The Bondi beach massacre results from laundering antisemitism as opposition to Israel.
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This is an expanded version of my Times column (£) today.
The massacre at a Chanukah candle-lighting ceremony on Sydney’s Bondi beach, in which at least fifteen Jews were murdered including a ten year-old girl and 30 others were wounded, was shocking but no surprise.
When I visited Australia earlier this year to promote my latest book, I found a Jewish community under siege. They were reeling from the shock of feeling abandoned by a society that had hitherto been the most welcoming to Jews in the world.
Two days after the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023, demonstrators had swarmed outside Sydney Opera House screaming “Where’s the Jews?” and, according to some reports, “Gas the Jews”.
Over the following two years, Australian synagogues have been firebombed; regular marches have chanted for the mass murder of Jews; on campus, Jewish students and academics have been harassed and intimidated; and the government’s hostility to Israel has been accompanied by mothballing key recommendations made by its envoy against antisemitism.
Attendance lists for my talks in Sydney and Melbourne were carefully screened against known extremists. Security outside was intense, and guards rushed me inside from my taxi. When the organisers of my talk in Brisbane wanted to find a larger meeting hall, they were gratuitously turned down by six venues with one stating openly that it wouldn’t host any Jewish speaker.
Australians have felt abandoned by a government which, as with the British government and many in the west, refuses to make the connection between today’s animus against Israel and antisemitism.
But the Bondi beach massacre was precisely what is meant by the marchers’ chants of “globalise the intifada”. It was part of a global onslaught against the Jewish people.
On the very day of that massacre, people marched in Birmingham behind a banner reading “intifada revolution” with an inverted red triangle, the symbol of Hamas terrorism...
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