Seething disdain for Israel goes right to the top at unis

Universities are not helplessly beset by mutant radical groups espousing anti-Semitism. They themselves subscribe to that anti-Semitism, albeit without the loudspeakers.

Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah speaks at a pro-Palestine protest at Macquarie University in Sydney in May. Picture: Richard Dobson

One of life’s worst experiences is to believe passionately in some benevolent proposition and then discover you are profoundly wrong.

Today, anyone who believed Australian universities were free of anti-Semitism is shattered.

Yes, there always was the odd Trot raving about Zionism. But there also were clubs for people who liked to wear medieval costumes. Best to leave them all alone until they graduate as accountants.

European academics, painfully acquainted with anti-Semitism in their home countries, would softly ask if it was present in our own universities.

No, we proudly would say at the Melbourne University Law School. We have had two Jewish deans and produced two Jewish governors-general. Anti-Semitism does not live here.

Looking now at the Australian university system aflame with anti-Semitism, it is almost impossible to believe we got it so horribly wrong.

Anyone who cannot see this ­crisis is either myopic, hopelessly biased or thinking in bad faith. Of course, in our postmodern world, it is easy to dress up bad faith as intelligent critique.

But it is hard to discourse away the brutal facts of campus life.

Jews are routinely ostracised, jostled and insulted, supposedly over the war in Gaza. Jewish lecturers have their classes invaded and cancelled. Incessant, blaring loudspeakers tell you just how much you are hated, while intrusive protest camps supply the visual evidence.

What all this is calculated to do is to create an intense climate of fear. No “obvious” Jew can set foot of an Australian campus without wondering how it will go.

As in past pogroms, the safest thing to do is not go, or not look too Jewish.

Footage from a QUT event showed Sarah Schwartz speaking about “Dutton’s Jew”, accusing the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of politicising the Jewish community.

This all came to a head in the gathering at the Queensland University of Technology, where a chart was displayed of “Dutton’s Jew”, describing the ingrained, contemptible, characteristics of the species.

In my view it was similar to charts in Nazi Germany illustrating the ­facial features of Jews. The speaker has since claimed she was not referring “to actual Jews”, but “the way Peter Dutton … uses us as political footballs to push his own agenda”.

Just to add the bizarre to the outrageous, one of the speakers at the conference where the Dutton Jew was displayed was Dr Randa Abdel Fattah of Macquarie University.

She not only denies Hamas is a terrorist organisation, but has received hundreds of thousands in taxpayers money to pay for her research. Nice work if you can get it.

QUT later apologised for the Dutton caricature in that very university way. It was sorry people were upset, but not for the actual racial libel. In other words: We are sorry you Jews are thin skinned, but do get over it, Schlomo.

Not every university is into Jew denial.

Regional universities seem to be immune, probably because their students have actual work to do. But in our much-vaunted “sandstone” universities, you would not lightly wear a yarmulke.

So the perplexing question is how we went from a university system that was proudly opposed to anti-Semitism to one that – as a whole – revels in it?

Academic Dr Randa Abel-Fattah updated her Facebook profile with the image of a parachutist in the colours of the Palestinian flag, a day after Hamas terrorists parachuted into Israel to murder and kidnap hundreds of civilians.

There are the usual arguments about the communal radicalisation of student bodies, and they are true. But there is something murkier that scuttles in our shared academic history. In the common rooms at Melbourne University, where anti-Semitism was routinely deplored, there was the occasional weary remark about Jewish students who insisted on wearing a kippah to class.

A tale about a particularly assertive student would be followed by the wry explanation, “He is Jewish”. When a Jewish business went down, there was the faintest raising of eyebrows.

The lesson was that Jews were a bit “different” in a world that favoured uniformity, whether on the left or the right. Catholics were a ­little more sensitive than others to this soft, Edwardian anti-Semitism, because we received our own dose of condescension.

