Greg Sheridan Says What Too Many in Australia Won’t About Antisemitism

With the third anniversary of October 7 approaching, Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, has pulled no punches in a searing op-ed on the explosion of antisemitism in Australia – and the role of the political and cultural left in fueling it.

Terrorists take anniversaries seriously. It’s one of their only distinctively human traits. So everyone should pay extra attention as we go into the third anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terror atrocities in Israel. These were shocking and grotesque and reviled by every decent human being in the world. Yet they were profoundly effective. It gives me no joy at all to write that Hamas achieved many of its objectives.

Sheridan then turns from Hamas’ success in demonizing Israel to what that success has meant for Jews thousands of miles away – including in Australia.

It turned the world against Israel. It made any thought of a two-state solution in which Israel and a Palestinian state live side by side in peace politically impossible, and utterly untenable on security grounds, for decades ahead at least. It was designed to provoke a strong response from Israel and that’s what it got, just as any nation would respond strongly to such an attack. Certainly, Australia would.

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We saw the most savage anti-Jewish terrorism in Bondi last year. Artificial intelligence, as I’ve written before, will make the future terrorist threat worse. There are only perhaps 16 million Jews, perhaps not even as many as that, in the entire world, and they are the most persecuted and at-risk racial and religious minority on the globe today. All human beings with a shred of decency should make solidarity with Jews among their highest priorities. But that’s not the case.

The two great contemporary drivers of hostility to Jews are left-wing ideology and activism, and the long tradition of Arab and Islamic antisemitism. Both are complicated cases with lots of exceptions and shades of grey.

But it is Sheridan’s diagnosis of the ideological left that is particularly damning:

But the left, in its bargain-basement critical theory guise, views all politics as identity politics, and all political discourse as divided simplistically into oppressor and oppressed. With a fabulous ignorance of Jewish and Middle East history, the left designates Israel a colonial oppressor, and because Israel is a Jewish state, and most Jews support Israel to some degree, Jews are accomplices in these colonial and racist crimes.

This view is inaccurate, ignorant, distorted, wrong and immoral in every respect. Naturally, it flourishes in our universities, in our writers’ festivals and across cultural organisations, especially those that are taxpayer-funded and therefore more likely to suffer from debilitating groupthink.

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Our treatment of this vulnerable minority is shameful. The Albanese government bears grave moral responsibility for its almost complete failure to provide any leadership. But the sickness of Australian antisemitism runs much wider. On this anniversary let’s be clear: it’s wrong, utterly wrong.

Read the entire thing.

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