In 2019, one of the world’s oldest and foremost democracies was given the choice of voting for a radical, anti-Semitic extremist as PM. As dire as the opposing choice was, Britons wisely rejected the Jew-baiting, far-leftist, Jeremy Corbyn. In 2022, albeit unwittingly, Australians voted in a party riddled with virulent anti-Semitism.
Not that they knew it at the time. The Jew-haters in Labor ranks kept it all in the branch offices, while obscuring their anti-Semitism under the guise of ‘pro-Palestine’ activism. We’ve all seen that obvious lie laid bare. It was brutally exposed on the nights of 8 and 9 October, 2023, when mobs cheered, lit fireworks and then marched on the Sydney Opera House chanting ‘Gas the Jews!’
Labor, at all levels of government, did nothing to stop it. Green MPs openly encouraged it and joined in with gusto.
It’s only got worse. Anti-Semitic graffiti, assaults and firebombings are a near-weekly, sometimes daily occurrence. In Sydney, especially. Police recently admitted to foiling a bomb attack which could have levelled everything within a 40m radius.
Maybe PM Anthony Albanese isn’t an anti-Semite himself. Although his chummy selfies with Jeremy Corbyn raise uncomfortable questions about just how much ideology the two share.
But if he isn’t himself an anti-Semite, he’s coddling and running scared from those who are.
Justin Bassi, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute […] goes as far as linking the government’s reticence to discuss national security threats to silence in the face of the crimes of Nazi Germany. “They say silence breeds contempt but the reticence of the Australian government about national security threats is more akin to the quote attributed to (legendary philosopher) Dietrich Bonhoeffer when resisting Nazi Germany: that ‘silence in the face of evil is itself evil’,” Mr Bassi says […]
“The government’s systemic abdication of responsibility, cloaked in silence and evasive justifications, is not a one off relating to the caravan plot against Australia’s Jewish community but a troubling trend, exemplified by the tactic of Prime Minister Albanese and ministers only commenting if asked by media and, even then, answering with non-statements.”
The stink of anti-Semitism clouds Albanese’s closest factional allies and cabinet members. Foreign Minister Penny Wong is vicious and unrelenting in her attacks on Israel: attacks she reserves solely for the Jewish state. Hamas, brutal Arab dictatorships and an aggressive expansionist China all escape the lash of the bile Wong repeatedly pours on Israel.
Other Labor MPs, particularly the raft of senior MPs and ministers whose seats are in Muslim-dominated Western Sydney, are little better. If they ever stir themselves to even acknowledge rampant anti-Semitism, they invariably chant the mantra, ‘…and Islamophobia’.
But that’s all just the head of Labor’s anti-Semitism boil. Beneath it all festers a vast reservoir of filth that’s been building for decades in Labor’s all-powerful factions.
Exposed in 2004 by the highly respected former Hawke government minister, Barry Cohen, the Labor leadership was warned twenty years ago, that antisemitism was already rampant in the party. As Cohen described it, this operated in a pincer movement against any Labor MP daring to support Israel.
On one side was the ominous, hard-left faction, reclassifying Jews as oppressors, even in their very own ancient homeland.
On the other, there was a bevy of opportunist MPs who only supported the hard left on Israel to keep the votes of an ‘increased number of Arab voters’.
Labor’s first resort, then as now, was denial and sweeping the issue under the carpet, even as security guards were first appearing at synagogues and Jewish kindergartens. A Sydney council in a strongly Jewish area refused a planning permit for a synagogue on the grounds that it would attract terror attacks. Student demonstrators attacked an Anglican cathedral because they thought it was a synagogue.
The time to act was then. But, just as they did in 2023, Labor did worse than nothing: they sided with the anti-Semites.
Consider, for example, what followed when in 1990 ALP minister for immigration Chris Hurford tried to deport antisemitic cleric Sheik Taj El-Din Hilaly for being against ‘Australian values’.
The prime minister, Paul Keating, removed minister Hurford and Hilaly was then given permanent residence […]
After Hamas terrorists took hostages and brutally tortured and murdered men, women, children and even babies during the 2023 surprise Hamas attack on Israel, the NSW Police ushered a mob to Sydney’s Opera House where they rioted, engaging in the vilest of antisemitic abuse and violence.
The only arrest was of a Jew carrying an Israeli flag.
Police and the NSW government also engaged in an egregious lie: that the demonstrators didn’t really say ‘Gas the Jews’.
Despite large numbers of people there having heard precisely that, we were given details of a high police exercise with an acoustic expert which established that what the mob was chanting was the unlikely and unidiomatic, ‘Where’s the Jews?’
As if that’s somehow any better. It certainly begs the question: what were they going to do when they found ‘the Jews’?
No doubt there’s plenty in Labor who know – and who’d join in, given half a chance.