Well before the October 7 atrocities in Israel, the organisers of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference declared that countries such as Australia, Britain and the US were facing a “civilisational moment”.
By that they meant that the world’s most successful societies were at an inflection point: would they continue to advance in the learning, curiosity and confidence that had made them beacons of hope and the world’s most harmonious immigrant nations; or would they collapse into self-doubt and succumb to an identity politics that sets group against group on the basis of immutable characteristics?
As it happened, at the very time of the ARC conference, the streets of London were filled with angry Britons: not rallying in support of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East; not in solidarity with Jewish people subject to a barbaric new pogrom whose perpetrators exulted in posting their evil deeds on social media.
Instead, on successive weekends, hundreds of thousands of Britons (and, in only slightly smaller numbers, Australians, Americans and Europeans) were rallying behind banners calling for the new holocaust that would result from expelling all Jews from Palestine “from the river to the sea”. As Bari Weiss, the distinguished American commentator who quit the increasingly leftist New York Times because it had started to cancel its own writers, has pointed out, there has been a chilling contrast between the reactions to September 11 and October 7.
True, there were a few fringe dwellers claiming that flying jets into the World Trade Centre was a Jewish plot to discredit Islam. Overwhelmingly, though, the world saw it not as an attack on America but as an attack on civilisation itself.
This time, even though it’s the same “death to all infidels” mindset that has motivated the attackers to murder innocent Jews, much of the world has sided with Hamas in a giant and utterly improbable exercise in blaming the victims.
In what must go down as our own antipodean day of infamy, the immediate response of several hundred Australians within hours of the massacres was to chant “Gas the Jews” in the forecourt of the Sydney Opera House.
What explains this extraordinary outburst of anti-Semitism from the citizens of a country that had hitherto prided itself on being the model of multicultural success? In part, no doubt, it’s the atavism of recent migrants from the Middle East, Australians of convenience more than conviction, conditioned from birth to regard Israel as existing on stolen land and to think of Jews as arch-exploiters.
In part, it’s the persistence of the world’s oldest prejudice, even in societies such as ours that have had two millennia to assimilate the words of St Paul in Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.
And then there’s the sheer ignorance and muddle-headedness of millions who can’t remember Hitler (and increasingly aren’t taught about the Holocaust) and who have been brainwashed to see everything through the prism of oppressed and oppressors where, in this case, it happens to be Israel that’s the relevant “colonial” exploiter and it’s Jewish people who happen to be the current representatives of “white privilege”.
At a deeper level, it’s a profound moral failure to appreciate the difference between a liberal society under existential threat and a terrorist statelet that wants to conquer and oppress its neighbour based on a creed that’s still in the Dark Ages.
It’s good that both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader were at the revamped Holocaust Museum in Melbourne on Wednesday to declare their abhorrence of anti-Semitism and their solidarity with Jewish people; because, all too often, as a culture we’ve been losing our ability to make intelligent moral judgments, usually because the people who should know better have abdicated their responsibility to make them. And given the sluggish response of his own frontbench to call out this renewed anti-Jewish hate speech or to dilute their comments with references to all but non-existent Islamophobia, Anthony Albanese’s words were overdue.
This backsliding into moral relativism and self-loathing in the struggle between a death cult and a law-abiding nation-state reflects the wider intellectual and cultural confusion afflicting free Western countries such as ours.
The recent rush by big business, sporting and cultural organisations – and even law firms – to endorse, sight-unseen, an Indigenous voice showed a glaring inability to make the necessary intellectual distinction between wanting a better deal for Aboriginal people and entrenching race in our Constitution. It was the triumph of feel-good politics over careful judgment.
Likewise, the inability of institutional leaders, including many in a medical profession pledged to “first, do no harm”, to distinguish between sympathy for confused teenagers, conditioned to think that they might be trapped in the wrong body, and automatic agreement to irreversible life-changing drug and surgical treatment, is another key example of virtue signalling over rational thinking.
Still, the widespread display of moral equivalence between a death cult and a democracy; and, even worse, the preference for Hamas with its indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, over an Israel trying to avoid civilian casualties while fighting a mortal enemy whose whole modus operandi is to use civilians as human shields, is an altogether more serious failure.
Israel is not trying to drive the Palestinian people into the sea or to exterminate Gaza. Israel simply wants to be free from random, regular rocket attacks from a Gaza that’s run to be a base for military operations against it rather than a decent home for the people who live there.
Our widespread collective inability to see this is a sign of intellectual decay, as well as a wilful selective blindness about horrors against a group we remain all too ready to stigmatise.
For almost eight decades, the citizens of the victorious World War II allies have prided themselves on being better than those Germans who acquiesced in the crimes of Nazism. It could never happen here, we thought. So what are our excuses for the “Gas the Jews” obscenity that has just disfigured our most famous built landmark? What possible justification do our mobs have for wanting a Jew-free Palestine? After all, there’s no local Gestapo here that “made people” do it.
At the very least, the laws we are so quick to deploy against anyone who offends more fashionable minorities, such as the late great Bill Leak over a cartoon, should be deployed against the practitioners of overt anti-Semitism.
Of the many hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters from the Opera House and the numerous hate preachers in some Sydney mosques, NSW police are thought to have charged just 34 so far. We are constantly told the law is a moral teacher, yet this particular law enforcement is being done almost entirely below the radar in a sign of our contemporary squeamishness about being seen to be for “some” and against “others” – even in the cause of justice.
Yet the police are only reflecting the wider historical amnesia and moral confusion. Even accepting Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s warning that the line between good and evil runs right through every human heart, it’s way past time for all of us to stand against the anti-Semitism now brazenly in our midst. On Thursday, young people who couldn’t find Gaza on a map, given the parlous state of education in Australia, are being urged to skip school for pro-Palestinian rallies. Is this what our country has sunk to?
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