Stop anti-Semitism in its tracks

THE war in Gaza has provoked alarming demonstrations.

THE tragic events in Gaza are no excuse for the anti-Semitism unfolding across Europe as well as closer to home. Provocation is coming from some of our media and from pro-Palestinian speakers and demonstrators in anti-Israel protests in Sydney and elsewhere.

Swastikas, superimposed on Israel’s Star of David flags, have become a feature of the local protests. They are supposedly trying to convey a parallel between the Nazis and Israel’s military campaign to stop Hamas firing rockets from Gaza. Tellingly, many of the demonstrations include black banners favoured by extreme jihadist movements and the yellow banners of terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah, which has propped up the murderous Assad dictatorship in Syria.

Local social media has also been redolent with incendiary, anti-Semitic provocations of the calibre of: “Our compensation (in the battle over Gaza) will be the extinction of the Jews.” Such extremism has not deterred some commentators. Fairfax Media’s Mike Carlton, for example, has taken a febrile, one-eyed view of the conflict, writing of the “breathtaking irony that these atrocities (in Gaza) can be committed by a people ... who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory.”

However offensive the anti-Israel sentiment has been locally, it has not come close to what is being seen in Europe. Eight synagogues in France have been attacked this week by ­
pro-Palestinian mobs carrying banners reading “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ Throats”. In predominantly Jewish areas of Paris such as Sarcelles, Jewish shops and synagogues have been petrol bombed. In Britain, more than 100 “hate” crimes against Jews have been registered by police. In Austria, a football match involving an Israeli team had to be abandoned when
pro-Palestinians supporters attacked the players. In Germany, police intervened to stop attacks on Jews. Jewish leader Natan Sharansky has spoken grimly of “the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe”.

Hopefully, that is an exaggeration. But Gaza is raising the spectre of intensified anti-Semitism in a way that should have no place in modern society.