In the Media

Sky News – 3 May 2024

Over the last few weeks, some of the most prestigious college campuses in America including Columbia, NYU and Yale have been engulfed in a wave of anti-Israel protests that have led to violence and intimidation of Jewish students and faculty members, including verbal and physical abuse. These acts of hatred and intolerance have now found their way to Australian campuses too where students eager to embrace these anti-Israel fashion sentiments have also set up tent encampments to protest emulating their American counterparts.

Many Jewish students feel unsafe to go onto campus just as they did in the 1930s when brown shirted Nazi thugs physically blocked their access to universities.

Apologists insist that today’s hostile incidents are isolated cases, and the protestors are merely standing up for Palestinians, but this is a falsehood and a lie, designed to distract and mask the rampant eruption of Jew hatred that has been on open display since the October 7 terrorist attack.

That attack unleashed a tsunami of hatred against Jews worldwide, removing the thin veneer of protection that existed between civilisation and anarchy, and exposing the world to a vicious Jew-hatred that had been bubbling under the surface for a very long time. Even as the bodies of the victims still lay broken, their blood still warm, and even before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza, demonstrations had already sprung up world-wide, including at Australia’s iconic Sydney Opera House, where a mob had gathered in a frenzy of unbridled glee, the smell of blood in their nostrils, shouting, “F*** the Jews! F*** Israel”.

Similar frenzied demonstrations were repeated across London, Paris, New York and many other worldwide cities with protestors calling for a violent uprising against Israel, including shouting genocidal chants in full view of police and other authorities.

Yet, the continuing inability of political and university leaders to show moral courage and emphatically call this violent hatred out has emboldened the demonstrators to such a degree that the protests continue to grow in strength and numbers, and the only people who seem to be “moved on” by police for their own “safety” are Jews!  This has led to an unacceptable situation that rather than terrorists and their supporters hiding in shadows today, many Jewish communities and individuals worldwide have been violently targeted and intimidated by these anti-Jewish protests, masquerading as pro-Palestinian.

In a time when all decent people should have been united in revulsion against the horror that befell the innocent victims of the October 7 brutality, many chose not to align themselves with these victims but with the perpetrators.

And yet, as shocking as all this is, it’s not a surprise. It forms part of a continuing pattern of historical injustice and persecution of Jews for thousands of years. Almost every society in the world has been touched by this unrelenting phenomenon that supersedes mere politics, religion or ethnic hatred.

Throughout history Jews often lived subject to the “pleasure” and “protection” of authorities but it was a tentative existence, and that “pleasure” was easily revoked, leaving Jews at the mercy of others.

Without the protection of authorities, Jews were often subjected to violent pogroms, vicious discrimination, or expulsion, with Jew-hatred having the unique ability to unite people of all backgrounds by tapping into the worst of humanity.

Today, many Jews feel that same vulnerability and isolation, as they see the Jewish State of Israel demonised by many in the world community, who fallaciously accuse it of genocide, starvation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

This has encouraged more violent protests around the world, including Australia, where protestors have set up encampments at universities  in Melbourne and Sydney. They too want you to believe they are protesting for “justice”.

But the hypocrisy is clear. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been killed by their fellow Muslims in Syria and Yemen, yet no-one marched through the streets of London demanding justice for them. Muslim Uyghurs are kept in concentration camps in China, yet there are no mass movements shouting, “Free the Uyghurs!”  There are also hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps kept  deliberately stateless by their hosts with very few rights, but no university students have protested that reality.

Only silence.

Yet when Jews are involved, demonstrators conveniently find their voices and their faux moral outrage, twisting the narrative so completely that Hamas is portrayed as the innocent victims and Israel as the perpetrators!

Antisemitism is poisonous to society, and it can only be countered by strong ,unequivocal political leadership. Otherwise, the heinous attack by Hamas on October 7 that should have awoken the world to the realities that Jews and Israel face, will end up just reinforcing what many Jews already knew.

The world may move on, but for Jews, it’s the same old story.