Donald Trump may be the most aggrieved person in the world – although you may think that is par for the course for a spoiled child and lousy golfer who cannot get his way.  Trump thinks Putin is another victim – Vladimir, he says, went through hell, too.  It is curious that two of the most powerful and loathed people on the planet are so insecure.

Take two sorts of person who have been reviled down the centuries – gays and gypsies (who all came under notice with the Nazis).  Which has suffered more?  The question is absurd and unanswerable.  You may as well ask whether Bradman was as good as Babe Ruth, or whether Carlton is as strong a football club as Collingwood.  Even God might draw the line at answering that question.

Yet, a very fine article by Waleed Aly in The Age says some people prominent in our public life, such as it is, are happy to compare the suffering of Jews with that of Muslims arising from racism.

Liberal senator Dave Sharma in December: “Any time any senior minister mentioned antisemitism in the last 12 months, they also mentioned a fictitious Islamophobia which was not going on.”  Lest that be dismissed as an isolated stance, here’s his colleague, Sarah Henderson: “Frankly, there is no issue with Islamophobia”, before adding later, “I really reject any argument that there is some sort of equivalence between antisemitism and any other form of racism, including Islamophobia, at the moment on Australian university campuses, because that is simply not the case.”  This as Muslim and Palestinian students were reporting instances of verbal and physical assault to the Register.  Or here’s Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie: “[The government] seem[s] to think there’s a moral equivalence between Islamophobia and antisemitism [but] there absolutely isn’t. And it needs to be called out.”

The result according to Aly is:

The consequence is the conviction, now deeply entrenched in Muslim Australia, that the country simply doesn’t care about anything that happens to them. That Australia recognises them only as perpetrators, but never as victims.

If Aly is correct in this, those involved, in government or opposition, who have led to this should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

And the frightful irony of their fault is that it shares the vice that is at the bottom of this malady of racism that has marred the earth since the time of the origin of man.  That vice is that it is in order to treat every member of a group that is said to be distinct by breed or faith as marked by a common attribute merely because of events in their shared history.  People are like branded cattle.  This dogma calls to mind that ghastly exceptionalism of the Americans.  ‘My country right or wrong.’

It is a flat denial of the principle of humanity – that each of us has our own worth or dignity arising merely from the fact that we are human.  And you do not have to resort to faith in the supernatural to build a moral code on that principle.

It is trite to say that Australia is a migrant country – our First Nations people would see all white and Asian people here as migrants, and very recent ones at that.  But we have Australians who have connections on both sides of the war in Gaza. 

The tension is not helped by a singular imbalance of political and social clout between them here.  Sir Isaac Isaacs was made Governor-General of Australia in 1931.  We are a long way from seeing a Muslim Australian head of state.  (Of course, under the English constitution, neither could be appointed as the Crown.  At least in that sense they are equal.)

People on both sides are prone to dismiss pleas from those against them as propaganda or, worse, bigotry.  (They might bear in mind that in that infamous Oval Office brawl, Vance accused Zelensky of taking people on ‘propaganda’ tours – of the victims of Putin’ s war crimes.)  Insular vision of imported conflict is a problem for the rest of us.  Two one-eyed people do not make one whole person. 

Most Australians do not care about which God is the more saleable, or which tribal history is the more pathetic.  But we may remind the warriors of the true faith or blood on either side that the more they go to war against each other, the more they court the venom and disease of which they justly complain.