Are Jews not allowed even one day of commemoration? Can’t they have just one sombre moment where they might remember their dead without mobs of wild-eyed Israelophobes frothing at the mouth for yet more ‘intifada’? Judging by the obscene events here in Sydney last night, the answer to that question is a firm No. It seems a Jew’s right to grieve counts for nothing in the face of the mob’s right to wail and rage about Israel.
I’m tired of tiptoeing around this. Intifada means violence against Jews
Even by the standards of the Israel-hating left, what happened in Sydney yesterday was despicable. The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, was in town. He’s on a four-day state visit to Oz. His main focus for the day was to visit the site of the Bondi pogrom of 14 December, when Jews were massacred by two suspected Isis gunmen. Fifteen were killed, including a ten-year-old Jewish girl by the name of Matilta.
Herzog, head of the Jewish nation, wanted to pay his respects. He and his wife Michal met and hugged survivors of the slaughter and Jews whose loved ones were slain. Yet they were forced to do so to a sinister background din of blind hatred for Israel. The keffiyeh classes couldn’t take just one day off. They hollered about ‘war crimes’, seethed about ‘genocide’, dreamt of ‘intifada’. They did everything they could to drown out the mourning for the murdered Jews. I can’t remember the last time I witnessed such loathsome scenes.
In central Sydney, far from lamenting violence against Jews, they barked for more of it. The Herzog haters chanted, ‘From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada!’. Gadigal is the Aboriginal name for the territory of Sydney. So you can imagine what kind of people we’re talking about – wet leftists and liberals so invested in the performative self-loathing of the clapped-out cultural classes that they can’t even bring themselves to say that ‘whitefella’ word, Sydney.
There is no confusion, however, about the other word they used: intifada. I’m tired of tiptoeing around this. Intifada means violence against Jews. The most recent intifada in Israel was the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005 – an orgy of mass murder carried out against the citizens of the Jewish homeland by the avowed anti-Semites of Hamas. And, of course, Hamas considers its fascistic pogrom of 7 October to have been an intifada, too.
It is astonishing, and nauseating, that people howled for more ‘intifada’ as the Israeli president was embracing a woman who lost her husband to the ‘intifada’ at Bondi, to that Jewphobic frenzy carried out by suspected Islamists. And they were calling for intifada not only in the Holy Land but in ‘Gadigal’ too, in Sydney, in the very city that just suffered one of the worst massacres of Jews of modern times. What, 15 dead people aren’t enough for you? You want more?
The events in Sydney shone an unforgiving light on the cult of Palestinianism. The cruelty of this bourgeois mania now stands starkly exposed. Its inhumanity is clear for all to see. These keffiyeh-shrouded agitators pose as anti-war and yet it is apocalyptic violence they dream of. ‘Intifada!’, they wail, knowing well that to president Herzog and the Jews of Australia, that word will conjure memories of the slaughter of Jews in discotheques and pizza parlours by the madmen of Hamas.
It seems there is no ‘pause’ button on Israelophobia. It is wholly unrestrained by morality and basic decency. It is extraordinary that not one organiser in Australia’s ‘pro-Palestine’ lobby thought to say: ‘Let’s give it a rest while they commemorate Bondi. We’ll get back to our Herzog-bashing tomorrow.’ Instead we have been treated to side-by-side footage of Jews weeping at Bondi as leftish hysterics in the city bellowed for more of the very violence that consumed their loved ones. What sickness is this?
Then came the final insult: the mob stole victimhood from the Jews. The New South Wales Police Force cleared protesters off the streets. The protest had been officially banned, so those who gathered were breaking the law. The cops dragged away a group of young Muslim men who were praying to Mecca. And that is literally the only thing Australia’s chattering classes are yapping about today: this supposedly ‘Islamophobic’ assault on pious Muslims.
It’s nonsense, of course. That street-praying was no mere religious act – it was a political provocation carried out as part of the anti-Herzog protests. Being a Muslim does not give one special immunity from the laws of the land. Yet this is where we’ve ended up: with grieving Jews being drowned out and Muslims being held up as the *real* victims. It is brazen narrative theft, with people’s focus being ruthlessly dragged from the racist murder of Jews to the supposedly ‘racist’ dispersal of praying men.
I’m not easily shocked, but the madness that befell Sydney yesterday felt genuinely unnerving. It felt like the salt of Israelophobia rubbed into the wound of Bondi’s anti-Semitism. A shameful day.
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