Tolerate antisemitism and the West is next
The massacre at a Chanukkah candle-lighting ceremony on Sydney’s Bondi beach, in which at least 15 Jews were murdered, including a ten-year-old girl, and 30 others were wounded, was shocking but no surprise. When I visited Australia this year to promote my latest book, I found a Jewish community under siege.
Two days after the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023, demonstrators had swarmed outside Sydney Opera House screaming, “Where’s the Jews?” and according to some reports, “gas the Jews”.
Over the subsequent two years Australian synagogues have been firebombed; regular marches have chanted for the mass murder of Jews; on campus, Jewish students and academics have been harassed and intimidated; and the government’s hostility to Israel has been accompanied by mothballing key recommendations made by its envoy against antisemitism.
Attendance lists for my talks in Sydney and Melbourne were screened against known extremists.
Security outside was intense, and guards rushed me inside from my taxi. When the organisers of my talk in Brisbane wanted to find a larger meeting hall they were gratuitously turned down by six venues, with one stating openly that it wouldn’t host any Jewish speaker.
Australians have felt abandoned by a government that, as in Britain and much of the West, refuses to make the connection between today’s animus against Israel and antisemitism. But the Bondi beach massacre was precisely what is meant by the marchers’ chants of “globalise the intifada”. It was part of a global onslaught against the Jewish people.
Of course Israel should be criticised like any other country. It’s perfectly legitimate, for example, to be repelled by extremist members of the Netanyahu government. It’s legitimate to believe, as so many do, in a “two-state solution”. The evidence is that there’s no Palestinian leadership prepared to accept the existence of Israel at all. But the fact that people may be misguided in this belief doesn’t make them into antisemites.
People of goodwill don’t realise how Jewhatred is embedded
People can believe damaging nonsense about Israel for the best of reasons but they ought to understand that this entrenched narrative is based on demonstrable lies and dodgy data — about famine, wilful killings of civilians and genocide in Gaza — designed to demonise and delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state.
A UN declaration of famine in August used projections based on trends. Even using the Hamas figure of 70,000 people killed in Gaza — which absurdly acknowledges not one terrorist among them and includes natural deaths — the ratio is under 1.5 civilians to every one combatant (using IDF estimates for the number of terrorists killed) compared with the global war average of nine civilians to every combatant.
As in any war, all civilian victims are a tragedy and there is especially understandable emotion over the children killed in Gaza. And it’s understandable that many regard supporting the Palestinians as a badge of conscience. But people of goodwill don’t realise how deeply Jew-hatred is embedded in this cause.
Palestinian authorities teach children from the cradle to hate and murder Jews because they are Jews. They demonise the Jews as rats, snakes or octopuses — monstrous, demonic figures said to be secretly controlling the world in their own interests.
So the West’s embrace of the Palestinian cause means the guardrails against antisemitism have been dismantled. Posing as the championing of an oppressed people, Palestinianism has made such discourse respectable in western society. Well-meaning people have no idea that this is what they are supporting. And they don’t realise that the street demonstrations aren’t just a protest. They’re also a delirious expression of the Islamists’ belief that the October 7 onslaught, and the West’s subsequent support of the anti-Israel narrative, signify that they’re on their way to defeating the Jews and conquering the West. This is demonstrated by their command of the streets and the authorities’ toleration of their incitement.
Many Muslims in Britain, Australia and elsewhere in the West have no truck with extremism. The hero of Bondi beach, who tackled one of the gunmen and disarmed him with his bare hands, is a Muslim of Syrian origin. But it’s very wrong to deny that most terrorism is Islamist and that antisemitism is a major problem in the Muslim world.
In Australia an Islamic scholar, Wissam “Abu Ousayd” Haddad, preached in November 2023 that the Jews were “rats” and “cowards” who controlled the media and the banks and who needed war to continue in order to make money. And he specifically denied that he was talking about Zionists. Let the West condemn Zionists, he chuckled. He was talking about Jews. Islamic preachers similarly incite against Jews in Britain. As in Australia, no action is taken against them.
As a result of its sensitivity to any criticism of the Muslim world as “Islamophobic”, the West is missing the crucial fact that for Islamists the destruction of the Jews is a necessary step towards the destruction of the Christian West. From the early 20th century Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb, who inspired modern political Islam, to Osama bin Laden and the Hamas charter, Islamic jihadis have said their war is against modernity which is a bacillus carried by the West; and behind both modernity and the West are the Jews.
The laundering of antisemitism as opposition to Israel means that the West can’t see it is the frog in the pot, slowly being boiled.
Comments
Post a Comment