Social media’s ignorance fuels anti-Semitism

MUP chief executive Louise Adler. Picture: Aaron Francis

Reliance on social media feeds for news is exacerbating global anti-Semitism and allowing highly contested – even untrue – legal claims about Israel to become accepted wisdom.

Feeding into this in Australia is the reticence of law enforcement authorities to challenge sometimes violent behaviours of pro-Palestinian Muslim crowds.

As ASIO boss Mike Burgess said last week, the intelligence services still see Sunni Muslim terrorism as a threat.

This echoes the period immediately after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq following the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Similar concerns were expressed by police and intelligence services in confidential briefings to senior media in 2013-14 as young Muslims made their way to Syria to fight for Islamic State.

Yet, taking steps to avoid stoking Muslim resentment in Australia does raise serious issues about the treatment of groups intimidated by Islamic radicals.

Why are Jews in Sydney and Melbourne, many born here and some third or fourth generation Australians, being targeted over the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza? Australian Muslims are never targeted over brutality by regimes in Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Why are Jews being arrested when they peacefully attend rallies of chanting Muslims? Does anyone really expect to see Jewish youths picketing mosques the way Muslims protested outside the Caulfield Synagogue in November?

And why all the warnings by federal and state governments of Islamophobia when the only racist hate regularly on display is by Muslims threatening Jews?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes a seat before his meeting with France's Foreign Minister, Stephane Sejourne in Jerusalem on February 5. Picture: AFP

Too few mainstream media sources are prepared to challenge false narratives on social media where Palestinian activists have persuaded young readers that Israel is an apartheid state – despite the presence of Arab, Druze and Christian members of the Knesset.

Palestinian social media still largely denies the horrors of October 7, branded as “legitimate resistance” by Islamic Council of Victoria president Adel Salman on ABC’s Radio National on Wednesday.

On February 26, online magazine Tablet published an astonishing piece about anti-Semitism and the left. Written by Justine el-Khazen (whose late mother was a CIA analyst), the piece asks why el-Khazen’s mum, on her death bed, urged her daughter not to raise her children Jewish.

Tablet traces the origins of anti-Semitism inside Marxist thought. Karl Marx wrote 20 years before Das Kapital: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

Marx linked Jews to the capitalism he hated: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewdom”. Here he refers to capitalism as “Jewdom”.

In her article, el-Khazen says that for Muslims, “Jewish death is linked to the Arab concept of self-determination on a world stage. If Israel exists, the Arab states don’t, not in their fullest expression.” This is the idea – discussed in this column previously – that 400 million Arabs and nearly two billion Muslims globally are being bullied by nine million Israelis and 14 million Jews globally. It’s anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

She quotes former CIA director John Brennan denying Hamas is a terrorist organisation. This is also what UN relief chief Martin Griffiths told Sky News UK in mid-February. How can two such prominent people not know Hamas on October 7 did what its founding charter said it would do, and has promised to repeat?

This column on February 19 said many journalists were swayed by their trust in the UN.

The truth is the corruption and radicalisation of the UN Relief and Works Agency has been reported on for years. UNRWA has responsibility for six million Palestinians it classifies as refugees. When it was set up in 1949 it looked after 750,000.

Yet UNRWA employs 30,000 people while the entire UN High Commission for Refugees employs only 18,000 to look after more than 60 million refugees.

UNRWA now bestows refugee status on all descendants of those original refugees in perpetuity – including those who are citizens of Jordan and Lebanon. The UNHCR applies no such logic to refugees from other countries, who it strives to resettle in third countries.

This column has reported Israelis are far less inclined to support a two state solution since October 7.

Nor do most Palestinians support a two state solution. They want one state as they did when they rejected two partition offers from the UK before World War II and later rejected the 1947 UN Resolution 181 that proposed giving them their own state between Israel and Jordan.

The surrounding Arabs invaded Israel when it declared independence in 1948 as they did again in 1967 and 1973. They could not sign on to the two state solution even after Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel prize for the Oslo Accord in 1994, with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin.

Now many mainstream Israelis have lost interest in a two state solution. Few want an independent Palestinian state that might threaten Israeli civilians.

Left wing Jews in the Australian publishing industry, particularly Antony Loewenstein and Louise Adler, support a one state solution where Palestinians have the right of return and Israel is no longer a Jewish state. Yet to Hamas, this would be code for a real genocide – of Jews.

Left wing critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t understand what is happening in Israel. Support for a two state solution sits mainly within the ranks of educated, left wing Ashkenazi Jews – the very people that the left in Australia accuse of being white European colonisers.

Support for Netanyahu’s Gaza war remains strong, especially among the largest Jewish group, the Mizrahim, many of whom were expelled from Arab capitals after 1948. They have no UN body to represent them but outnumbered Palestinian refugees at the time by 850,000 to 750,000.

Nor are social media warriors correct when they claim Israeli settlements on the West Bank are illegal, though some may be. There were always Jewish villages on the West Bank and under the Oslo Accords the area was divided into three zones.

Many settlers are moving to areas earmarked for Jews under the Oslo Accords, while Palestinians are earmarked to move to other parts of the three zones if ever the Palestinian leadership finally signs up to the agreements. Remember, Jews lived in the area for thousands of years before the birth of Mohammed, including in East Jerusalem.

And why are so many who want a melting pot inside Israel horrified by a melting pot on the West Bank? Israel, a nuclear power with a very proficient army, has made many serious peace offers to the Palestinians but peace is the last thing Hamas’s billionaire leaders want.

Yet so-called peace activists here have invited a hijacker and a controversial academic critic of Israel to speak at events that should be informed by genuine expertise. Leila Khaled hijacked two planes in 1969 and 1970. The federal government last week was correct to block her appearance in Perth in June.

Why is Adler inviting as a stream-in guest Israeli historian Ilan Pappe to the Adelaide writers’ festival this week? Check out reviews of his work in The New Republic on March 17 2011.

This column can only imagine it’s because Guy Rundle quotes him regularly in Crikey, even though he is discredited in the academic world.