Opinion
The explosion of naked anti-Semitism on the mainstream left might seem sudden and shocking, but it shouldn’t be. More or less open Jew-hating has been simmering on the left for years. As the left has more and more cosied up to Islam, itself endemically anti-Semitic*, it’s only become more pronounced.
The more notorious incidents in recent years include Greens members in Melbourne targeting bags of “shekels” at Jewish politicians, and the near-ubiquity of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. Then there was a university lecturer in Sydney hurling money while screaming abuse at an elderly Jewish woman, and a Sydney student newspaper lauding a Jew-murdering terrorist on its front page, and another lecturer superimposing the Nazi swastika on the Israeli flag in his lecture slides.
You’ll notice a common thread there: anti-Semitism on campus. If students are imbibing Jew-hatred, it’s because they’re being fed it by their teachers.
Jewish teachers fearful of anti-Israel activism in classrooms have been urged to ditch mainstream education unions and report incidents of anti-Semitism in their workplaces.
As the school year begins, Australian Jewish Association chief executive Robert Gregory is concerned radical political activism will worsen in 2024.
The poisonous spread of anti-Semitism reaches to the highest levels: the teacher wife of a (Muslim) Albanese cabinet member was recently disciplined for peddling anti-Israel propaganda to students. As for the far-left teacher unions:
He said growing union support for the Palestinian cause had pushed Jewish teachers to terminate their memberships. “Jewish teachers are concerned with the introduction of anti-Israel activism into the classroom, and with the failure of established teachers’ unions to intervene and oppose it,” he told The Australian.
“We’ve heard concerns from teachers and pupils that instead of learning important information, the classroom (will) be turned into a charged political environment.”
What else is new, though?
“We would have expected after the October 7 attacks increased support for Jewish teachers, unfortunately that hasn’t been the case. We are shocked.”
The Australian
Basically, it’s as if the left had watched Kristallnacht — and sided with the Nazis.
But it’s not quite true that it’s only October 7 that brought the anti-Semitic cockroaches out into the light.
On October 5, two days before the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, High Court Justice Jayne Jagot called out the growth of anti-Semitism on Australian campuses in her Sir Zelman Cowen lecture […]
It is festering in universities where vice-chancellors are turning a blind eye, and in the inner cities where it is now a feature of the Greens’ extremist agenda.
The petri dish for growing anti-Semitism is our university campuses. Last year, prior to the Hamas attacks, the Social Research Centre released the Australian Jewish University Experience Survey. This found 64 per cent of Jewish students experienced anti-Semitism at university and 88 per cent of these had experienced anti-Semitism on campus in the preceding year As well, 57 per cent of Jewish students had hidden the fact they were Jewish at university and 19 per cent had stayed away from campus because of anti-Semitism. When anti-Semitism occurred, 85 per cent of students did not make a complaint. Of those who did complain, 61 per cent were dissatisfied with the outcome.
That’s because the teachers and administrators are in hate-deranged lockstep with the anti-Semites. Most recently, a clique of Ivy League deans were unable to say that anti-Semitism would violate their campus speech codes. Never forget, either, that Nazism flourished very early on university campuses in Germany.
This white-anting of the teaching industry has its consequences: not least, a generation of deranged, Pally-Jugend Jew-haters.
A recent Harvard Harris poll found two-thirds of American voters aged 18-24 believed Jews were a class of oppressors. This compares with 9 per cent over the age of 65.
The Australian
This is the same age group most likely to vote Green.
The same Greens who’ve proudly marched alongside Muslims screaming, “Gas the Jews!”
*Before some tit blithers that, “Arabs are Semites, too!”, I will point them to the definition of “anti-Semitism”, as per Oxford: Hostility towards and discrimination against Jewish people (although there are other Semitic peoples, notably the Arabs, anti -Semitism is only used to refer to prejudice against Jewish people).