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As I wrote during the Covid outbreak – not the virus cooked up in the Chinese lab, but the plague of authoritarianism and snitching that followed – I’d long wondered what it must have been like to be a 1930s German helplessly watching their country country slide into totalitarianism. Well, now I knew.
Still, one lesson would have been enough, Lord. Instead, we’re getting an even more brutal lesson that’s closer to the Nazi home than I’d ever have wished for, much less on my fellow Australians who just happen to be Jewish. Day two of the antisemitism royal commission laid bare a grim truth: Jew-hatred in Australia is no longer confined to the fringes. It has gone mainstream: nowhere more than among the left-elite, the arts-academic set and the professional virtue-signallers who pride themselves on ‘tolerance’.
He recalled how an antisemitic cliche went unrebutted at a panel during Sydney Writers’ Festival last year.
“The topic was antisemitism and social cohesion. There were two very eminent authors on the stage and towards the end of the session … there was a Q&A at which a woman stood up and said: ‘we’re all missing the elephant in the room, the Jewish tentacles’,” Dr Alhadeff said.
This session ended without either writer addressing the remark, he said.
Silence is consent, remember. They mightn’t have had the guts to come right out and spout their Jew-hate, but they’ll nod smirkingly along and tilt their heads in the universal lefty Masonic handshake when a less reticent goose-stepper does it for them.
This is the left-elite in action: institutions that lecture endlessly about ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’ quietly polish their jackboots when ancient blood libels are dressed up as edgy commentary. The arts-academic community, long a safe space for every other form of identity politics, has become a petri dish for respectable antisemitism.
Alhadeff recounted a Catholic priest at a private girls’ school telling students Jews were ‘a jealous people’. When challenged, the priest retreated to “I was only referring to Jews at the time of Jesus.” Classic. Teach the kids the stereotype, then gaslight when called on it.
Interfaith dialogue groups, supposedly the height of multicultural sophistication, collapsed into silence after October 7. When Alhadeff pressed senior faith leaders (stage whisper: he means the Imams), the response was telling: “but look what’s happening to the Palestinians in Gaza”. Collective guilt for every Jew on Earth. Classic antisemitic move, now mainstream.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief Peter Wertheim documented the shift:
“In the past, the most common forms of antisemitism were from the far right… As the anti-Israel movement started to gather steam here, we also started to see manifestations of antisemitism coming from the far left, and increasingly also from Islamist groups… After October 7, 2023 it went up by 316 per cent.”
This is exactly what I’ve been writing, in sorrow and in growing anger, for the last two years. From credentialled quislings in universities collaborating with enemies, to the normalisation of hatred on campus and in the streets, Australia’s left-elite has either cheered, excused or looked away.
French immigrant Lea Levy, who fled rising antisemitism in Paris, described the same patterns emerging here:
“It’s very distressing to see similar patterns emerging here in Australia, such as normalisation of stereotypes against Jews and weekly aggressive protests, and calls for Intifada in the streets and biased media reporting, and a kind of lack of moral clarity and political courage from leaders,” Ms Levy said.
“Most importantly a hesitation, or even a refusal, to name and identify the main threat to Jewish lives, which is radical Islam. I’ve seen it in France, and now I see it happening here, and it is very hard because the place that I chose for safety no longer feels as secure.”
Levy had especially harsh words for the ABC – for one-sided coverage that ignores Israeli suffering while amplifying every accusation against Israel.
Even basic law enforcement fails. American-Australian Nir Golan was abused, Nazi-saluted and threatened with death near Bondi. Police allegedly told him pursuing it would be “a lot of wasted effort” because a Nazi salute wasn’t illegal at the time and CCTV had no audio.
The Nazi salute may not have been illegal, but assault very much was and is.
I actually took my phone out to record him and said: ‘This is a hate crime, and I’m going to be reporting it’. This enraged him, and he started getting physical. No one intervened, unfortunately, except for an American tourist who jumped in. That tourist ended up getting bashed pretty badly.
He should be grateful, I suppose, that the police didn’t arrest him, for being Jewish in public, which is exactly what they did when a howling Muslim mob stormed the Sydney Opera House in October 2023. The only person arrested was a Jewish Australian – for carrying an Israeli flag.
This is the Albanese government’s Australia: record levels of antisemitic incidents, brazen public hatred, elite institutions platforming tropes, and a prime minister and senior ministers who still can’t bring themselves to call out the main drivers – radical Islamism and its left-wing fellow travellers – with any real conviction. A government that thunders about ‘far-right extremism’ suddenly develops a speech impediment when the hatred comes from the left, the campuses, the marches or certain migrant communities.
Australia once prided itself on decency. The mainstreaming of ‘Jewish tentacles’ at literary festivals, police inaction on Nazi salutes and elite silence tell a different story. The scourge is here. It’s mainstream. And too many in power simply don’t want to confront it.
