Andrew Bolt: How many of our Australian Jew-haters are driven by envy?

Australia’s mobs of Jew-haters chanting for the world’s only Jewish state to be wiped out “from the river to the sea” are incoherent misfits with more anger than arguments.

If Jews were as poor as Muslims, would they get this hate? How many Jew-haters are just driven by envy and toxic victim politics?

We must ask, now that crowds are chanting for the world’s only Jewish state to be wiped out “from the river to the sea”.

When I see these mobs I’m struck by how many sound incoherent and look poor, young or – frankly – misfits with more anger than arguments, including anger at Australia.

Many seem to have a lot of reason to envy others for having what they haven’t earned themselves.

Like the Jews.

The success of Jews is astonishing. A healthy society would say: these are people to learn from, not despise.

Here’s one measure of that success. Just 965 individuals have won the Nobel prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in the past 122 years.

Of those, 22 per cent were Jewish or had a Jewish parent, even though Jews make up just 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. Yes, there are only 16 million Jews, nearly half in Israel.

Pro-Palestine supporters clash with police on the steps of parliament. Picture: Getty

These figures are astonishing. They show Jews are 110 times more likely than everyone else to win the world’s top prizes for things like literature, economics, physics, chemistry, medicine and peace, producing giants like Albert Einstein, Boris Pasternak and even Bob Dylan.

In other words, Jews are 110 times more likely than others to win the top prizes for helping to create Western civilisation and its blessings, including thriving economies, thanks in huge part to a culture that reveres learning.

Muslims, who make up nearly a quarter of the world’s population, have won just 15 Nobel prizes, and one was for the terrorist leader, Yasser Arafat, who got his for a peace deal he never honoured.

The special genius of the Jews is why in Israel they created a garden from a desert, even as Muslim armies tried three times to wipe them out.

You only need to compare Tel Aviv – rich and free – with Gaza City just 40 minutes down the same coast, a Palestinian city ruled by terrorists who used their people’s wealth and Western donations to build not schools or businesses but tunnels, rockets and guns for war. Tel Aviv exports cutting-edge tech, while in Gaza you see people getting around on donkeys, despite billions a year in foreign aid for just 2.4 million Gazans.

Or look right here. In Australia, census after census shows Jews earning much more than the average Australian – as much as 40 per cent more – even though many Jewish families first came here as refugees from the Nazis with next to nothing.

How many of those chanting to wipe out Israel “from the river to the sea” are driven by envy, asks Andrew Bolt? Picture: David Crosling

Some Israel-haters have now learned where some of that Jewish money goes.

When flighty Sydney Theatre Company actors pranced on to a stage with Palestinian keffiyehs, the backlash cost the STC an estimated $1.5m in lost sales and support. We have just 100,000 Jews, yet Jewish money has still helped to prop up our arts.

That’s why I ask: is it envy that now helps drive these mobs to howl insults at Jewish students, Jewish politicians, and Jews rallying last Sunday against anti-Semitism?

Actually, I also blamed victim politics.

The Marxism that was once preached in our universities has not left us. It’s morphed into another kind of class war – identity politics, where the tribes are defined not by social status but race, ethnicity and gender.

But one thing has stayed the same: the lie that wealth is not created but stolen. That the rich are oppressors and the poor their victims.

Identity politics adds this vicious twist: whites tend to be richer than blacks, and must have got that way by being oppressors, colonialists and thieves.

You can see how all this makes Jews villains from central casting.

They tend to be richer than Palestinians and are seen as whiter, even though half of Israel’s Jews are from families that emigrated from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

To make things worse, Israel is capitalist, making its people six times richer per person than all their Muslim neighbours together, from Syria to the east all the way to Morocco to the west.

So it’s all set up for haters who’ve been taught to blame their failures not on themselves, but others. Not on their culture or habits, but on “racism” and “discrimination”.

The Jews! They must be the villains! And our young dress up like Palestinians to show their solidarity against the very people with the secrets to our civilisation’s success.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: How many of our Australian Jew-haters are driven by envy?