to do with Israel…. This has everything to do with Jews existing,” said Zicklin.

Our campus depends on mutual respect. The perpetrators are testing boundaries. If they face no real consequences or community pushback, they will feel emboldened to repeat the behavior or escalate it further. Unfortunately, this is not a West Coast phenomenon.

Campuses across the country have faced increasing amounts of unabashed Jewish hate. Just last month, the Michigan State University Chabad was vandalized with swastikas accompanied by the words “He’s back,” presumably referring to Hitler. When asked about the incident, Jewish MSU student, Ruben Sobol, expressed sentiments that would resonate with Jewish students around the world: “Hatred is so normalized, I don’t even know who to trust anymore when I meet new people.” These incidents aren’t simply vandalism. They create a culture that prohibits Jewish students from feeling safe in their own educational spaces.

Aside from the current rise of antisemitism that we’re seeing, it’s hard not to see parallels with pre-Holocaust Nazi radicalization in German universities. As the Nazis were increasing their influence, Jewish professors and students were already being alienated on campuses. Jewish faculty was boycotted, and petitions were circulated to limit Jewish participation in universities. Swastikas were everywhere.

The time to pay attention is now. We cannot allow Jewish students to live in fear of constant attacks because it’s easier than finding ways to have hard conversations and explore resolutions.

What happened at AEPi wasn’t a funny prank and it wasn’t harmless. It was someone entering illegally into a Jewish home and vandalizing the home with an intimidating hate symbol. Talking about incidents like this matters, because when they’re ignored, it sends the message that this kind of behavior is normal and acceptable. Once hate is allowed to enter people’s homes without real consequences or pushback, it starts to feel normal, and that’s when the problem becomes much bigger than one house or one incident.

Lily Karofsky is Vice President of Jewish Life at UCSB Hillel and a CAMERA on Campus Fellow.

If you have ever lived in Australia for more than five minutes, you have heard it: “She’ll be right.”

To non-Australians, it can sound like a charming national habit, spoken with a shrug and an easy confidence. In plain terms, it means it will be okay, it will work itself out, don’t worry too much. For generations, that instinct has helped Australians get through droughts, floods, bushfires, recessions, and the ordinary knocks of life. But it is a disastrous approach to hate. Hate does not work itself out. It spreads when it is tolerated, excused, minimized, rationalized, or treated as someone else’s problem.

And that, in many ways, is how we got here.

Australia did not wake up one day as a country where antisemitism could operate in plain sight. We arrived here through thousands of small decisions to look away, to downplay, to avoid “making it worse,” to keep the peace, to pretend that a hard conversation was somehow more dangerous than the hatred itself. Even when voices inside and outside the Jewish community warned that the temperature was rising, the response from too many corners of public life was predictable: don’t overreact; don’t inflame tensions; it’s just protest; it’s just politics; she’ll be right.

But what happens when that reflex meets the modern ecosystem of radicalization, online incitement, imported ideological extremism, and a protest culture that learns it can push further, and further again, with little consequence? You get a country where hate preachers can operate openly, and where the enforcement line becomes so blurry that it ceases to function as a line at all.

A particularly stark example came when an Australian federal court found that Sydney cleric Wissam Haddad’s sermons breached racial vilification laws, with orders requiring removal of content and restraint on repeating similar racist statements about Jewish people. That was not a niche community dispute. It was a warning flare to the entire nation: incitement was being broadcast; it was crossing legal thresholds; and it was doing so in an environment where too many people still wanted to pretend it was either “controversial speech” or someone else’s problem.

One of the most corrosive dynamics in Australia’s public conversation has been the tendency to repackage antisemitic incitement as merely “speech,” and then to treat objections as evidence of intolerance. That rhetorical trick has done enormous damage. It allows people to avoid the hard question a democracy must face: what is our obligation when hatred is actively cultivated, when it targets a minority, and when it seeks not just to offend but to intimidate?

We do not lack a framework for answering that. Australian law and public standards distinguish political disagreement from vilification and incitement. In late 2025, the Australian government publicly responded to a plan to combat antisemitism and flagged measures including an aggravated hate speech offence aimed at preachers and those who use platforms to promote hateful antisemitism. Whatever one’s politics, the fact that government had to explicitly address “preachers” tells you where the line had drifted. That drift did not happen overnight. It happened through years of shrugging, excuse-making, and a preference for comfort over clarity.

