Enough already: Sophie Scamps and the Politics of “Division”

Australia’s sense of safety has taken a hit, and we need to stop dressing it up as political debate.

Since 7 October 2023, we have watched Islamist extremists and their useful idiots grow bolder in public life. Intimidation is excused as activism. Threats are waved away as speech. Slogans that glorify violence are treated as harmless chanting.

For Jewish Australians, this has meant living with the constant feeling that our right to belong is suddenly conditional, something to be argued about in public, as if it is optional. But it does not stop with us. When a country tolerates menace aimed at one minority, the standard drops for everyone. It seeps into everything.

Then came Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025. The terrorist attack at the Chanukah celebration confirmed what many of us feared. It could happen here. It would happen here. And it did.

In the period since, we have still heard rhetoric that any decent society should treat as a warning sign, not a lifestyle choice. That includes chants like “globalise the intifada”, a phrase now at the centre of a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry examining whether it should be banned when used to incite violence.

This is the backdrop against which Dr Sophie Scamps, the independent MP for Mackellar, decided to warn that the official visit of Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, “risks igniting further division” and that leaders should be working to “rebuild social cohesion and bring our nation together”. She also said, “For all of us after Bondi the priority ought to be the safety and security of the Jewish community” but then argued that inviting Herzog “can only invite division and further risk.”

Let that sink in.

Not that intimidation should be confronted. Not that extremist threats should be policed. Not that leaders should draw hard lines against hate. Instead, the risk is framed as the presence of a Jewish and Israeli leader.

That is not responsible leadership. It is dangerous.

Because when a federal MP implies that Jewish and Israeli presence in public life is the spark, she shifts attention away from the only people actually creating division: those who threaten, harass, glorify violence, and try to dictate who is allowed to appear in public and who is not. It hands power to the intimidators and then calls it cohesion.

And it is the clearest example of Dr Scamps’ selective moral lens.

She can find her voice when it suits. On certain issues, she speaks with certainty and urgency. Fine. That is politics. But in this space, she is out of her depth. She speaks as if she understands the stakes for Jewish Australians, the mechanics of antisemitism, and the security realities that sit behind every serious conversation about Israel. Her statements show she does not.

Her argument collapses into the easiest talking point of all: division. It sounds reasonable until you notice what it avoids. It avoids naming the intimidation. It avoids naming the extremist ideology. It avoids naming the people who chant for violence. It avoids naming the ones who turn hatred into public performance. Instead, it points the finger at a visiting head of state.

If she wants to speak in the language of moral urgency, here is a simple test. Where is the sustained activism for the people of Iran right now, as human rights groups and reporting describe mass arrests and a brutal crackdown, including medical workers detained for treating injured protesters. Where is the same persistence, the same volume, the same pressure.

If moral clarity is something she can summon on demand, then the question is not whether she has a voice. The question is why that voice appears reliably when it is fashionable, and fades when it is hard, complex, or politically inconvenient.

And no, this is not about denying criticism of Israel. Australians can criticise any government. It is about whether an MP understands the moment we are living in. After Bondi, words do not float in the air. They land. They travel. They are repeated by the worst actors. They become permission structures.

Dr Scamps does not represent an inner-city protest circuit. She represents Mackellar.

On the Northern Beaches, people are practical. They care about safety. They care about basic decency. They care about raising families without imported hatreds being normalised in their streets. Our Jewish community here is not asking for special treatment. We are asking for what every Australian should expect: leaders who stand up to extremism, defend minorities, and stop treating Jewish presence as a problem to be managed.

Because that is what Dr Scamps is doing, whether she realises it or not. She is treating the presence of a Jewish and Israeli leader as the trigger, rather than treating those who threaten violence as the trigger.

Enough.

Leadership is not chasing headlines. Leadership is choosing words that protect people, back the rule of law, and draw clear lines against intimidation. It is refusing to give radicals and their useful idiots the power to decide who can appear in public life.

Dr Scamps can keep offering commentary dressed up as leadership. But the Jewish community of Mackellar, and the wider community of Mackellar, have had enough of being spoken at. We want representatives who understand that cohesion is not built by blaming the target. It is built by confronting the threat.

Michael Gencher is the Executive Director of StandWithUs Australia