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Comments by Brandan O'Neill about Australian progressives in The Australian
7 February 2025
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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/progressives-who-marched-for-black-lives-have-enabled-jew-hatred-simply-by-staying-silent/news-story/93f507c5aef82398e39eda2a549c2795
Article title, /Progressives who marched for black lives have enabled Jew
hatred simply by staying silent/
Selected quotes below.
1,
Why did the Australian left get more upset about the police killing of an
African-American man 15,000km from Oz than they ever have over the
persecution of Jews in their own towns and cities?
2,
Who can forget the glee with which protesters outside the Sydney Opera
House greeted Hamas's orgy of barbarism on October 7, 2023?
Less than 48 hours after that neo-fascistic atrocity, the worst butchery
of Jews since the Holocaust, a gloating mob assembled at Sydney Harbour to
holler insults at the Jews and cry "F..k Israel".
It was the salt of Israelophobia rubbed into the wound of the pogrom two
days earlier. It was the taunting of Israel's dead and wounded, the public
mockery of slain Jews.
It was as sick as if people had poured on to the streets of Sydney in 1938
to celebrate Kristallnacht.
3,
The kind of Aussies who took to the streets in their thousands following
the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 have yet to
muster up the energy to oppose the Jew hate in their own midst.
4,
We need to ask why those who constantly cry racism essentially shrug their
shoulders when synagogues are burned down and Jewish schools are
graffitied.
We need a reckoning with the "Be Kind" activist class and its stark
failure to stand with Jews in their hour of need.
"Silence is violence", these people cried during the days of unrest over
George Floyd. If that slogan still holds, then they have been very violent
indeed towards Australia's Jews.
"Black Lives Matter", they said back then. And Jewish lives? Do they
matter? Their silence is their answer.
5,
The Australian left, and the Western left more broadly, has done something
worse than ignore the racist persecution of Jews. They have enabled it.
They have emboldened it.
They essentially hung a target sign around Jews' necks. "Oppressors", the
sign says. "Privileged". "Colonialists". And, of course, that most
egregious sin in the eyes of both the left and the Islamists they have
made a suicidal alliance with: "Zionists".
The left exiled Jews from the moral universe of progressive sympathy and
marked them as a suspect community. They paved the way for their present
persecution.
This is the tragedy of the Jews. In mid-20th century Europe they were
hated for being insufficiently white, for being a "lesser" race. Now they
are hated for being "hyper-white", for being a "privileged" race.
The fascist loathing of Jewish "inferiority" has been replaced by a woke
suspicion of Jewish "superiority". And the consequences are alarmingly
similar: burnt-out synagogues, desecrated Jewish schools, the public
libelling of Jews.
Solidarity with Jews is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. It
won't come from the left but it has to come from somewhere. Who's in?