The Melbourne office of Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns was vandalized and set on fire early Wednesday morning. The perpetrators smashed windows, started a fire at the front of the office, and scrawled “Zionism is fascism” in red paint on the wall.

Burns denounced the attack as a “politically motivated” act, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese strongly condemned the incident.

“This is an escalation of the attacks that we’ve seen. We’ve been talking about this. We’ve got to dial this down,” Albanese said. “For some people, they feel very strongly about issues in the Middle East. But it’s no reason to target MPs half a world away in Australia, and in particular the targeting of a Jewish MP is very distressing.”

“This has got to be seen as an attack on someone who’s a Jewish MP, someone who is running an office that looks after people’s interests,” he added. “How people think that they advance their cause through activities like this is beyond me. It does nothing. It undermines the cause that people purport to represent.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)