Opinion
As I wrote yesterday, the green-left in Australia is going full Brownshirt. Determined to put the socialism back into National Socialism, they’re not even hiding their virulent anti-Semitism any more.
Not that they’ve been leaving much room for doubt, anyway. Certainly not since Greens politicians proudly marched alongside a Muslim mob bellowing, “Gas the Jews!” (Or, if you’re gullible enough to believe NSW police, “Where’s the Jews?”, as if that’s so much less alarming). In the months since Oct. 7, the left has happily trotted out every anti-Jewish trope imaginable—especially the old Nazi imagery of “World Jewry”, with its pernicious tentacles enveloping the globe.
This week a video emerged showing [Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the state seat of Newtown in Sydney’s inner west] speaking at a “pro-Palestine” forum in Sydney in December. What she said at that meeting was genuinely chilling. She raged against the “Jewish lobby”. These people, she said, “rock up to every community event and meeting” to try to make a “connection”.
Then came her killer line, a line that will have sickened everyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with the bleak history of anti-Semitism. They meddle in everything, she said, because they want their “tentacles” to reach into every nook of society in order that they might “influence power”.
There it was. “Tentacles”. The old, obscene vision of the Jewish people as an octopus-like monstrosity straddling the world, interfering everywhere. This is the most racist thing I have heard a mainstream politician say.
The “tentacle” imagery isn’t new to the green-left, of course. In recent months, Swedish doom-goblin Greta Thunberg likewise weighed in against Israel, with a photo of herself holding a toy octopus. It was about as subtle as tweeting about MLK Jr. Day while waving a Gollywog and a watermelon around.
Of course, when caught out, the left always tries to walk it back, but the fact is that every time it happens, it looks less and less like an accident.
To my mind, for a public figure to speak ominously of Jewish “tentacles” is no better than if a public figure compared black people to monkeys or branded Chinese-heritage people a “yellow peril”. Just imagine if an Aussie politician uttered such vile slurs. There would be uproar from the right-on. That politician would be cancelled into oblivion.
This hasn’t happened for Leong. That the self-styled anti-racists of the woke left just carried on sipping their macchiatos is so revealing. It confirms their staggering double standards. They’ll hit the streets over certain kinds of racism, but turn a blind eye to the world’s oldest racism.
Or… because they tacitly agree with it.
Even back in the ’90s, The Village Voice wrote a large feature on how the left was even then increasingly out-doing the right when it came to anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Leong is not the only “anti-racist” who seems to have a colossal blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish racism. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter praise Hamas. BLM Chicago even tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider, celebrating those who flew into Israel on October 7 to carry out the worst slaughter of Jewish men, women and children since the Holocaust.
This week it was revealed an “anti-racist” member of staff at the BBC once tweeted about Jews being “Nazi parasites”. At demonstrations across the West, we’ve seen supposed anti-racists march alongside radical Islamists who holler for “jihad” against the Jewish state. Here in London, posh leftists have chanted in support of the Houthis, the Yemeni movement whose flag literally has the words “Curse the Jews” on it.
And, as violent anti-Semitism has soared, anti-racists have looked the other way. The kind of people who scream at white men with dreadlocks (that’s “cultural appropriation”) and damn those who ask ethnic-minority people where they are from (that’s a “racial microaggression”) have been schtum as synagogues in Europe have been firebombed and even when a man with a knife threatened Jews outside a kosher shop in London recently.
The Australian
And now we have right-on leftists in Australia disseminating a “Jew-list”, with names and addresses of prominent Jews. We are now well into incitement territory.
Another socialist rampage to rival Kristallnacht is surely only a stamp of the jackboot away.