In retrospect, this faintest disdain for Jews was not a regrettable but harmless eccentricity from another age. It represented a genuine residual disdain that now has flowered in the hothouse of hate. A fair number of university senior administrators just wish the “Jewish problem” would go away.

At the heart of this liberal anti-Semitism is the fact that Jews are palpably different from the rest of a campus community. They refuse to be absorbed automatically into every campus trend. They are a standing reproach to the dedicated, materialist uniformity of Australian universities.

This same individualism and refusal to lay down and die has brought a collision on campus between “The Jews” and “The Left”.

The most obvious symptom is the flag-waving, mouth faming protest camps on various campuses, whose occupants are enraged not only by the war in Gaza, but by Israel’s perennial alignment with the United States. Proxy beating is a favoured hobby of the maniac left.

But those concerned by university anti-Semitism – particularly conservatives – get it horribly wrong when they see these self-glorying groups as the disease rather than the symptom, and anti-Americanism as the lifeblood of university anti-Semitism.

Postmodernism has held sway in our universities for almost 40 years. In essence, it holds that there is no such thing as objective truth, so if you want to see every Australian Jew as a US-funded Zionist monster, go right ahead. Evidence is not required, just conviction, preferably radical conviction.

This is where critics of new-age anti-Semitism in Australian universities are clueless.

Sarah Schwartz, who leads the controversial left-wing Jewish Council of Australia.

Universities are not helplessly beset by mutant radical groups espousing anti-Semitism. They themselves subscribe to that anti-Semitism, albeit without the loudspeakers.

No one would suggest that some Australian university would take formal action against Jews. But you can see the discomfort of many vice-chancellors with the very notion of Jewry when they have to deliver an unavoidable apology for the latest student or staff atrocity.

You can also watch in disbelief the contortions of our universities in trying to avoid signing up to the standard definition of anti-Semitism endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. They could make watering down an Olympic event.

Remember also that today’s vice-chancellor was yesterday’s pompous Maoist with a seething disdain for the Israeli running dog. It partly explains why so many ­senior university administrators perceive that they have a problem around the Jews, so the Jews must be the problem.

The question is, as they say in the classics, what do we do about all this?

It is ludicrous to ask the universities to fix it themselves. Most of them do not think there is a problem, just a lot of provocative media. If the papers would just shut up, things would get back to normal. If that includes some offended Jews, so be it. They are always taking ­offence, anyway.

But beyond disinclination, there is fear.

If universities are seen to crack down on overtly anti-Semitic students or staff, they will be accused by progressive enforcers inside and outside their walls of denying free speech and breaching academic freedom.

It is much easier to tolerate the occasional office invasion or doxxing attack than end up in the dock before the jury of enlightened opinion. And in fairness to vice-chancellors, equally enlightened magistrates usually will let off some violent campus disrupter with a polite warning, or possibly a commendation.

In the past, various commentators have suggested a parliamentary inquiry into university anti-Semitism. There now is indeed the farcical drama of a parliamentary committee inquiry, not into the existence of anti-Semitism at universities, but whether there should be a judicial commission to actually investigate it.

This in an inquiry into an inquiry, designed purely to allow the government to stall on real action on anti-Semitism in higher education.

The answer is obvious. The only way forward is a judicial inquiry.

Judges are deeply, boringly impartial. They are used to sifting evidence and eviscerating unreliable witnesses. Think of Justice Michael Lee in the Brittany Higgins libel case. I pine to see some snooty Group of Eight vice-chancellor ­before him explaining why anti-­Semitic slurs and intimidation are not actually anti-Semitic at all.

Academic anti-Semitism would be a complex inquiry for any tribunal. The evidence would be voluminous and the obfuscations immense. But we cannot simply let our highest institutions of learning slide further into the oldest race ­hatred in history.

Only an independent, expert, incorruptible judicial inquiry could address this monstrous failure of truth in our institutions designed most to expound it.

Greg Craven is the former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.