Andrew Bolt: How the toxic Left has betrayed Australia’s Jewish community

Australia’s Jews have been betrayed by the Left – and more fool some of their leaders for not seeing this coming as predicted.

Many Jews in these weeks of strife have asked why I don’t speak more often at Jewish events, when friends are so badly needed.

Let me explain now that one Jewish group has in fact reversed its invitation to address a protest against anti-Semitism, after another Jewish group apparently objected.

Australia’s Jews have been betrayed by the Left – and more fool some of their leaders for not seeing this coming, not least because I warned them.

Two decades ago I did give many speeches at Jewish fundraisers and predicted the next great threat to Jews here would not come from the far-Right, but the Left.

How true that’s turned out to be.

The far-Right is a joke. Look at the few dozen morons we now see, flashing their Hitler salutes and wearing too-tight black T-shirts. Two outside a Melbourne court this year were so dumb they couldn’t even pronounce “Heil Hitler”.

These misfits could never hold real power. They could never become, say, Greens politicians, Labor ministers, ABC presenters, teachers, actors, academics or journalists for The Guardian or Nine newspapers who are now whipping up such a deranged hatred of Israel that anti-Semites feel licensed to unleash Jew hatred worse than anything I’ve seen since the Holocaust.

But my warnings about the Left were not what intellectual leaders of the Jewish community wanted to hear.

The Jewish intelligentsia has long been of the Left itself. Many did not like being told the causes they backed would be used as weapons against their community.

The tribalism encouraged by people like Mark Leibler, the most influential Jewish community leader, has burst like a tsunami over Australia’s Jews. Picture: Valeriu Campan

Take their support for multiculturalism – encouraging new migrant groups to keep their culture, not integrate.

Or their support for identity politics, including the Aboriginal-only Voice to Parliament.

Or their support for the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it dangerous to protest such things, or the dangers of mass immigration from the Middle East.

These leaders should have realised Jews would lose if we let Australia become a land of warring tribes, obsessed by racial, ethnic or religious identities. They would be the first to suffer if our foolish governments destroyed the symbols and traditions that united us.

The numbers alone are against them: 100,000 Jews, when we have 800,000 Muslims.

When I spoke against such things, some of Melbourne’s top Jewish leaders put me beyond the pale.

One clown of a QC, a crusader for race-based causes, even accused me in court of thinking like the Nazis.

Yet the Left has turned out even worse than I feared.

The tribalism encouraged by people like Mark Leibler, an architect of the Voice and the most influential Jewish community leader, has burst like a tsunami over Australia’s Jews.

Mobs of badly assimilated Muslims have chanted “gas the Jews” at the Sydney Opera House or screamed insults outside a Caulfield synagogue, while Labor support has been on mute.

Aboriginal campaigners for the Voice now wear Palestinian emblems and denounce Israel.

Jewish leaders who put their naive faith into “interfaith” meetings with Muslim leaders have meanwhile waited by silent phones, hoping for even one word of sympathy from Muslim leaders after the barbaric slaughter of 1200 Jews by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

“The silence is deafening,” mourned Michel Laloum, from Melbourne’s Progressive Jewish community. Not one Muslim representative of his interfaith network has called.

Or take developer Morry Schwartz, who’s funded The Monthly and The Saturday Paper, hiring far-Left journalists who furiously pushed identity politics, even running headlines like: “Why it’s important to listen to Lidia Thorpe.”

Thorpe, the race-baiting Senator is attacking the ‘racist colonial system’ she claims is guilty of ‘genocide’ in Australia and Gaz. Picture: Nicki Connolly

Now Thorpe, the race-baiting Senator is attacking the “racist colonial system” she claims is guilty of “genocide” in Australia and Gaza, while several of Schwartz’s journalists have signed a petition demanding journalists treat Israeli spokesmen with no more trust than the head-hacking, pack-raping, Jew-hating Hamas terrorist group.

That, Schwartz now concedes, goes “well beyond balance” in reporting.

So many Jews who trusted to the Left feel this shock of betrayal.

Last Saturday, actors in a Sydney Theatre Company production took an encore while wearing Palestinian-style keffiyehs, shocking the STC’s many Jewish supporters.

A Jewish board member quit in protest, and a Jewish subscriber penned an open letter declaring:
“We (Jews) in Australia have felt totally abandoned by the progressive Left.”

They are witnessing the toxic products of a cultural revolution backed by too many of their leaders – a new tribalism, a new identity politics, and a new contempt for Western civilisation and the faiths that built it.

And once again, as in Germany in 1933, the Jews are the first to pay.