These groups think about Israel and Jews the same way neo-Nazis do.
All share a hateful, ignorant ideology thousands of years old that is now corroding the foundations of our universities and parliaments.
Reflect on admissions by some of our million-dollar-a-year vice-chancellors that they have failed to protect their own Jewish students.
It’s worth remembering the 1933 burning of 20,000 books by Jewish authors at Berlin’s Humboldt University by members of the National Socialist Students Union and many of their professors.
It is to Germany’s Nazis and their modern supporters in Iran and Qatar that much of today’s activist class here owes allegiance, even if they are too silly to know it.
Terrorism experts warn neo-Nazis are reaching out to jihadist organisations. On February 19, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) discussed “white jihad” extremism – a “hybridised neo-Nazi ideology directly inspired from jihadist movements, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State”.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess last Wednesday night nailed the stupidity of the link between anti-Semitism here and Israel’s war in Gaza: Australian Jews, many descended from Jews who settled here a century or more ago, cannot be responsible for a war on the other side of the world.
Yet the anti-Semitism that Jews in Australia are facing is imported from that side of the world. Few journalists covering the Middle East seem aware of Jew-hatred among leaders, preachers and journalists in Iran and Qatar.
They also seem unaware of the links between Palestine’s Muslim community and German Nazism. As this column explained on October 14, 2023, the then Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was a formal ally of Adolf Hitler, and had visited him in Berlin on November 28, 1941.
Journalists in Australia have also been slow to the domestic anti-Semitism story, no doubt partly because more than 300 senior members of the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, signed up in the days after October 7 to a formal statement urging media to consider that murderous rampage in its proper “context”.
Nevermind that before Israel’s retaliatory action in Gaza, only two days after the killing of 1200 innocents and the capture of 261 hostages, thousands of Muslims turned out on October 9 to demonstrate against Israel at the Sydney Opera House with chants of “f … the Jews”. The ABC, Guardian Australia and the Nine newspapers detected little anti-Semitism there.
Indeed they saw little anti-Jewish hatred in 18 months of weekend marches in inner Melbourne and Sydney by flag-waving activists crying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – an explicit call for the elimination of the UN-mandated state of Israel.
Even the social media feeds of people such as academic Randa Abdel-Fattah and Palestine Advocacy Network chief Nasser Mashni, full of anti-Israel bile, offered no fertile ground for editors and reporters other than at News Corp.
It was only after the burning of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 6, and attacks on cars, homes, other synagogues and a childcare centre in Sydney’s east in the past two months that much of the media decided there really is “something to see here’’.
Yet, as late as last Monday, a coalition of Muslim leaders was implying journalists who reported anti-Semitic behaviours were part of a plot to “politicise anti-Semitism”.
A statement in reaction to footage of two Bankstown nurses discussing killing Israelis who came to their hospital said it was a “manufactured panic” to silence Palestinian voices.
As if anything could silence the noisy mobs that have been disrupting Australian life for 18 months.
Yet the Jewish federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, speaking at Sky News Australia’s anti-Semitism summit in Sydney last week, foolishly fed into claims of media politicisation of anti-Semitism, excusing the federal government’s woeful inaction on the issue.
As this newspaper pointed out on Tuesday, the 50 signatories to Monday’s Muslim statement included hate preachers who had been whipping up anti-Israel crowds.
Think here Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun, who preached a sermon on October 8 during which he said how “elated” he was and described October 7 as “a day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory”.
Another signatory was southern Sydney Al Madina Dawah Centre preacher Wissam Haddad, who is being sued for sermons in which he called Jews “descendants of pigs and monkeys”. Haddad boasts of his friendship with dead ISIS fighters Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar and thinks Muslims should invite controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate to Australia to lecture on the role of women.
This column has for 18 months argued that central to the misreporting of Israel’s legally just response to October 7 and the subsequent rise of anti-Semitism in Australia has been the role of Qatar’s state broadcaster, Al Jazeera.
It broadcasts, unchallenged, claims by so-called journalists who are often Hamas militants against the soldiers of the Israel Defence Force even when the IDF proves Hamas emplacements have been set up under hospitals, schools, media facilities and UN offices.
To understand how warped the thinking about Jews is inside Iran and Qatar, this column recommends MEMRI, which reports verbatim and in video the words of journalists, politicians and preachers in the Middle East.
Last October 24, the Qatari government daily Al-Sharq published a piece by journalist Abd Al-Razzaq Aal Ibrahim, a jihad supporter and Jew hater. He told his readers that “Zionists and Jews are treacherous and corrupt and full of ‘filth, wickedness and depravity’.”
Jews were the “bats of darkness’’ and the “devils of hell who suck the blood of the nations … and are incorrigibly full of resentment and jealousy”, he wrote.
Iran is worse. The regime’s biggest newspaper supporter, Kayhan, supports Hitler, denies the Holocaust and publishes anti-Semitic extremism.
In an editorial on January 5, it claimed Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse to improve the image of Jews. Falsely claiming Disney was Jewish, it says “the popular cartoon figure of Mickey Mouse, a cute loveable mouse, was created by Jews at Disney with the aim of gradually erasing from people’s minds the ‘dirty mouse’ label used to describe Zionists a century ago”.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has said crazier things. Khamenei is a Holocaust denier who refers to all Jews as the agents and servants of Satan.
Yet Israel is a vibrant democracy that gives political rights to non-Jewish citizens and does not discriminate against women or kill homosexuals, as Iran does.
None of this means supporting Palestinian statehood or wanting an end to the deaths in Gaza are extreme positions. But local Muslims need to be aware of the ideological positions of some who claim to speak for them.
They might also reflect on why Jewish Australians have been successful migrants. They have made a life here that positively contributes to the country rather than playing out ancient animosities from other parts of the world.
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