Opinion
As William Blake so perceptively wrote, “A truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent”. He might well have been thinking of Australia’s taxpayer-funded broadcaster. As the legacy media will, even when it’s reporting the truth, the ABC misleads by omission and misdirection.
Case in point: a report on a study showing an alarming rise in anti-Semitism on university campuses. This report certainly merits attention: today’s students are tomorrow’s elite chattering classes, after all. A rise in anti-Semitism in Australia is also of a piece with a dismaying surge in Jew-hatred in Europe and the US.
“People are scared to be publicly Jewish”
New research shows the disturbing levels of antisemitism faced by young people, both on campus and online.
According to a survey of more than 500 Jewish students, commissioned by the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS), more than two-thirds of respondents had experienced antisemitism at university.
More than half said they had hidden their Jewish identity […]
One in five respondents reported staying away from campus to avoid the problem — a statistic AUJS president Alissa Foster describes as “heartbreaking”.
“People are scared to be publicly Jewish,” Ms Foster says.
We’ve seen a similar trend worsening in Europe, especially for years. So much so that, for the first time since WWII, Jews are fleeing the continent in large numbers.
If only the ABC could be a bit more honest about where it’s coming from.
Watch, now, how the ABC directs their report to neo-Nazism and government moves to ban “Nazi symbolism”.
The neo-Nazi National Socialist Network, a group that appeared at the anti-trans rally in Melbourne earlier this year, was recently suspended from Twitter but has opened a new account […]
In June, the federal government announced it intended to follow several states in outlawing Nazi symbols, specifically the Nazi swastika and the SS symbol.
“We are sending the clearest possible message that there is no tolerance in our country for any form of racial or religious vilification, no tolerance for antisemitism,” says Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
Dr Dreyfus says while the swastika and SS symbols are those most identified with the Nazi regime, “if we need to go further, we will.”
ABC Australia
There’s just one teensy problem with that deliberate segue by the ABC: the report says almost nothing about Nazis, nor about swastikas or SS symbols. There is nothing about neo-Nazis on campus.
In fact, its only references to Nazism are Jewish students reporting that Israel is regularly compared to Nazi Germany. A quarter of Jewish students report being singled out “because of matters relating to Israel”. By students and staff.
“[At my university], it is of a very popular position to take by both staff and student to make antisemitic remarks, especially in regards to Israel. Comments such as ‘from the river to the sea’ and Jewish colonist occupiers are very common and makes me very wary of being open about my Jewish identity.”
“From the river to the sea”? “Jewish colonist occupiers”? Where have we heard those phrases before?
“The socialist movement has said things to me, including calling me a ‘dirty Zionist Jew’ as someone who is clearly a religious student with kippah, tzitzit and a beard. I feel very unsafe with the presence of anti-Jewish student clubs on campus, such as Students for Palestine.”
The socialist movement. Students for Palestine.
In other words, the rise in anti-Semitism is coming, not from the far-right (although only a fool would deny a persistent, pestilential strain of anti-Semitism on the fringe right), but the mainstream left. And it’s being openly tolerated on campus.
Nearly a third of Jewish students reported campus staff participating in anti-Semitic incidents. Nearly three-quarters said that staff were present but ignored such incidents.
“Especially around Nakba Day I do feel hesitant to come on campus.”
ABC Australia
Last year, the University of Melbourne Student Union voted to denounce Zionism as a “racist, colonial ideology”. Several academics have been embroiled in horrific anti-Semitic incidents. The Sydney University student newspaper valourises murderous Palestinian terrorists on its front page.
LARPing neo-Nazi edgelords are indeed a problem: left-wing students and academics are even worse.