Progressives who marched for black lives have enabled Jew hatred simply by staying silent
We need to talk about this treachery of the progressives, this betrayal of Jews by the self-styled anti-racists of the bourgeois left.
I have a question. It’s not a nice one. Some will find it hurtful. But it has to be asked.
Why did the Australian left get more upset about the police killing of an African-American man 15,000km from Oz than they ever have over the persecution of Jews in their own towns and cities?
Recent events have forced this query, in all its ugliness, to the front of my mind.
Anti-Semitism in Australia is soaring. A synagogue in Melbourne was set alight. A childcare centre near a Jewish school in Sydney was daubed with Jewphobic graffiti.
Last week a caravan was found in Sydney containing explosives and an anti-Semitic note.
In Perth, people’s homes have been desecrated with anti-Semitic slogans. “F..k Jews,” said one.
The former home of Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry was blitzed by Jew-hating bigots. They splashed red paint on the walls. On a nearby car they wrote “F..k the Jews” and “F..k Israel”.
And who can forget the glee with which protesters outside the Sydney Opera House greeted Hamas’s orgy of barbarism on October 7, 2023?
Less than 48 hours after that neo-fascistic atrocity, the worst butchery of Jews since the Holocaust, a gloating mob assembled at Sydney Harbour to holler insults at the Jews and cry “F..k Israel”.
It was the salt of Israelophobia rubbed into the wound of the pogrom two days earlier. It was the taunting of Israel’s dead and wounded, the public mockery of slain Jews.
It was as sick as if people had poured on to the streets of Sydney in 1938 to celebrate Kristallnacht.
Then there are the anti-Israel protests. These fevered gatherings have crossed the line, time and again, from opposing the war in Gaza to heaping hate and bile on the world’s only Jewish nation.
People have waved the flag of Hezbollah, an avowedly anti-Semitic movement sworn to the destruction of “cancerous Zionism”.
They have chanted in favour of the Houthis, the Yemeni outfit whose flag contains the words: “Curse be upon the Jews”.
They’ve held up placards showing the Star of David mangled with the Nazi swastika. Translation: Jews are Nazis now. An anti-Semitic libel disguised as anti-imperialism.
Australia’s scourge of Jew hate is so bad it’s making global headlines. Even here in the UK, where anti-Semitism is likewise rife, we are shocked at what has become of our Aussie cousins.
Liberal America is perturbed, too. This week, The Washington Post reported on the “wave of anti-Semitic attacks” that have “roiled Australia”.
Its report was illustrated with a pic of yet another hateful scrawling on a wall in Sydney: “Kill Israel”.
These are crisis levels of racial hatred – and yet there is little more than an eerie, cowardly silence from the left.
The kind of Aussies who took to the streets in their thousands following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 have yet to muster up the energy to oppose the Jew hate in their own midst.
The rowdy activists of “antifa” have yet to register their concern about the fascistic assaults on Australia’s synagogues.
Campus radicals who see racism everywhere – in every “blasphemy” against Islam, every criticism of mass immigration – have yet to see the hatred for Jews that is slow-marching through their nation. There are progressives in Australia who screamed “Nazi!” when the diminutive Brit Kellie-Jay Keen visited your shores to make the case for women’s rights, yet who have remained schtum as synagogues have been consumed by the flames of hate.
This week, the Lord Mayor of Sydney refused to sign a bipartisan, multi-faith declaration rejecting the surging anti-Semitism on her streets – unless it condemned Islamophobia too. But no one is torching mosques or scrawling “F..k the Muslims” and “Kill the Muslims” on the harbour city’s cars and houses.
We need to talk about this. We need to talk about this treachery of the progressives, this betrayal of Jews by the self-styled anti-racists of the bourgeois left.
We need to ask why those who constantly cry racism essentially shrug their shoulders when synagogues are burned down and Jewish schools are graffitied.
We need a reckoning with the “Be Kind” activist class and its stark failure to stand with Jews in their hour of need.
“Silence is violence”, these people cried during the days of unrest over George Floyd. If that slogan still holds, then they have been very violent indeed towards Australia’s Jews.
“Black Lives Matter”, they said back then. And Jewish lives? Do they matter? Their silence is their answer.
The truth about the left’s treachery towards the Jews is that it’s not a glitch. It’s not an oversight. It is not just a failure among “anti-racists” to be consistent and face down all forms of hatred, including Jew hatred.
No, the progressive blindspot on anti-Semitism is actually in keeping with the left’s identitarian worldview. There’s an ideological underpinning to their shameful moral neglect of the Jews.
In recent years, the Western left traded in the noble politics of anti-racism for the squalid, divisive creed of identitarianism.
Out has gone that great plea to judge people by their character rather than their colour, and in its place we have the hyper-racialism of wokeness.
Under this dispiriting doctrine, colour is far more important than character. If you’re white, you’re privileged, and you must atone. If you’re black or brown, you’re oppressed, and thus deserving of the left’s empathy.
The new left enforces a ruthless hierarchy of racial and moral worth. Apparently, white, straight, “cisgender” men are oppressors, and thus suspect, while non-white people, the genderfluid, Muslims and migrants are oppressed, and thus sympathetic.
Jews lose out hugely in this racialist mania. They are judged white, if not “hyper white”, and therefore more likely to oppress than be oppressed.
How can the “privileged” be victims of racism? To the infantile moralists of the modern left, it doesn’t compute.
As Alex Ryvchin says, in the eyes of the 21st-century “progressive”, Jews are “untrustworthy and scheming”. And who would take to the streets for people like that?
The Australian left, and the Western left more broadly, has done something worse than ignore the racist persecution of Jews. They have enabled it. They have emboldened it.
They essentially hung a target sign around Jews’ necks. “Oppressors”, the sign says. “Privileged”. “Colonialists”. And, of course, that most egregious sin in the eyes of both the left and the Islamists they have made a suicidal alliance with: “Zionists”.
The left exiled Jews from the moral universe of progressive sympathy and marked them as a suspect community. They paved the way for their present persecution.
This is the tragedy of the Jews. In mid-20th century Europe they were hated for being insufficiently white, for being a “lesser” race. Now they are hated for being “hyper-white”, for being a “privileged” race.
The fascist loathing of Jewish “inferiority” has been replaced by a woke suspicion of Jewish “superiority”. And the consequences are alarmingly similar: burnt-out synagogues, desecrated Jewish schools, the public libelling of Jews.
Solidarity with Jews is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. It won’t come from the left but it has to come from somewhere. Who’s in?
