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Like many Good Oil readers, I suspect, your author is a refugee from what used to be the mainstream left. I grew up in a generational rusted-on Labor household, where Whitlam was near god-like and the faith in the ‘party of the worker’ was unshakeable.
A couple of decades ago, though, I began to descend into heresy. Like Martin Luther, I couldn’t help but notice that the Church of Left was a deeply corrupt and greedily venal handmaiden to new aristocracy of upper-middle-class snobs. Most of them, the beneficiaries of Whitlams’ ‘free’ university, which sent hardly any working-class kids to uni but taxed workers to the hilt in order to benefit the scions of the middle class.
But if I’d spent most of the last 25 years simply regarding the modern left with disdain, the last two years have engendered nothing but visceral disgust and loathing.
It was bad enough watching the once-noble Australian left morph into a pack of virtue-signalling hypocrites who’d sell out their grannies for a whiff of internationalist brownie points. But, watching them more and more openly embrace virulent anti-Semitic hate was quite another. And seeing that hate culminate in the massacre of Jewish Australians at Bondi was even worse.
The response of the left chatterers has, incredibly, been even worse still. Bugger all their pious wittering about ‘unity’ and ‘social cohesion’, as if the bloodshed was neither entirely foreseeable, nor anything to do with what they’d been bellowing for two years.
We had a national day of mourning as sincere as a Hallmark card. Watching the detestable NSW premier Chris Minns, who sat on his hands and did nothing from the moment thousands of Muslims rampaged on the steps of the Opera House screaming ‘Gas the Jews’, was enough to make any working man vomit.
And where’s the reckoning? Are the scum who fostered this murderous hate going to be allowed to just slither back under their rocks? Of course they are, just as they did after Covid.
And no one wants to mention the war for Australia’s soul that we’re losing faster than a tart’s virtue on Cup Day.
What we failed to do was identify why there was an upsurge in antisemitism in Australia in the wake of an even more horrific massacre of Jews on October 7, 2023.
The right are not immune from blame, of course. Not when they’re all-too-willing to cuddle up to neo-Nazi shitheads like Thomas Sewell. But the bulk of the blame lies entire with the left-chatterers.
First there were elements of Australian society that celebrated the attack of October 7. Notable among them were hardcore Islamist preachers and extremists such as Randa Abdel-Fattah. These are people who want to play out the conflicts of other parts of the world on our streets, even though Australia was not directly or indirectly involved at all in the Gaza war.
Incredibly, they are supported by elements of our media, not least the ABC. After all, there is the ABC’s global affairs editor, Laura Tingle, among others, coming out in support of Abdel-Fattah when she was uninvited from Adelaide Writers Week.
Then there is almost the entirety of the mendicant ‘arts’ community. These low-talent grifters, embodiments all of Heinlein’s searing observation that ‘a government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!’, have spent over a century mooching off the generosity of Jewish Australians. From innumerable galleries and private collections, to Melbourne’s iconic Sydney Myer Music Bowl, Jewish-Australian philanthropy has done more for the arts in this country than a million government grants.
The luvvies were quicker to bite the hand that fed them than a rabid camel.
Perhaps it was just cowardice: the typical gutlessness of an actor or musician who’s terrified of saying something out of step with the vicious cretins they call their peers and losing what passes for their careers. Or was it, like the revolting Clammy Fraud, who gleefully peddled the ‘Jew List’ pogrom invitation, something much darker?
Second, after October 7, elements of the extreme political left joined Islamists in their celebration of the massacre of the Jews and their embrace of Hamas, declaring war on Israel.
They joined Islamists in mounting mass demonstrations on the streets of our capital cities, denouncing Israel, glorifying Palestinian terrorist leaders and even hero-worshipping Ali Khamenei, the theocratic dictator of Iran. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
The left’s selective outrage is nauseating, not to mention all-too telling. If ‘peace’, ‘anti-war’ and ‘the suffering of innocent civilians’ really is their great moral cause, why the studious silence on Iran’s massacres of its own Muslims or Sudan’s carnage? No, it’s only Jews defending themselves that gets their knickers in a twist.
The political class? Gutless wonders at best and vicious covert (or not so covert) Jew-haters at worst.
Not only did members of the government drink the Kool-Aid of Hamas propaganda and make condemnatory statements of the Israeli government and its defence force but, dramatically, they also announced without qualification that they would recognise a Palestinian state. Not that they had any idea who would run the Palestinian state or what its borders would be: that didn’t matter. They just wanted to make a strong political statement against Israel and, of course, in effect, in support of Hamas […]
The point is, Albanese and his left-wing government are substantially responsible for the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in Australia. They didn’t have to recognise a Palestinian state and they didn’t have to go around condemning the Israelis day in and day out as they did.
They did have to act at the first signs of open anti-Semitism, but it was their loyal voters bellowing to ‘cleanse the world’ of Jews, so they did nothing. Worse, they nudged and winked at the anti-Semites and gave them everything they wanted, short of actually rounding up Jewish Australians and cramming them into cattle cars.
All that’s on the left: what are we sane folk going to do about it? As a centre-right convert, I say: call it out.
It’s long past time to stop tolerating the intolerant. The least we should do is make sure their names and shames are recorded for posterity. We need a curated ‘Nazi List’ – every celebrity, politician, arts wanker, academic and activist, who’ve publicly nailed their colours to the mast of hate. No doxxing: no private information, just name and shame.
Maybe a time will come to forgive, but we should never, ever forget.
