Joe Hildebrand: ‘Racism pure and simple’ – nurses weren’t talking about Israelis, but Jews
The Bankstown nurses, victims of a culture fuelled by extremist propaganda that dehumanises all Jews, are not the originators of this disease – merely the symptom, writes Joe Hildebrand.
National
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The most shocking thing about the video of two Bankstown Hospital nurses talking about killing Israeli patients is that it’s not shocking at all. Not to them.
Whether they were joking or not, they were clearly so comfortable, so utterly uninhibited and untroubled by what they were saying, that they were more than happy to say it on video again and again and again, almost as though in a bidding war with each other over who could say the most harmful things.
We are talking here about two frontline healthcare workers, whose sole purpose is the preservation of life and wellbeing of people at their most vulnerable, openly boasting about killing a specific cohort of these patients based on their ethnicity.
And doing so while at work, presumably amid the performance of these duties, wearing their NSW Health uniforms – outfits especially designed for the provision of safe patient care.
Just imagine this in any other context or directed against any other type of person: Nurses boasting about killing Africans or Asians in their care; or Muslims or Methodists.
Indeed, a week ago it would have been unimaginable. Today it is the new normal. So how on Earth did it happen? First we need to clear the decks of all the predictable equivocation and excuse-making that has kicked up like bulldust in the wake of the video’s release.
Were they set up or provoked or entrapped? Hardly. No one held a gun to their head or told them what to say. This was not Johnny Depp and Amber Heard negotiating the release of Pistol and Boo.
Were they joking? If so it’s fair to say that it’s a gag that hasn’t quite landed. What was supposed to be the punchline?
And have they actually caused any harm to any Israeli patients? Or would they really? Of course not – the prospect is ridiculous. And that is the first all-important point.
How many Israeli patients have actually ever graced the doors of Bankstown Hospital?
My best bet would be zero.
I was saying this to a good friend of mine who thought the whole thing was a bit overblown.
There are no Israelis in Bankstown, he joked, they’re all in Bondi.
“Er, no,” I said. “They’re all in Israel.”
It was then that the shekel dropped. These guys weren’t talking about Israelis, they were talking about Jews.
At least that is how my friend had immediately understood it, as did the few vox popped in Bankstown who supported the nurses’ rant. Many more, to their great credit, opposed it. Multiculturalism is not dead yet.
“Israeli” here, as in many other areas of this ugly debate, is simply a cipher for “Jew”. Are we seriously to believe that the nurses were also proudly boasting of sending Arab Muslim Israelis to hell?
Perhaps in their upcoming police interviews they will clarify that. Until then it is too absurd for words.
They were clearly not talking about a nationality, they were talking about an ethnicity. Whether it’s the chant of “Where’s the Jews?” on the steps of the Opera House after the October 7 terror attack or the Melbourne version of “From the River to the Sea, Death to every Israeli!”, the concept of “Israeli” and “Jew” are interchangeable for those who hate both.
Indeed, how else to explain the viciously violent outbreak of attacks against Jewish Australians who are self-evidently not Israeli. The clue is in the address of the firebombed cars.
This is racism pure and simple. The left like to talk about supposed “collective punishment” being wrought upon the innocents of Gaza – which is horrible to behold, even despite Hamas’s grotesque role in provoking and fuelling it – and yet there is a chorus of open and proud declarations that attacking and killing Jews in Australia is okay or justifiable because of something the Netanyahu government is doing on the other side of the world.
That is the very essence of terrorism: The punishment of random innocents here for something that supposedly guilty people have done somewhere else.
And yet I feel genuinely sorry for these two nurses. In a grotesque way they too are victims.
They are victims of a culture fuelled by extremist propaganda that dehumanises all Jews by casting them as genocidal Zionists.
Much of this has come from fundamentalist Islamist ideology and much has spread like a virus from the Hamas government of Gaza, where even children’s television shows paint Jews as evil animals.
And all of this is propagated and legitimised by the extreme activist left on university campuses and in fringe political parties like the Greens. If you paint all supporters of Israel’s right to exist as ethnic-cleansing, apartheid-loving monsters then who wouldn’t want to send Jews to hell in our hospitals?
The two Bankstown nurses whose lives have now been destroyed are not the originators of this disease. They are merely the symptom.
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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: ‘Racism pure and simple’ – nurses weren’t talking about Israelis, but Jews
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