Slogans matter in this context, not because words are inherently violence, but because words can be permission structures. They can normalize contempt. They can be recruitment tools. They can teach people which targets are legitimate. After October 7, Australians watched a pattern take hold: open hostility toward Jews, moral inversion, and rhetoric that did not aim for peace but for escalation. Chants such as “Globalize the intifada” were tolerated in protests and on campuses, even though they function as a call to export violence into Western streets. In the wake of subsequent events, commentators and security analysts have repeatedly warned that hate speech does not stay in the realm of slogans: it translates into intimidation, harassment, and sometimes violence, with the deliberate purpose of making communities afraid. Australia was warned in real time. Too many people chose to treat those warnings as exaggeration, or as an inconvenience to the national self-image.

Then it happened here.

On Sunday, 14 December 2025, Jews celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach were attacked. It is difficult to overstate what that meant. Bondi is iconic Australia, the postcard version of our national story. The target was not an abstraction. It was Jews gathered openly, publicly, celebrating their identity. The Commonwealth later recognised the national impact with formal reflection and commemoration. A royal commission was announced to examine the circumstances and failures around the massacre.

But here is the part that should make every decent Australian pause. A commission, however necessary, is not a substitute for cultural and civic accountability. And the most chilling detail is not only that this attack occurred, but that our public debate still struggled to speak plainly about the conditions that made it possible.

Because even after Bondi, the line kept moving. The instinct to rationalize, to relativize, to insist that “it’s complicated,” to reach for euphemisms rather than speak plainly, remained. If a society cannot draw a clear boundary after a mass casualty attack targeting Jews at a religious celebration, then the problem is not confusion. It is moral failure, and it is institutional cowardice.

This is where the “she’ll be right” mentality becomes dangerous. It tells decent people the adults will handle it, the institutions will self-correct, the extremists will burn out, the country will naturally return to balance. But extremists do not burn out when they are rewarded with attention, tolerance, and platform. They escalate when they learn there is no meaningful cost.

The media conversation, too often, has been trapped in a false binary: free speech versus censorship. That frame is convenient for those who want to avoid doing the difficult work of distinguishing legitimate political expression from incitement and harassment. It also obscures the cumulative reality. One sermon becomes a “controversy.” One rally becomes “passionate activism.” One antisemitic incident becomes “unfortunate.” One campus campaign becomes “student politics.” And then people act shocked when Jewish Australians say they no longer feel safe, when security becomes normalized around synagogues and schools, when families reassess what it means to live openly as Jews in a country that once felt uncomplicated.

Australia did not “suddenly” change. We were watching it change. We just did what we often do best.

We shrugged.

So where to from here? Australia has a choice. We can keep treating antisemitism as episodic, or we can confront it as systemic. That requires more than statements. It requires enforceable standards and the willingness to apply them consistently. It means drawing bright lines around incitement and vilification, and acting when those lines are crossed. It means refusing to launder hate through the language of “debate,” and being honest that dehumanization, intimidation, and calls to violence are not contributions to a pluralist society. It means treating Jewish safety as a national issue, not a niche concern, because Bondi was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was an Australian one.

And it means demanding institutional courage from universities, cultural institutions, and community leaders, rather than watching them outsource moral judgement to PR teams and crisis committees. A liberal democracy cannot function if it has no confidence in its own moral boundaries. Multiculturalism cannot survive if it becomes a cover for tolerating extremism. Social cohesion is not maintained by pretending the problem is smaller than it is. It is maintained by confronting what threatens it, early, clearly, and consistently.

Australians are proud of being laid-back. But there is a difference between being laid-back and being asleep.

“She’ll be right” might be fine when you are talking about a dented car door, a late train, or a rainy weekend. It is not fine when hatred is organizing, recruiting, preaching, marching, and escalating.

We got here because too many good people assumed someone else would stop it.

If Australia wants to be the country it says it is, then the next cultural reflex cannot be a shrug.

It must be resolve.

