Tim Blair: Where is the logic in anti-Jewish hate speech?
Australia’s pro-Palestine movement was running victory laps after police conceded the phrase “gas the Jews” was not chanted at the Opera House rally. But it doesn’t change the perception of a hate-filled protest, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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An old journalist colleague was once warned about his drinking, which had become a daily enhancement of his working life.
His editors in particular insisted, given that our mate was routinely unproductive during afternoons, that he stop drinking at lunch.
With his job on the line, the colleague agreed. And then, the very next day, he turned up at the office after lunch reeking of booze.
Challenged by his bosses, the miscreant presented what he thought was an unbeatable defence. He hadn’t been drinking constantly throughout the entire break, he said. He’d only “had a couple”.
Denial isn’t only a feature of alcoholic rationalising.
Australia’s pro-Palestine movement is so riddled with intellectual hallucinations and fantasy beliefs that it also tries to convince itself that massive self-inflicted failures are actually triumphs.
That’s why Palestinian activists and their supporters were running delirious victory laps all weekend on social media.
They were inspired to do so after NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Mal Lanyon announced on Friday that anti-Jewish mobs at the Sydney Opera House back in October did not, in fact, chant “gas the Jews”.
Lanyon revealed that an “eminent expert” from the National Centre of Biometric Science, no less, had “made an examination of the audio and visual files taken from outside the Opera House on that occasion”.
His finding? “The expert has concluded with overwhelming certainty that the phrase chanted during that protest, as recorded on the audio and visual files, was ‘where’s the Jews?’, not another phrase as otherwise widely reported.”
Well, hooray for that. The Jew-hating mob clearly chanted “f … the Jews”, as police confirm, but they didn’t say “gas the Jews”.
They merely asked where the Jews were, as they raucously celebrated Hamas’s rape, torture, slaughter, animalistic defilement and abduction of more than 1000 Jews just a day or so earlier.
How completely innocent and reassuring. Not.
“Where are the Jews?” was repeatedly asked by Nazi SS officers as they searched Warsaw’s ghetto during World War II. Discovery meant death.
The same terrifying question was asked more recently by anti-Jewish gangs in Europe. CNN’s political correspondent Dana Bash reported: “Sunday, October 29 in southern Russia, barely three weeks after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, an angry mob stormed the tarmac and rushed to the plane that had just arrived from Tel Aviv. They were hunting for Jews.”
“They weren’t saying give us the Israelis, which would have been terrible anyway,” Deborah Lipstadt, the US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, told the network. Instead, the hunters asked: “Where are the Jews? Where are the Jews?”
Remarkably, however, claims that Sydney’s Jew-hating Opera House crowd chanted “where’s the Jews” were presented by activist and dumped ABC stand-in host Antoinette Lattouf as a complete personal vindication.
“It took 100+ days, but NSW police can now confirm there’s no evidence ‘gas the Jews’ was chanted outside the Opera House,” Lattouf posted on X. “(Online reporter) Cameron Wilson and I investigated the authenticity of the AJA (Australian Jewish Association) edited and distributed video. Then I was savagely targeted for doing accurate journalism.
“I look forward to receiving apologies from The Australian, Sky News, Australian Jewish Association, Executive Council for Australian Jewry and at least a couple of WhatsApp groups.”
Lattouf, currently taking legal action against the ABC, is perhaps a little optimistic on that front. Her “accurate journalism” mostly speculated in a doubt-inducing way about the origin and editing of the videos in question.
But Deputy Commissioner Lanyon confirmed the videos “have not been doctored”. Interestingly, Lattouf also apparently heard “gas” rather than “where’s”, writing with her co-author that the videos appeared “to show pro-Palestinian protesters chanting ‘gas the Jews’.”
All the police investigation did was propose an alternative word to “gas”, resulting in a different phrase still loaded with anti-Jewish hatred and menace.
Everything else – the torching of Israeli flags, the “f … the Jews” chant, the October 7 triumphalism, the Hamas cheerleading and the authenticity of the videos distributed by the AJA – is either clearly documented or supported by police examination. Both Lattouf and Wilson acknowledged that other anti-Jewish chants were made.
Still, “don’t hold your breath waiting for retractions and apologises (sic) from those in the business of propaganda in service of genocide,” wrote another Australian activist, Randa Abdel-Fattah, who on Friday said she was having “flashbacks to being grilled about the doctored video” by Sky’s Erin Molan.
In that October 13 “grilling”, Molan reasonably enough invited Abdel-Fattah to watch and listen to the Opera House videos.
“They say ‘eff the Jews’ and ‘gas the Jews’,” host Molan pointed out following the clip.
In response Abdel-Fattah took matters beyond even the level of biometric science. “I didn’t hear anything,” she said.
Someone call NSW Police. We need an expert ruling on this. And, personally, several daytime drinks.
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