Nurses’ anti-Jewish hatred antithesis of medical ethics

The descent of sections of Australia into depraved and dangerous outbursts of anti-Semitism sunk to a new low on Wednesday when two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney were filmed declaring they would refuse to treat Israeli people and would kill them. In deranged comments uploaded online by Israeli influencer Max Veifer, the male nurse, Ahmad “Rashad’’ Nadir, who pretends to be a doctor, brags: “You have no idea how many (Israeli people) come to this hospital … I send to Jahannam (the Arabic translation for hell).” The female nurse, Sarah Abu Lebdeh, wearing a hijab, says: “It (Israel) is Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of shit … when your time comes, I want you to remember my face so you can understand that you will die the most disgusting death.”

NSW Health Minister Ryan Park and the Minns government responded swiftly and well, standing down the pair and pledging they would never work for NSW Health again. But as Premier Chris Minns said, the comments will undermine confidence in the health system. And as Mr Park said, they have taken an axe to a core tenet of NSW Health: “that every Australian should be able to go to their local hospital and get quality, safe care”.

Health authorities, so far, have found no evidence of Jewish patients being refused treatment, and NSW Health secretary Susan Pearce has offered her “sincerest apologies’’ to the state’s Jewish community.

Mr Park assured members of the Jewish community that the care they would receive in NSW hospitals would be “first class’’.

However reassuring that may – or may not – be, the concerns of Australian Jews will be heightened by the fact that the incident is part of a despicable, long-running pattern of anti-Semitism. It began on the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas terrorists killed 1200 people and kidnapped another 251 in Israel. Australian Jews, since then, have suffered abuse, vandalism, the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue at Ripponlea in the city’s southeast, the torching of a childcare centre at Maroubra in Sydney that was spray painted with anti-Semitic graffiti, hostilities from pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses that were poorly managed by vice-chancellors and academics, and much else.

Exposure of the murderous hatred of Mr Nadir and Ms Abu Lebdeh – who should be investigated, pursued and punished to the full extent of anti-vilification laws – coincides with the deplorable move by Macquarie University to set up a high-security “safe room” as a refuge for Jewish students trying to escape anti-Semitic venom on campus. Sydney University is reportedly taking similar steps. At Macquarie, the safe room has been built in response to a spike in incidents of harassment and bullying of Jewish students, and posters depicting Jews as thieves with long noses and wearing the Star of David.

Eighty years on from the Holocaust, when our nation opened its arms to those fleeing the terror of the Nazi death camps, Australians with consciences can only recoil in horror. The advent of “safe rooms’’ and the nurses’ murderous hatred lend credence to Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel’s view that anti-Semitism has become a “disease’’ in Australia.

So-called safe rooms, which could isolate and draw extra attention to Jewish students, are no answer. Every inch of every campus must be safe for Jewish students, as Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin says. Universities have a legal obligation to ensure Jewish students can study and engage in all aspects of campus life in peace and security. While clubs and associations are allocated spaces for meetings, “when students feel they need a sanctuary to escape their tormentors – that should shock us all”.

Also appalling is the fact that Mr Nadir, a Bankstown local who fled Afghanistan as a 12-year-old and became an Australian citizen in 2020, does not appear to have absorbed the tolerant, decent values of his adopted homeland. His claim, that he “didn’t mean to offend’’ (really?) and his comments were “a joke, a misunderstanding” for which he would apologise was unconvincing and starkly at odds with the video. Ms Abu Lebdeh, also a Bankstown local, has worked for NSW Health for years. According to her relatives, a couple of whom abused a journalist from The Australian, she is also “sorry’’ and suffering a “panic attack’’. In the interests of community harmony, the leaders of whatever mosques, faith groups or community groups they belong to, if any, must, in good faith, condemn their extremist comments unequivocally.

Anthony Albanese, rightly, said Mr Nadir and Ms Abu Lebdeh would face “the full force of the law’’ over their “disgusting, vile’’ comments that were “driven by hate’’. What his government is yet to address, however, as Coalition MP Julian Leeser asked the Prime Minister at the start of question time, is “How did the country get to this point?’’ On Tuesday, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus rejected charges by Peter Dutton that he had been “largely missing from this debate (over anti-Semitism) in 15 months”. Mr Dreyfus claimed the government had worked tirelessly to put an end to the wave of anti-Semitism. But regrettably, too little has been done to reverse one of the nastiest and most destructive trends to disrupt our society for decades.