The crisis of civilisation ruining our university campuses

Protests at universities across the globe, including in Berlin in December 2023, are fuelling hatred and hostility. Picture: Getty Images

Why have universities, once the cradle of our civilisation, become such engines of hatred, obscurantism, foolishness and hostility?

Niall Ferguson wrote recently that Western universities have become devoted to “the intellectual organisation of political hatreds”.

When you look at the disgusting, so-called anti-racism conference at the Queensland University of Technology, with all its fevered presentations and gross hostilities, it makes you ask a couple of questions.

Why are taxpayers required to fund this rubbish? And why do universities regard their proper vocation now as, in part, the conscious fostering of vile and destructive hatreds?

The Albanese government should hold a royal commission into anti-Semitism at Australian universities. God knows we’ve had countless judicial inquiries into vastly less important subjects.

It would take some time. It wouldn’t solve the crisis of anti-Semitism, now or even in the future.

But it would shed light on one of the great contemporary engines of the oldest and worst social hatred of them all.

A slide shown to delegates on the first day of an anti-racism symposium at QUT in Brisbane.

Ferguson and others have pointed out that Western universities, in their acute emphasis on political hatreds, have become a kind of mirror of the Nazi attitudes to universities.

This is especially so in their anti-Semitism. One of the main breeding grounds of anti-Semitism today is left-wing ideology, especially the noxious mingling of the ideology of “settler colonists”, identity politics and intersectionality.

The settler colonist slur can be used against any modern society, for almost every human being occupies a space on the planet where human beings of other races at one time or another predominated.

Identity politics is really just contemporary Marxism, in which one class of people – generally people of colour in this ideology – are always victims, and another class of people, so-called whites, are always oppressors.

These ideological categories have no regard for history or facts. It doesn’t matter that Jews have been continuously present in Israel for thousands of years.

Nor does it matter that plenty of Jews, from Ethiopia or Morocco or Iraq or many other parts, are dark-skinned.

Ideology always has an Alice in Wonderland quality – white oppressor means just what I say it means.

Whereas in Nazi universities Jews were irredeemably the villains and could never be “Aryan”, now in many Western universities Jews are again always the villains and can never be the victims.

They are associated with “settler colonist” Israel and white privilege. So it doesn’t matter what they do or don’t do as individuals. When the left says someone should be opposed because they benefit from structural privilege, it’s morally and intellectually the equivalent of the Nazis saying a Jew can never be a good German.

The intensity of this perverse belief was a Nazi innovation. German Jews served with distinction and honour in the German army in World War I. The hatred of Jews evident on many campuses in the West today, whether lightly disguised as hatred of Zionism or simply seen in all its naked barbarism as in “F..k the Jews”, is an innovation of contemporary left-wing ideology.

Footage from the QUT event in which Sarah Schwartz, who leads the left-wing Jewish Council of Australia, spoke about “Dutton’s Jew”.

Anti-Semitism is so monstrous today partly because it’s fed by three toxic, virulent sources. One is traditional, Nazi, racist anti-Semitism, which demonises Jews for being “other”, for being an alien presence in the West. Though this ideology is insane, and is not now held by any respectable person or group, it persists in the swamplands of conspiracy and personality disorder.

A vastly more powerful source of anti-Semitism is found in left-wing ideology. This inverts the Nazi hatred of Jews. In this ideology Israel is hated in part because it is seen as a central part of the West. It’s seen as a living specimen of Western colonialism.

The left in its attitude to Israel is something like the New York District Attorney in Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities; too often having to prosecute black offenders he’s always on the lookout for “the great white defendant”.

The left can see in Israel a combination of everything it claims to hate – colonialism, militarism, capitalism, etc. In this demonology Jews and Israel are interchangeable.

The presence of Jews in our society, especially on campus, gives the left some actual real human beings to hate. The presence of real, physical human beings to hate and abuse is always deeply satisfying for an extremist ideology.

The ideological left is not remotely concerned with human rights. It’s barely heard of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Somalia, or North Korea. It holds no demonstrations for LGBTQ rights under Hamas.

The third great source of anti-Semitism is the distinctive Arab and Islamist strain of anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was notoriously Adolf Hitler’s greatest ally in the Middle East in World War II.

All three of these streams of hatred flow into the crisis of anti-Semitism Australia is experiencing today.

University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott appears before the parliamentary joint committee inquiry into anti-Semitism at Australian universities.

At no point has the Albanese government ever understood or acknowledged the depth and importance of this crisis. It’s also politically paralysed in responding to the crisis in another way. Much of the left-wing ideology, which gives rise to distinctive left-wing anti-Semitism, is widespread in the left-activist circles that make up a serious portion of the ALP base, and which dominate the Greens’ base.

Lots of these people of course would decry anti-Semitism in the abstract.

But they sign up to all the points that lead to hatred of Jews – the wild demonising of Israel beyond anything that is reasonable, the grotesque ideological misinterpretation of Israel, the fixation on Jews in our society as somehow or other responsible for all the alleged sins of Israel, and so on. So to really tackle the crisis of anti-Semitism would involve trying to change the culture of the left.

Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley did this in terms of the culture of the Labor activist class in relation to the United States and the American alliance.

Hawke and Beazley repudiated the anti-Americanism that had infected Labor from the disastrous split in the 1950s, all through the calamitous Whitlam years and was still dominant in fact until Hawke took the leadership of the Labor Party.

Anthony Albanese and Labor’s current generation of leaders, though still living off the Hawke legacy, are not remotely capable of anything similar.

A final reflection. Anti-Semitism is a profound and terrible crisis in itself.

But the role of universities in generating new forms of this ancient hatred underscore the even wider crisis in our civilisation represented by the universities, which in many areas beyond technical subjects have come to be dominated by a corrosive and anti-intellectual hatred of our own society and its traditions. That’s intensely destructive.