OPINION
What is wrong with people? What the hell is wrong with people?
Just what is going on in the hateful, addled minds of the masses of people across the Western world, people who repeatedly proclaim their own moral self-righteousness, yet whose first, almost instinctive, response to the worst butchery of Jews since 1945 is to march in solidarity with the butchers? How utterly warped must be the moral compass of Greens politicians who happily attacked a vigil for slain innocents in Israel, marching in lockstep with Neanderthals chanting to “Gas the Jews”?
Why are left-wing college students and academics asserting that the butchery of children and women, including the now-thoroughly documented beheaded of babies, is the fault of the victims? Why are the same people tearing down posters of missing hostages?
As my wife asked, bewildered, why do people hate Jews so much?
Even before the October 7 horror, Jews even in Australia lived under the constant threat of violence.
A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the two-stage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.
Just a few years ago, a Sydney council in a largely Jewish suburb blocked planning approval for a synagogue — on the grounds that it would attract violence. Not, mind you, that the Jewish residents had done anything wrong, but because other Sydney inhabitants are so deranged by hate that they would likely bomb the place.
Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread. It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.
Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.
It must be pointed out, that a “both sides” moral equivalence, however fair-minded in intent, is dangerously misguided.
Yes, anti-Semitism blights the far right. That’s something the right must reckon with, for sure. In America in particular, the mainstream right has been far too lenient regarding the “Groyper right”, whom they’ve tended to dangerously dismiss as merely provocative shitposters. That was foolishly blind.
But it’s even more foolishly blind to minimise that anti-Semitism is mainstream today on the left. The Greens are in parliament, for Pete’s sake — and they’ve long been stained by ever-more overt anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism that has been laid bare for all to see in the past fortnight.
Even worse, government MPs, ministers, even, have openly attacked Israel, even while the bodies were still cooling in Kfar Aza and Sderot.
Next to that, a few Groypers posting stupid memes of the Happy Merchant are a pathetic, if noisome, sideshow.
It’s worth noting, too, that the Labor MPs most vociferously attacking Israel are all Muslim. Which brings us to the second misguided moral equivalence: the anti-Semitism of different religions.
Let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity. These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti-Semitism is a blight on Christian history.
This is true enough, but the key word here is history.
The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian […] It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination. Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”
There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well.
And this is where we skew off into garbage, if well-meaning, moral relativism again.
The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews.
In fact, the Koran is nothing like the New Testament. The New Testament was, after all, with one possible exception written entirely by Jews. Its “disparaging passages” are essentially internecine bickering which was tragically weaponised.
The Koran is completely different: it is rife with violent exhortations against Jews. Allah has cursed them, for instance (Christians, on the other hand, are merely “led astray”). Elsewhere in the Koran, Jews are “losers”, and “treacherous”, who should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned. Jews are compared to pigs and cattle.
It’s also a common error of those with only a cursory knowledge of Islam to think that the Koran is the sum of Islamic scripture, as the Bible is Christian. In fact, Islamic scripture also includes the Hadith — the sayings and doings of Muhammad — and the Sira, the biographies of Muhammad. The hadith, in particular, drip with violent exhortations against Jews.
Even the Muslim daily prayer, the al-Fatiha, reminds Muslims that Jews have “evoked your anger”.
To pretend that there is an equivalence between the past horrors of Christianity and the ongoing venom of Islam is simply nonsense.
But anti-Semitism is nothing if not ecumenical.
All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and cross-fertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.
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And this is the tragic error the Western polity has made.
Assuming that the antipathy between, say, the far right and Islam, or between white supremacists and their black and brown counterparts, means that one will cancel out the other.
In fact, nothing unites these loons quite like anti-Semitism. This is why, for example, Greens politicians who would shriek and faint at the sight of a Heil Hitler-ing neo-Nazi, are marching arm-in-arm with Muslims waving swastikas and chanting “Gas the Jews!”
Anyone who fails to understand just how infectious the virulence of anti-Semitism really is is on a slippery slope to a hell that was supposed to be “never again”.