The West has turned itself into a welcoming home for antisemites. An incident in Australia is telling.
There was a very disturbing set of events that took place recently. An Israeli blogger had a discussion with two Muslims in Sydney, Australia. It is still not clear if one was a doctor, the other a nurse or both of them doctors or nurses. The discussion was in English, and the blogger identified himself as being in and from Israel. The two medical officials wished upon him multiple times death and that he should go to “gehinnom,” the word meaning hell in both Hebrew and Arabic, with a slight difference in pronunciation. The male, who called himself a doctor, said that any Israeli who would come by him in the hospital would be sent off to hell. Later, in the conversation, he seemed to imply that he had already done the same. The last word I had heard was that the two had been removed from their hospital positions and had additionally been arrested, with an investigation coming.
I had the good fortune to visit Sydney in 1990. My father and his parents were able to leave Germany because of an uncle who lived in the city and had served as their sponsor. Australia, in taking in my father’s family as well as many other Jews fleeing Europe, saved many lives. My father took his bachelor’s and master’s from the University of Sydney and then came to the U.S. for his doctorate. He actually came home from Northwestern, but the land of kangaroos and koalas had no need in the 1950s for a synthetic organic chemist. He went back to Chicago, and that is the reason I still root for the Bears.
If we could go back to 1990 and drag our Jew-hating health professionals with us, things would have been quite different. The hatred in their heart would be the same. Conversations between themselves and like-minded bigots would have been similar to the one that they held via video with the Israeli. The only differences would have been that they would never have let on to their prejudices and would not have risked their careers to kill an Israeli under their care. Today, antisemitism in the West is open and mainstreamed. In Australia of late, a synagogue was torched, anti-Jewish graffiti is common, and outward hatred towards Jew is expressed in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne. How is it that today, in 2025, one can openly threaten Jews, attack Jews, and demand that Jews and Israelis die via a “universal intifada”?
A group affiliated with Columbia University—thank God that there is at least one school worse than Harvard—had an off-campus seminar on how to “un-live” (in other words, kill) Zionists. The seminar was meant to teach how to stab Jews to death. Columbia, sticking to tradition, did nothing. How can such Jew hatred be so public? The answer is that we have a confluence of trends that has become dangerous to Jews in the West.
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The first factor is the large-scale importation of Arab/Muslim students into U.S. universities. Universities are always desperate for money, and for the past few decades have made unholy alliances with China and some of the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East. The sheikhs provide petrodollars and the schools provide their name, prestige and at times faculty in the host countries. While some U.S. universities offer degree programs here in Israel, the difference is that students being sent from countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Palestinian territories and Jordan generally have all of their expenses paid by a local government. While Harvard has to provide a large percentage of its undergraduates with significant financial assistance, students from the Middle East generally pay 100% of tuition and fees and are thus attractive candidates for U.S. schools. These students, often seen hiding their faces behind keffiyehs during protests, bring their Jew hatred from home, where freedom of expression does not exist. The two fired “doctors” down under were Muslim immigrants, given all of the benefits and freedoms of a Western country.
But the importation of Jew haters would not have been enough to lead to the open and unabashed threats and attacks on Jews from the U.S. to Europe to Australia. The other factor is home-grown. The left’s full embrace of Marxist oppressor/oppressed theories is the second part of the current antisemitism bomb. Jews necessarily had to be put in the “oppressor” bin, though antisemitic attacks in the U.S. and Europe outweigh all other racist attacks combined. Jews in Israel have faced threats of annihilation for 80 years, but have never tried or suggested wiping out any Arab country. Once the Jews were tagged as oppressors, leftist students, professors, and citizens in general felt comfortable adopting the Israel/Jew hatred of the highly expanded Muslim/Arab population in their midst. While individual Jews in the past criticized Israel over various policies, nothing compares to Jewish students lending their voice and bodies to demand that Israel be wiped off of the map—and only after 1,200 people were murdered in cold blood in Israel.
If it had just been the Muslims, they could not have made antisemitism so open due to the push-back from Jewish students and faculty. The left was satisfied in its classroom disdain of Jews, and Jews did their best to show their support for blacks and others via DEI to prove that while born in the wrong group, they have left their oppressor status behind. Neither group could have led to that call from the Jewish blogger but together, virulent antisemitism is joined by those on the left, including Jews, who find no value in Israel or their religion. And the result is an open explosion in which Jews can get beaten up in Brooklyn or threatened in London or denied entry in New Zealand for serving in the IDF. The Jew hatred of the Germans was always in their hearts; Hitler elevated it into a national service, so that shop owners could deny Jewish customers entry and SA brownshirts could rough up Jews without any fear of retribution. Ditto in 2025, where Jew haters are encouraged and soft-on-crime prosecutors and cowardly university presidents refuse to act. If the attacks and threats (“un-live”) had been directed towards blacks, trans, illegal aliens, or homosexuals, the phenomenon would have been quashed in its crib. Since it’s directed towards Jews—hated by Muslim and leftists alike—there are presently no brakes.
The beauty of the Western system when it worked was that it did not matter what was in a person’s heart. A shop owner may not like blacks but if he took any action to deny a black patron entry or service, he could face a fine or jail. There were heroic stories of soldiers declaring to their German captors that they were all Jews, so as to protect the Jews amongst them. I met a colonel who was shot down on his thirty-sixth mission over Europe. He told me that he had his Jewish airmen throw away their dog tags so that the Germans could not identify them as Jewish.
I have never asked on this website any preferential treatment of Jews in the U.S. or any other Western country. All I ask is that the laws and university rules be applied to Jews as they would vigorously be applied if the threatened group was blacks or gays. If they can uphold that standard, then Jew-hatred will again retreat back into the heart, where it will always remain.
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