Islamists and leftists combine their extremism against Israel
On October 7 last year, after two years of ceasefire between the democratic state of Israel and the Hamas Islamist dictatorship in Gaza, Hamas, without provocation or warning, began firing rockets at the cities, towns and kibbutzes of Israel. Then at 6.30am that day more than 1500 terrorists from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad breached the border fence in southern Israel and attacked the unarmed and unprotected civilian population there.
Almost immediately there was a response from people in the West and in the Middle East. Most people in Western countries were repulsed by the reports of massacre, torture, beheadings, burning people including babies alive, and other sadistic atrocities against hundreds of Jewish civilians, and more than a few non-Jews, by the terrorists. Yet on the streets of many Arab nations, there were expressions of joy and sympathy for the terrorists.
Even more shocking was the expression of support for the terrorists in Western universities and among some in the Western entertainment industry.
On the day of the October 7 attack (October 8 AEST), University of Sydney politics professor John Keane raised the Hamas flag on his X account. Despite the quickly accumulating evidence of appalling barbarism by the terrorists, he never took it down. Nor did he denounce the terrorists for their inhumane war crimes.
Instead, as soon as the Israeli armed forces began their counter-attack in self-defence against the terrorists, who had fled back to Gaza with 240 mostly civilian hostages – another war crime – Keane began a tirade of posts denouncing Israel as engaged in genocide against the Palestinian people.
Sadly, Keane was not the only academic in the world engaged in such hypocritical and vicious smears.
Moreover, outside the academic communities, street demonstrations began in many Western capitals in support of the Hamas policy of liquidation of Israel. Well before there was any significant Israeli military response, the protesters around the world began vilification of the Israeli people and Jews in general. From New York to London to Sydney, the events took almost identical form with protesters saying nothing about the barbaric massacre of Israeli civilians while waving placards with the slogan “Free Palestine” and chants calling for the destruction of Israel. There is no doubt that these worldwide street demonstrations were co-ordinated.
Australia gained a special place in the annals of infamy when, on October 9, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Sydney Opera House not to condemn the terrorists but to chant “Gas the Jews” and “F..k the Jews” – an event, seen around the world, that has not been forgotten and that has brought Australia into disrepute in the eyes of informed, civilised people in the West.
Today we live in the most intense period of Jew hatred around the Western world since the 1930s. Anti-Semitism has been rising at an alarming rate in recent years, thanks largely to an unregulated internet that has normalised many expressions of ethnic hatred.
Many expressions of hostility towards Israel and towards Jews make reference to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. However, the event precipitating the greatest explosion of Jew hatred, bizarrely, has not been anything that Israel has done to Palestinians but instead what has been done by Palestinian terrorists to unarmed Jewish civilians living in Israel.
The invaders not only murdered so many. They also displayed a sadistic cruelty in several hours of torture, rape and butchery. In many instances, the killers mutilated their victims alive so they would suffer horribly before they were executed. Women had their breasts cut off, some pregnant women had their babies cut out of their womb, some men had their eyes gouged out (a common sadistic practice conducted for years in Syria on the political prisoners of the Hamas-sponsoring tyrant Bashar al-Assad).
Some Israeli children had their little hands and feet cut off, some children were executed in front of their parents, and other parents were executed in front of their children. GoPro body camera footage shows the Hamas butchers often cheering and laughing as they carried out their horrific atrocities.
Hamas terrorists and their allies have been indoctrinated for years to believe that Jews are not human beings but evil beings descended directly from “pigs and monkeys”, as Hamas leaders often proclaim.
We must keep as one public document of Hamas evil the recording of one young Palestinian man calling his parents in Gaza with the mobile phone of one of his victims. With almost hysterical excitement he boasted of how he had murdered 10 Jews with his own hands. He screamed at his parents to go on WhatsApp so he could show them the bodies of the Jews he had killed. His father told him how proud he was of the son’s crimes.
We also must not forget the threat of one leader of Hamas, Ghazi Hamad, who appeared on Lebanese television on October 24, stating that Hamas was ready to do the same again. It will continue October 7-style attacks and murder Israeli civilians as long as it takes until the state of Israel is destroyed and all Israeli Jews are killed or driven out of the Middle East. What Hamad stated was a warrant for genocide. Yet it is all in the Hamas charter.
It is the reason no Israeli government can let Hamas remain in power in Gaza and possess the military forces that enable it to repeat its sadistic massacres.
Another particularly repugnant practice by pro-Hamas activists in the West has followed the attempt of supporters of Israel to advertise the plight of the kidnapped, especially children, by putting up on lampposts and walls posters of the hostages, calling for their freedom. There has been a systematic campaign by Hamas sympathisers to tear down the posters, as if to pretend the hostage-taking never happened and so to deny the innocent victims of Hamas any sympathy.
And on university campuses around the world, Jewish students were subject to verbal and even physical abuse from roaming gangs of Hamas supporters.
One such event took place at Harvard, when a Jewish student on his way to class was surrounded by a mob of Hamas supporters who refused to let him leave while chanting “shame”. Similar harassment and abuse of Jews took place at other universities, to such an extent that Jewish students were fearful of wearing any signs of their Jewish religion in public such as the Star of David necklace.
In this activity the pro-Hamas activists received endorsement from a politically extremist segment of the university teaching faculty. At Cornell, one faculty member expressed joy at the October 7 massacre. He was suspended, and apologised as a condition of not being sacked. Yet at Columbia, long-time anti-Israel professor Joseph Massad stated the Hamas attack was “awesome” but he was not disciplined.
Many university administrators refused to discipline culprits, probably fearing the wrath of violent mobs. Early last month, three university presidents – from Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania – appeared before a congressional hearing, where they equivocated on a question about whether students or faculty who called for genocide against Jews should be disciplined. Their poor performance led for calls for their dismissal. The University of Pennsylvania president, Liz Magill, resigned over this. Harvard’s Claudine Gay resigned this week over the fallout and allegations of plagiarism.
Not only Jewish students on campus were abused. There have been physical attacks at political meetings and rallies.
In November, one Jewish man in California died after being struck by an anti-Israel protester, a blow that caused him to fall to the ground and suffer fatal head trauma.
In Detroit, a pro-Palestinian mob gatecrashed a Christmas party on December 16 hosted by the Democrat member for the 13th Congressional District, Shri Thanedar, who is pro-Israel, and proceeded to chant and instigate violence. They beat badly one non-Jewish black Democrat activist, Bobbie Avington-Johnson, giving her two black eyes and sending her to hospital. The organisations that carried out the attack were the Palestinian Youth Movement and Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Jew hatred, so long associated with the extreme right wing of politics, in recent decades in the West has become a more prominent and organised manifestation of the politics of an alliance of the far left and the radical Islamist right. Traditional Western right-wing anti-Semitism still exists, sometimes in an organised form. But the greatest damage from the non-Muslim far right now comes from deranged “lone wolf” individuals and a few powerful others, now including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Yet left-wing anti-Semitism is today even more corrosive of liberal society because of its strength in major cultural institutions such as the universities and entertainment industries.
Jew hatred organised and supported by an alliance of the radical neo-Marxist left and the reactionary Islamist extreme right is partly derived from their warped and intransigent view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, both seemingly incompatible ideologies share a more general hatred of Western liberal democratic civilisation. For these extremists the solution to the conflict is not creating a state for Palestinians living in peace alongside Israel but the complete destruction of the state of Israel.
The latter “solution” is the policy of Hamas, which is why the current demonstrations should be identified honestly not as pro-Palestinian but instead pro-Hamas.
In support of that judgment, we need to note that before the terrorist attack on Israel, and the Israeli military response, most Palestinians were opposed to Hamas. The electoral vote in 2006 in Gaza was not an expression of overwhelming support for Hamas. Only 44 per cent supported Hamas and many of these votes were in protest against the corruption of its rival, Fatah, which dominated the Palestinian Authority. Hamas seized total power in a coup in 2007 and has refused to allow elections since then.
A more recent survey conducted by Princeton University’s Arab Barometer public opinion survey organisation, co-led by a devout Muslim female academic, Amaney Jamal, showed that before October 7, two-thirds of Gazans distrusted and had no confidence in Hamas. Thus, it is wrong to equate Hamas with the Palestinian people, as the street demonstrators, the far-left academics and many in the media so sloppily or wilfully do.
There are several components of radical left-radical Islamist ideology on Israel that are the basis for Jew hatred in Western countries.
First the claim that the seven million, 75 per cent Jewish majority of Israeli citizens are colonisers from Europe and thus have no right to live in an independent majority Jewish state of Israel. This is a lie. In fact, Jews have been living in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories for more than 3000 years. This is more than 2000 years before the advent of Islam and even longer than the advent of the word Palestinian. Some of the ignorant protesters may have heard of a Jew named Jesus Christ who was born in Bethlehem, now in the West Bank, 2023 years ago.
Across the centuries the areas where Jews and Palestinian Arabs now live have been ruled by a variety of empires. The Zionist movement for a Jewish national homeland had emerged in Europe during the 19th century. The British mandate of Palestine in the 20th century promised a Jewish homeland could be created there, and that promise was given greater urgency after the attempted extermination of all the world’s Jews during the Holocaust, which ended only with the Nazi military defeat in 1945. The UN attempted to resolve the dispute between the Arab and Jewish people by a partition of the former British mandate’s territory between Jews and Arabs. The Jews accepted it while the Arabs rejected it. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 and recognised by most of the world thereafter (though not by any Arab nations until 1979).
The Jews who migrated to the British mandate of Palestine before and after World War II could not have been colonisers. There was no imperial nation that sent them there and that protected them. They were Jewish immigrants joining their long-established communities in that region. After 1948 the immigrants were moving to an internationally legally recognised independent state. The concept of Jews as colonisers with regard to the original state of Israel is just ideological mystification created and perpetuated by people who don’t like Jews.
The second component of the current pro-Hamas ideology is the myth of Israel as an apartheid state. This phrase is uttered incessantly by all those who hate Israel and the Jews. However, those who have been to Israel will know that Israel is a democracy in which the 20 per cent minority Arab population has the same political and civil rights as Jews.
Unlike under South African apartheid, Israeli Arabs and black Israeli citizens (most of whom are Jews) do not eat in separate restaurants from “white” Jews, do not travel in special public transport separate from “white” Jews, do not attend separate schools, and do not get treated in separate hospitals with separate doctors and nurses. Israeli Jews come in many different skin colours. The Israeli reality is the opposite of what South African apartheid looked like.
Arabs hold seats in the Israeli parliament (Knesset). In the previous government, before the return of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current one, there was an Arab Islamist party as part of the ruling coalition.
Most of the current anti-Israel protesters know none of this because they have never been to Israel, don’t read serious books or articles about Israel, and get their news (in fact misinformation) from internet sites, including from the Chinese-controlled TikTok. However, the pro-Hamas propagandists and protest organisers probably do know all this but they lie to mobilise the ignorant young in support of their anti-Jewish, anti-Western cause.
Some may try to confuse others by arguing that when they speak of apartheid, they are referring to Israelis in the occupied territory of the West Bank. But that is not Israel. No foreign nation recognises the West Bank as part of Israel. In any case, even that is not apartheid.
The settlements built on land Jews have taken from Palestinians are often adjacent to other land still owned by Palestinians and, except for the most extreme radical settlers, many Jews often interact with Palestinian neighbours on a commercial basis.
In addition, many Jewish-owned businesses created on the West Bank hire Palestinians as workers, while other West Bank Palestinian residents enter Israel itself to work as guest workers. Finally, many Palestinians who are seriously ill are able to enter Israel to receive medical treatment at Israeli hospitals.
Thus, apart from use of main roads, and Israeli military checkpoints, and all that is only for security purposes, there is no formalised system of laws governing ethnic separation, even on the West Bank, as there was in South Africa.
One doesn’t have to support the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and I don’t regard it as a just permanent solution to the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, but instead want to see, like the Biden administration and the EU, two independent states of Israel and Palestine living side-by-side) to recognise that the term apartheid is an ideological fiction in the Israel-Palestine context.
The third component of the pro-Hamas ideology is the suggestion that Israel is committing genocide in its military operations in Gaza.
Again, this is an abuse of language for political purposes. The term genocide has a precise meaning. It refers to an attempt to exterminate a race or ethnic group. Obviously, the Israel Defence Forces have no such intention. There is no evidence of such intention.
If the IDF did want to commit genocide then it would not have told the civilians of northern Gaza to flee to the south for safety when the IDF was intensifying its attacks on Hamas in the north. The IDF just would have allowed Palestinian civilians to stay in the north and systematically killed them all, as genuine genocidists such as the Nazis or the Hutu militias in Rwanda would have done. It is quite legitimate for anyone to criticise the military tactics of the Netanyahu government as being insufficiently concerned about unintentionally inflicting civilian casualties during its legitimate pursuit of Hamas terrorists. I am personally sympathetic to that criticism. But that criticism does not sustain any charge of genocide.
The ideological influencers of the pro-Hamas demonstrators are a minority of extremist politicians, figures in the entertainment industry, and academics.
In the US, President Joe Biden has demonstrated himself to be the most committed presidential friend of Israel in the 75 years of Israel’s existence. However, it is the far-left congressional faction of the Democratic Party, known as the Squad, that has provided some small political support for Hamas’s goals
In July last year, a huge majority of the House of Representatives voted 412-9 to declare that Israel is not a racist or apartheid state. All nine opponents were left-wing Democrats, but they made up less than 5 per cent of the house Democrats and only 10 per cent of even the Democrat Party’s Congressional Progressive Caucus. The mainstream media in the US is fairly supportive of Israel, though not necessarily of Netanyahu, and is certainly against Hamas.
Support for Israel in the US is watertight and bipartisan at the national level, as I believe that the Australian ALP government leaders as well as the Coalition opposition fully understand.
In Britain the political support for Israel is strong among the Conservatives, as well as within the Labour Party since Keir Starmer took over the leadership from the anti-Semitism enabler and general electoral failure Jeremy Corbyn. The now discredited Corbyn had once called a Hamas member his friend. Jewish MPs in the British Labour Party had been harassed and abused by extremist thugs who had been given power under Corbyn.
However, although Corbyn now is gone from power, the far left is not dead in Britain because the situation there is complicated by the presence of a large Muslim minority population. Some young British Muslims are useful political cannon fodder for both the radical Islamists and the radical Marxists. Although they have lost control of the Labour Party, the radical Marxist-Islamist alliance has managed proportionately much bigger political demonstrations against Israel than we have seen in the US.
In the British cultural sphere a lot of damage has been done by extreme-left activists. Most notable of these is Roger Waters, the bass-playing co-founder of the 1960s-70s rock band Pink Floyd.
A few years ago Waters appeared dishevelled and deranged on Hamas Gaza television spouting classic anti-Semitic tropes, such as the wild fantasy that then US president Donald Trump was a mere puppet of billionaire Israeli-American businessman Sheldon Adelson (who died in 2021).
Waters also asserted that US police were taught methods of murdering blacks by Israeli soldiers, who had been flown to the US to show how they had murdered Palestinians. As well, Waters has expressed interest in the “truther” conspiracy theory that the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US by al-Qa’ida were an inside job by the CIA or Israel’s Mossad, or both.
In recent stage performances Waters has used as a prop a balloon the shape of a pig with the Israeli Star of David on it. In another concert he appeared on stage dressed in a Nazi-style uniform while posing as an Israeli soldier. Waters uses his concerts to spread hatred of Israel and the US. He also apologises for Vladimir Putin while denigrating Ukraine among his hundreds of thousands of fans in Britain and Europe. Waters is admired by other extremists, including the recently deceased Australian activist John Pilger, who supported the October 7 massacres.
It should be noted that last year the Russian ambassador to the UN gave Waters his platform to address the General Assembly on the subject of Ukraine.
Waters’s reputation as an influential anti-Semite has taken hold in some important parts of Europe. On his concert tour last year, some cities in Germany cancelled his concerts on the grounds that he was an anti-Semite.
The Albanese government should seriously consider refusing Waters entry into Australia if, as rumoured, he decides to tour, on the grounds that he is likely to inflame current social discord and perhaps even incite violence in this country.
Waters’s case also is important in that it illustrates how many of those influential Jew haters in the West who wish to destroy Israel and support or apologise for Hamas are also apologists for Putin’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine. This has been true for years. It has become even more striking and politically relevant since the Russian President decided last year to abandon his previous ambivalent attitude to Israel and become an ally of Iran and a supporter of Iran’s client Hamas, as well as Lebanese Hezbollah. Putin has moved in this direction so he can receive tens of thousands of drones and other weapons from Iran to support his attempt to conquer Ukraine.
China, too, has taken the side of Hamas against Israel. Thus, the internet today not only functions as it always has, as a meeting place for actual living racists of all stripes, along with actual living Jew haters; it is now also an arena where Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, along with Iranian ones, are officially authorised to proliferate in support of such people, at the expense of Israel’s position in the world and at the expense of the Jewish people.
This unfortunate development encapsulates the fundamental fact that the struggle of Israel against Hamas is not merely a struggle between the Jewish people and radical Islamists. It is a struggle between Western civilisation and its barbaric totalitarian enemies.
In Australia the global struggle between the West and its enemies over Israel, the Jews and the radical Islamists has been replicated in many different ways. The main quasi-respectable political force opposed to Israel is the Australian Greens. Unlike the morally decent Green Party in Germany, which is supportive of Israel’s struggle against its exterminationist enemies, most of the Australian Greens hate Israel and regularly smear that country with the lie that it is an apartheid state engaged in genocide. The party’s bellicose deputy leader, Pakistan-born Mehreen Faruqi, has never issued an unequivocal condemnation of the October 7 massacres and hostage taking by Hamas.
On top of this, as in many other countries, Australia has the problem of political propaganda in the universities.
The University of Sydney has had an unpleasant recent history of anti-Semitism, first centring around the misleadingly named Centre for Peace Studies, and its former head Jake Lynch, who was involved in an attempt to disrupt a public lecture on counterinsurgency in 2015. A university committee of inquiry exonerated him of accusations that his conduct was anti-Semitic. Inquirer is not suggesting he holds anti-Semitic views.
Moreover, in 1998 some members of the department of political economy hired a political activist named Tim Anderson, who has served prison time for attempted murder (pardoned in 1985 after almost seven years in jail) and murder (acquitted in 1991), as a lecturer. Anderson is an admirer of two of the world’s most barbaric regimes, the totalitarian state of North Korea, and the mass-murdering Syrian dictatorship of Assad. He was warned by the university against publicly promoting the North Korean and Syrian regimes. In 2018 Anderson presented a lecture course where Israelis were portrayed as Nazis. After complaints, Anderson was sacked by the university. However, he took legal action for unlawful dismissal that he won in court and his union is demanding his reinstatement.
Recently we have seen awful outbursts by Sydney University’s Keane. With regard to Russia and Ukraine, Keane glibly postulated that the invasion was merely a struggle between “two empires”, describing Ukraine as a mere proxy for NATO (to Keane the “American empire”) and being used against Russia.
In this Putin-friendly conception, Ukraine is merely a Western puppet with no independent choices and moral standing. This nonsense, which is popular on the extreme left, is an attempt to diminish Russia’s responsibility and attribute blame to the West for the invasion, while denigrating the people and elected leaders of Ukraine. It is dismissed by genuine scholars of Ukraine and eastern Europe.
Despite presenting himself as someone interested in human rights and democracy, Keane also has rejected the principled attempts by Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott to prevent anti-Semitic vilification on campus. The university had sent a letter to faculty and students declaring that while it tolerated free speech, it would not “tolerate pro-terrorist statements or commentary, including support for Hamas’s recent terror attacks”.
Keane responded with an open letter that accused the university of an “eerie bias” in support of Israel. In a lengthy, typical Keane diatribe, he falsely claimed, with a condescending and distasteful reference to the Holocaust, that Israel had a policy of genocide against the Palestinian people. Keane suggested that statements in support of that smear should be tolerated.
After all of this Keane was contacted by the WZB Social Science Research Centre in Germany where he had been proudly affiliated for 25 years, asking him to explain his X posting of Hamas flags on the day of the attacks, whether it was a statement of support for Hamas on the day it conducted mass murder, and demanding that he denounce the Hamas atrocities or be disaffiliated. Germany has strict laws against supporting terrorism.
Keane, although writing that he abhorred all violence, refused to criticise the Hamas gang rapes, beheadings, mass murders and hostage taking, denounced the polite German request with a self-righteous and unctuous explanation, then rushed off a letter of resignation from the institute before it could fire him.
Keane’s refusal to condemn Hamas terrorists is at minimum an embarrassment to Sydney University. A few other members of the department appear to share his extreme views.
I am not suggesting that all these academics support the butchery of Hamas that occurred on October 7 or the acts of anti-Semitic violence we have seen in some parts of the West. But, to allay legitimate suspicions, they publicly should make clear their support for the Palestinian cause does not extend to support for the atrocities we saw three months ago in southern Israel or the outbreaks of anti-Jewish fervour appearing on the streets of Western cities.
Sydney University vice-chancellor Scott appears to be an honourable man trying to preserve the academic integrity of his institution against attempts of political extremists to turn it into a hate-filled propaganda arm for their preferred foreign dictators and terrorists. However, his task is complicated by too many bad academic appointments having been made by some departments.
The future of Western democracies is being greatly challenged now by the rapid rise of anti-Semitism promoted by hateful political thugs. So far, the US President and the overwhelming majority of the US congress, the governments and most of the parliamentary oppositions in Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as in Europe, have spoken up forcefully against anti-Semitism.
But more needs to be done by political and civic leaders at all levels of society. The history of the Holocaust should be mandatory in government schools in Australia. The Islamists and radical left activists will oppose it, and demand courses on the mythical Israeli genocide of Palestinians. But state and federal governments need to be strong in resisting these politically extremist ethnic vilifiers, even if they have the support of the Greens party.
The preservation of democracy requires political leadership on the rights and dignity of Jews, not pandering to political extremists for the sake of the mirage of social peace or even to guarantee electoral votes.
More also needs to be done by the police and intelligence forces in all Western countries in surveilling pro-Hamas demonstrators and particularly their leaders, because supporters of Hamas are potential domestic terrorists or aiders of such.
Not only does ethnic and political violence grow from within the meetings of hate groups, such as those “Free Palestine” Jew haters who demonstrated at the Opera House on October 9. At stake also is the social fabric of civility and tolerance that makes Australia and other nations functioning democracies, and good places for decent people to live.
Dr Stephen J. Morris is an Australian citizen living in the US. For 10 years he was a fellow of Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs, Russian Research Centre and department of government. For 16 years he was a fellow at Johns Hopkins University school of advanced international studies. He has taught at the University of NSW, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University and the US Naval War College. He is the author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia (Stanford University Press). vaucluseoriginal@aol.com
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