Tanveer Ahmed: Nurses scandal reveals ugly face of Muslim anti-Semitism

As a child, visits to the mosque were often filled with clerics waxing lyrical about Jewish conspiracies to dominate the world and rid the world of Muslims, writes Tanveer Ahmed.

I work at Bankstown Hospital. The catchment area is probably among the most diverse in the world and attracts wave after wave of new immigrants. Those from sub-Saharan Africa and Rohingya refugees are among the latest cohort.

I am devastated that my colleagues and I feel diminished in the wake of the anti-Semitic outbursts of two nurses. The reality is that they do amazing work with vulnerable, complicated patients.

But the comments should not come as a surprise. The underbelly of anti-Semitism is very strong within Muslim communities, only matched by the culture of denial.

What is striking about this incident is that they weren’t committed by anti-social types scribbling graffiti but by individuals considered pillars of their community. The nurses had won awards for their service. If ever an incident could prick the fierce denial ever present among Muslim communities about the problematic levels of anti-Semitism, this was it.

Bankstown Hospital nurses Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh have been stood down. Picture: NewsWire Handout

I grew up with it. As a child, visits to the mosque were often filled with clerics waxing lyrical about Jewish conspiracies to dominate the world and rid the world of Muslims. I learnt of the story in religious verses about Muhammad slaughtering Jews who had allegedly betrayed him.

It was not until I started in high school that I met and befriended Jews that my stereotypes were countered. As an adult I visited Israel with a journalistic delegation and was impressed by the dynamic, pluralist society where criticism against the government is fierce and many Arabs flourish.

Demonstrators hold flags and pictures of Hassan Nasrallah, late leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, at a protest rally in the central business district of Sydney.

While anti-Semitism has been pronounced among a variety of communities historically, it was more pronounced in Christian communities. For centuries Jews and Muslims coexisted relatively peacefully, across North Africa and the Middle East. However for the past few decades anti-Semitism has developed into a thoroughly Muslim problem.

The modern, virulent anti-Semitism is an outcrop of the Islamist ideology that forms the foundation of Islamic terrorism. It is rooted in civilisational humiliation feeding a nexus between Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism, part of the wider grievance politics in Islamic countries.

Canadian scholar Tarek Fatah recounts in his book “The Jew is Not My Enemy” that when he was growing up in Pakistan anti-Semitism was barely visible. But in the past decade his old peers from university, educated elites, were adamant Mossad orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. He arrived at an airport in Lahore to see a man holding up a sign claiming Jews were responsible for the coronavirus.

This again suggests the roots of modern anti-Semitism are not scriptural or historical but quite modern trends. Not only that, but it is bred from a very young age, including Muslims like myself raised locally.

The nurses may well be suspended or worse, possibly entrenching them as martyrs, especially given the modus operandi of the Israeli influencer that exposed them was to out people like them. But given their relative status, I hope it opens the eyes of many otherwise peace loving Muslims how their frustration with Israel’s actions must be separated from an ugly hatred of all Jews.

A failure to do so risks the ability to remain in peaceful coexistence within multicultural communities like ours.

Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist and author.