Julia Gillard has voiced social media’s malign influence

Good for former prime minister Julia Gillard, who warns malignant social media is convincing young Australians to adopt ill-informed opinions about the Israel-Hamas conflict, “without ever touching any of the real facts”. As she told former treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Tuesday night in his Sky News Australia documentary on anti-Semitism in Australia: “Young people are ­developing views about this which are unbalanced and really not ­informed by the history in any way.”

Ms Gillard is right. Social media, the source of what passes for news for many young people, is soaked in anti-Semitism and cloaked in denunciations of Israel’s fight against the Hamas terrorists. At least we must hope she is right. Because if protesters on university campuses chanting “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” actually understand what the slogan and calls for an end to the state of Israel mean, they are advocating the slaughter of all Israelis who are Jews. A few young Australians who are, for whatever nonsensical reason, anti-Semitic may wish this. But surely the vast majority of protesters view Israel’s campaign in Gaza as an invasion because they do not know the circumstances of the Jewish state’s creation and have no knowledge of the Holocaust. There are several reasons for this.

One is centuries of anti-Semitism and the Nazi attempt to murder all European Jews are not common topics in school curriculums, if they are covered at all in factually based narrative history subjects that are all too rare. Another is the academic left orthodoxy that there is a worldwide struggle between oppressors and oppressed, and all Western democracies, despite being governed by the will of their people, are the former. And terrorists such as Hamas and their authoritarian paymasters in Iran must be the latter. A third reason is the theory of “settler colonialism” – that colonial powers invade other nations and steal land from indigenous owners to give to immigrants, which is what Israel has done and now must be undone, which absolutely ignores the historical facts. There have been millennia of migration by people of different faiths and ethnicities throughout the Middle East and Jews have always lived in what is now Israel.

But the complexities of history and why Hamas wants to murder Jews are easily ignored on social media platforms that permit the packaging of propaganda as news. Such fact-free media is indeed the message – one of ignorance and hatred.