In perhaps the clearest sign yet that the imminent Australian election is closer than polls suggest, things are getting ugly before it’s even called. PM Scott Morrison hasn’t even been to see the Governor-General and already the low blows are being dealt. Especially the race card.
In the process, they’ve exposed a fault line that goes far beyond grubby local race-baiting, all the way around the Western world.
Labor dirt-diggers are bandying claims that Morrison questioned the wisdom of the Libs running a Lebanese candidate in his own seat of Cook, just two years after the Cronulla riots (media coverage of that awful day solely concentrates on the “anti-leb” protests during the day, and completely ignore the caravans of cars full of Lebanese men from Western Sydney who invaded Cronulla that night, randomly bashing and stabbing “Aussies”).
In their turn, the Liberals are sharpening their attacks on the wealthy, so-called “independents” aiming to win the harbourside mansion vote in the elite Sydney harbourside suburbs.
A key figure behind independent candidate Allegra Spender’s tilt in the Sydney seat of Wentworth has criticised Australia’s “shocking support” of Israel and is a proponent of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Ms Spender, the daughter of the late fashion designer Carla Zampatti, was recruited as the independent candidate in Wentworth late last year by a group called Wentworth Independents.
The electorate has one of the biggest Jewish communities in the country.
Climate activist Blair Palese was listed as one of the four core members of Wentworth Independents when the group outlined its policy platform and desire for a new federal MP.
After Ms Spender was chosen as the candidate, Ms Palese said she was involved in developing policy positions for her.
In keeping with the “progressive” left’s growing anti-Semitic streak, Palese combines the right-on, watermelon climate policies that so appeal to the idle rich (the “independents” are largely bankrolled by a useless rich kid who, to borrow Ayn Rand’s words, inherited billions and is spending the rest of his life trying to make amends for it) with a visceral hatred of the Jewish state.
Backing Spender’s campaign is another dodgy leftist group with a growing anti-Semitic streak.
Other founders of Wentworth Independents, Lyndell and Daniel Droga, donated $20,000 to activist group GetUp in 2019.
GetUp, readers may remember, was implicated in the disgraceful campaign of harassment, abuse and stalking waged against Liberal MP Nicolle Flint.
GetUp board member Sara Saleh was one of the organisers of the [anti-Israel] Sydney boycott.
Ms Spender’s volunteer organiser Tracey Hamilton, who is listed on Ms Spender’s website, is also connected to GetUp.
Deputy government whip in the Senate James McGrath said in a parliamentary speech that […] “The people of Wentworth need to know that GetUp is increasingly anti-Israel.”
The Australian
Running a candidate so steeped in such an anti-Semitic ideology (for instance, she appears to think that Israel is a worse human rights abuser than even China) in one of the most Jewish seats in Australia might seem as politically suicidal as running a Lebanese candidate in Cronulla in 2007 — were it not for the global fault line alluded to earlier.
That fault line is the continued devotion of Western Jews to the left, despite the increasingly obvious fact that the left is turning ever-more viciously on, not just Israel, but Jews themselves.
We saw it in the last British election when the openly anti-Semitic Corbynite faction conquered one half of the two-party system. Where Jews were attacked outside meetings of Labor’s Corbyn supporters. Where high-profile Jews are fleeing an increasingly anti-Semitic country.
We also see it in America, where Ground Zero of “progressivism”, Hollywood, not only expunged the Jewish founders of the American motion picture industry from its own museum but the once-dominant Jewish presence behind the cameras is being sidelined in favour of the left’s newly annointed darlings, blacks. In a sordid saga that hearkens back to Jesse Jackson’s sneer at “Hymietown”, Jews in New York have been subjected to a wave of unprovoked street attacks from black assailants — attacks whose racial dimension the left media completely erases.
The left just doesn’t like Jews anymore — so why do so many Jews continue to love the left?