Michael Gencher is Executive Director of StandWithUs Australia

The world has a habit of forgetting the Kurds — until catastrophe strikes. Even the most progressive movements, governments and institutions that speak eloquently about human rights often fall silent when Kurds demand the most basic of them: dignity, safety, political recognition and the right to exist without fear. Kurds are noticed only when they are facing yet another atrocity, another mass displacement, another erasure.

Today, all three major parts of Kurdistan urgently need humane attention and international accountability.

In Northern Kurdistan, under Turkish control, a historic moment is unfolding — and stalling. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been designated a terrorist organization despite posing no threat to any Western governments, has laid down its arms after four decades of conflict with the Turkish state. This decision marked the potential beginning of a genuine peace process. In return, Turkey was expected to recognize Kurdish political and cultural rights and to end systematic assimilation policies.

Yet the talks between the Turkish government and the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan remain opaque. No details have been shared publicly. Kurdish rights remain in limbo. Meanwhile, human rights organizations and Western governments — so vocal elsewhere — have failed to ask the most basic question: why has this historic opportunity been stalled, and at whose expense?

In Western Kurdistan (Rojava), the situation is even more dire. Rojava has represented one of the most compelling democratic experiments of our time: local governance by the people, of the people and for the people. Kurdish forces — largely civilians, alongside other Kurdish and non-Kurdish communities — took up arms with U.S. support to defeat ISIS, the most brutal terrorist organization of the 21st century. More than 15,000 lives were lost; thousands more were wounded or permanently disabled.

The victory in Kobane is commemorated worldwide every Nov. 1, yet the people who made that victory possible are now being abandoned.

Since then, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by Kurds, have continued working with the United States to prevent the resurgence of ISIS, protect religious minorities such as the Yezidis and maintain stability along Syria’s northern border. Crucially, Rojava has never demanded secession. Kurds have advocated instead for a decentralized Syrian state that guarantees dignity and safety for all communities—Kurds, Arabs, Yezidis, Druze, Turkmen and others.

That fragile stability began to collapse when the West rushed to legitimize a temporary leadership in Damascus under Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly known as Jolani). Initially, Kurdish leaders approached the new government with cautious optimism, offering cooperation to safeguard Syria’s sovereignty and protect civilians. When SDF leadership traveled to Damascus for talks, hope briefly surfaced.

Then came betrayal.

In early 2026, Syrian government-backed militias launched brutal attacks on Kurdish, Yezidi and Druze neighborhoods in Aleppo under the pretext of “eliminating Kurdish forces” — the very forces that defeated ISIS. Civilians were killed. Women and children were displaced in the dead of winter. Videos circulated of militia members torturing Kurdish civilians, throwing people from buildings and posing for selfies.

And how did the world respond?

By calling for “restraint on both sides.”

Once again, Kurds are asked to justify why they are defending themselves. Once again, the West refuses to acknowledge its own misjudgments in empowering leaders who have neither credibility nor commitment to pluralism.

In Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhelat), under Iranian rule, the situation is no less complex or alarming. While the Iranian regime represses women, minorities and dissenters across the country, Kurds and Baluchis have been among its primary targets. Executions, mass surveillance, militarized cities and cultural repression are routine. Kurdish resistance is criminalized with particular brutality.

As discussions of regime change in Iran intensify, Kurds are once again left asking: what comes next for us? A restored monarchy that may please Western interests and loosen dress codes for women — but continue to treat Kurds as internal enemies? The West may celebrate cosmetic reforms, but Kurdish history teaches us to ask deeper questions about power, rights and exclusion.

Nothing in Kurdistan is black and white. Kurds do not ask for blind sympathy or simplistic narratives. We ask for consistency. We ask why Kurdish lives are treated as expendable bargaining chips. We ask why international law, human rights frameworks and progressive values seem optional when Kurds are the ones demanding them.

The world must stop seeing Kurds only as useful fighters against terrorism — or as tragic victims when massacres occur. Kurds are a people with political agency, cultural depth and a long history of contributing to global civilization.

We do not need to be dying to deserve attention.

Xeyal Qertel is a New York-based educator and human rights advocate. Originally from North Kurdistan (Bakur), she migrated to the United States and made New York her home. Xeyal is the founder and president of the New York Kurdish Cultural Center (NYKCC) and the director of the annual New York Kurdish Film Festival (NYKFF).