The rise of oikophobia

On 7 December last year, I sat with my children, now adults, watching Events That Changed Australia, a television special marking twenty years since the Cronulla riots. What struck me most was not only the footage itself, but their stunned reaction.

‘Why was this chapter of Australian history never taught to us at school?’ they asked, repeatedly.

That question lingered long after the program ended and spilled into nightly dinner table conversations about memory, identity, and the stories a nation chooses to confront or quietly sidestep. Those conversations led me back to a question I have grappled with for much of my professional life.

In a world defined by constant change, fractured public discourse, and digital environments that increasingly encase us in ideological silos, how does Australia form a shared sense of identity?

Living in a world we have not yet understood

For more than three decades, my work in the arts, education, and intercultural engagement has revolved around this question.

Over time, I have come to understand that identity is layered, contextual, and shaped by lived experience as much as by inherited narratives.

Over the last decade, I have merged my intercultural work with technology. This has caused me to sharpen my terms and understand identity in its great complexity. I now appreciate what happens when identity is oversimplified, how some stories are elevated while others disappear.

What unsettles me most in Australia today is not the noise of what is said, but the silence around what has apparently become too uncomfortable to acknowledge: the violence that sometimes gets airbrushed as righteous defiance.

Since 2011, I have spent several months each year working across regions as diverse as Southeast Asia, South Asia, Europe, United States, Middle East and Central Asia. This included years in the global interfaith space and a decade serving on the global council of a grassroots organisation dedicated to peacebuilding United Religions Initiative. Across cultures, faiths, and political systems, one truth remains consistent: we are living in a world we have not yet learned how to navigate ethically.

The turning point came in 1989. The Berlin Wall fell, Fukuyama’s “end of history” proclamation captured a moment of optimism, the sense that liberal democracy had won and that we were headed towards a world of shared values, holding hands and singing kumbaya. Reality proved far more complex. The World Wide Web emerged.

Globalisation accelerated at unprecedented speed. Instead of a convergence of values, we experienced economic integration without a shared ethical framework. When social media reshaped public discourse after 2008, algorithms gave previously marginalised voices a much-needed platform but they also learned to reward outrage, affirmation, and identity politics based on oversimplified and inherited distorted understanding of human identity. Global peace indicators have declined steadily since.

Dialogue without agreement, empathy without erasure

In such an environment, dialogue has become both more necessary and more fragile. Not dialogue aimed at agreement, but dialogue grounded in curiosity, humility, and care.

Empathy is often misunderstood as sympathy. In its deeper sense, drawn from its Greek etymology, empathy asks us to place ourselves, however imperfectly, within the suffering of another without erasing their experience or identity. It requires effort, discomfort, and a willingness to listen beyond our own certainties.

This matters because avoidance has consequences.

Accountability without exception

Accountability must apply to everyone, without exception. If my children, now adults, act against my values, I do not excuse it, because I love them. I name it and do so with care. That is not rejection. It is responsibility.

The same principle must apply in public life. If those who sit ideologically close to us cross our ethical line, we need to call it out. Not to humiliate or perform outrage, but to hold dialogue grounded in empathy and clarity. Kindness does not mean silence. Compassion does not require lowering standards, and sometimes standards need to be readjusted. No one has a monopoly on morality

A society that only holds its opponents accountable while shielding its own corrodes trust and legitimises hypocrisy. Consistent accountability, applied with humanity, is not divisive. It is the foundation of moral credibility.

Naming what is happening

I am witnessing a disturbing reluctance in Australia to explicitly name antisemitism when Jewish people are targeted. An attack that occurred at the commencement of Chanukah, a sacred period for sixteen million Jewish people worldwide, was not only an act of violence. Officially classified as a terrorist attack, it is the worst such incident in Australia’s history.

Avoiding clear language does not reduce harm. It compounds it.

We need nuance, not silence, to understand how extremism takes root. The aggressive politicisation of identity, the rise and normalisation of oikophobia, and the failure to hold parts of academia, politics, and the arts accountable for legitimising dehumanising rhetoric have created fertile ground for radicalisation. Governments, meanwhile, have too often remained paralysed in the face of what has been plainly visible.

This is not unique to Australia. Decades of Western military interventions and proxy conflicts in the Middle East produced instability and grievance ecosystems that allowed extremist movements to emerge and globalise. Their consequences are felt far beyond the region. I think of close interfaith friends, including  Father Chito Suganob in the Islamic City of Marawi situated in Mindanao of the Philippines, whose homes were flattened less than a decade ago.  Father Suganob survived the Marawi Seige and became known as a symbol of peace after being held hostage for 4 months. These impacts are not abstract. They are lived.

A crisis of values in a super-diverse world

What this moment reveals is a deeper crisis of values. Super-diversity, a term coined by Steven Vertovec, refers to a new, complex level of societal diversity driven by migration, involving intersecting categories like ethnicity, legal status, language, education and age. Super-diversity without ethical literacy is volatile. Education that transmits information without cultivating discernment leaves societies vulnerable to manipulation and fear.

This is why education must move beyond tolerance slogans towards critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and genuine intercultural competence. Language matters because it shapes the reality we inhabit.

Silence matters because it teaches people what not to care about.

My belief in education led me to establish programs focused on intercultural understanding and global citizenship, now reaching hundreds of thousands of school students annually. These efforts are important but not enough. Education must be accompanied by institutional courage and societal accountability.

Why light still matters

This is where Chanukah offers a powerful lesson.

Chanukah reminds us that even the smallest light matters. A single flame can push back darkness when fear and brutality attempt to extinguish hope. It does not deny darkness. It acknowledges it fully and insists that light is a choice and a responsibility.

Candles are lit not because the world is safe, but because it is not. They are lit to affirm that humanity is not defined by its worst moments, but by how it responds to them.

If we are serious about social cohesion, we must learn to name harm clearly, educate courageously, and hold one another to account with kindness and integrity.

May the light we carry be stronger than the darkness we witness.