by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
After Bondi, we can deny it no longer – bourgeois Israelophobia has aided and abetted a lethal new violence.
Let me get this right – we’re expected to believe it is entirely coincidental that there has been a spike in anti-Jewish violence at the exact same time as hatred for the Jewish State has soared? We’re meant to think there is no connection whatsoever between today’s frothing bourgeois animus for the Jewish nation and the rise in disdain for the Jewish people? You’re telling us the targeting of Jews in the West is wholly unrelated to the Western elites’ ceaseless damning of the Jewish homeland as a uniquely barbarous entity?
Is anyone still buying this? I’m not. And after the massacre of the Jews at Bondi, that mini 7 October that has shaken Australia to its core, it’s time more people refused to buy it. The only individuals responsible for that pogrom on the beach are the father-and-son fascists who carried it out. But their apocalyptic loathing for Jews did not emerge in a vacuum. It festered and curdled in an era in which we are told, day in, day out, that the Jewish nation is a pox on Earth. That it is singularly murderous. That all who support it are scum. That it is so depraved it might have to be violently excised from the Holy Land, all the way from the river to the sea. It does not detract from the culpability of the two Jew killers to analyse this foul soil in which their medieval bigotry was able to take such firm root.
After Bondi, the activist class is fuming at the suggestion that their rage against the Jewish State might be aiding and abetting a new rage against the Jewish people. When the UK’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’ have stirred up suspicion and rancour against Jews, they flipped. How outrageous to suggest that ‘people opposing genocide’ are the problem, wailed the digital left. Blinded by the glare of their own self-righteousness, they refuse to countenance any connection between their zealous enmity for the Jewish State and the new imperilling of the Jewish people.
Read also: Jews don’t feel safe anywhere. The intifada has been globalised by Samuel Rubinstein, UnHerd
Watch: