For years the right-on have been warning about the rise of racism. Beware red-faced white men who moan about mass immigration, they say. Watch out for populist politicians and their witless supporters in the masses, they cry. For it is from within these ranks, from within this army of the unwoke, that fascism is likely to emerge.
Watch out, the 1930s are coming back – that’s been the constant cry of the politically correct these past few years.
And yet when fascist-like language really did re-emerge, it came not from some old white bloke but from a youngish and very left-wing woman. When 1930s-style talk really did rear its ugly head, it wasn’t courtesy of an ageing conservative with a chip on his shoulder about illegal immigration, but a hip politico beloved of the smart set.
I am referring, of course, to Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the state seat of Newtown in Sydney’s inner west.
This week a video emerged showing Leong speaking at a “pro-Palestine” forum in Sydney in December. What she said at that meeting was genuinely chilling. She raged against the “Jewish lobby”. These people, she said, “rock up to every community event and meeting” to try to make a “connection”.
Then came her killer line, a line that will have sickened everyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with the bleak history of anti-Semitism. They meddle in everything, she said, because they want their “tentacles” to reach into every nook of society in order that they might “influence power”.
There it was. “Tentacles”. The old, obscene vision of the Jewish people as an octopus-like monstrosity straddling the world, interfering everywhere. This is the most racist thing I have heard a mainstream politician say.
Yes, it’s good that Leong has walked back her comments. She now admits the word “tentacles” was “inappropriate”. That’s one way of putting it. I prefer “disgusting”. It has direct echoes of Nazi-era cartoons that likewise showed the Jews with “tentacles” encircling the globe.
Leong’s expression of (half-hearted) regret for her remarks should not detract from what a serious situation this is.
To my mind, for a public figure to speak ominously of Jewish “tentacles” is no better than if a public figure compared black people to monkeys or branded Chinese-heritage people a “yellow peril”. Just imagine if an Aussie politician uttered such vile slurs. There would be uproar from the right-on. That politician would be cancelled into oblivion.
This hasn’t happened for Leong. That the self-styled anti-racists of the woke left just carried on sipping their macchiatos is so revealing. It confirms their staggering double standards. They’ll hit the streets over certain kinds of racism, but turn a blind eye to the world’s oldest racism.
“Jewish tentacles” were a key motif in Nazi propaganda. As Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says: “The nefarious Jew/octopus was a caricature deployed by Nazis as a staple in their hateful campaign.”
The rehabilitation of this vile image should horrify everyone. And strikingly, it was rehabilitated not by some hard-right loudmouth, but by a self-described anti-racist. Leong is a loud and proud critic of racism. She supports Black Lives Matter. “If you’re sick of us talking about racism, imagine how sick we are of being subjected to it,” she once said.
What is going on here? How do we explain this bizarre phenomenon – what we might call “anti-racist anti-Semitism”?
Leong is not the only “anti-racist” who seems to have a colossal blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish racism. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter praise Hamas. BLM Chicago even tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider, celebrating those who flew into Israel on October 7 to carry out the worst slaughter of Jewish men, women and children since the Holocaust.
This week it was revealed an “anti-racist” member of staff at the BBC once tweeted about Jews being “Nazi parasites”. At demonstrations across the West, we’ve seen supposed anti-racists march alongside radical Islamists who holler for “jihad” against the Jewish state. Here in London, posh leftists have chanted in support of the Houthis, the Yemeni movement whose flag literally has the words “Curse the Jews” on it.
And, as violent anti-Semitism has soared, anti-racists have looked the other way. The kind of people who scream at white men with dreadlocks (that’s “cultural appropriation”) and damn those who ask ethnic-minority people where they are from (that’s a “racial microaggression”) have been schtum as synagogues in Europe have been firebombed and even when a man with a knife threatened Jews outside a kosher shop in London recently.
Anti-racists flirting with racism – it feels surreal. But here’s the most troubling thing: it’s more than a blind spot. It’s more than hypocrisy. Rather, the strange spectacle of “anti-racist anti-Semitism” speaks to how rotten the politics of identity has become.
This left-wing ideology dolls itself up as “anti-racist”, but it is the opposite. It doesn’t seek to deliver us into a post-racial world, a la Martin Luther King, where true equality reigns. No, it divides us by our ethnic heritage, separating us into boxes marked “oppressed” or “privileged”.
The “oppressed” get the left’s love, while the “privileged” get their hate. And who’s in the “privileged” box? White men, naturally. Heterosexual men. “Cis” people. And, you guessed it, Jews.
Indeed, in the warped worldview of these racial authoritarians who masquerade as progressive, Jews are the most privileged of all.
A recent Harvard/Harris poll in the US found that 67 per cent of 18-24-year-olds – the woke young – view Jews as an “oppressor class”. This, too, echoes a feverish belief of the 1930s – namely, that Jews love to stomp their oppressive boot on the peoples of the world.
Today, entire ethnic groups are demonised, not by the ranting far right, but by a mainstream left that ruthlessly sorts us into the categories of “good” or “bad”.
Identity politics is the enemy of equality. It is the new means through which Jews in particular are singled out as suspect, branded as wicked. Tackling this bigoted left creed should be the top task of everyone who opposes racism, in all its devious guises.
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