Month: December 2023

That was the year that was – the age of anxiety

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle-class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission
To murder and to maim
Leonard Cohen, You want it darker?

The title of our retrospective for last, year, 2022, was Don’t Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow), the recently departed Christine McVie’s anthem. That was a drear year, and the song was a hopeful reflection of the year to come. But, as they, say, man proposes, God disposes. This year, a line from the just departed Shane McGowan’s most famous seems more apt: “Happy Christmas your arse. I pray God it’s our last”. We are living in an age of uncertainty, an age, to borrow from WH Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year in review 

The year began on a high. Albanese’s Labor government was sitting pretty, the opposition in floundrous disarray. I’d written a few months earlier: “The new Labor government is riding high in the polls whilst the Neanderthals of the Opposition bounce along the bottom of the pond, although in Monty Python speak, it’s “just a flesh wound”’. The Tory government in NSW was enroute for a hiding in the upcoming March state election. And there was apparently massive support in all states for the as yet unannounced referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament – Australia’s long-awaited reckoning for its dark history.

Though Labor did win in March, by the barest of margins, by mid-year the Voice was going backwards with Labor’s honeymoon over as the atavistic alliance behind the No campaign landed blow after blow on the government and the electorate, straining under cost of living and housing pressures was deciding that they and the government had more important matters to deal with than what was increasingly perceived as divisive value signaling.

An incumbent who looked like he would end the “here today, gone tomorrow” phase of prime ministerial politics now faces troubling questions of whether he can become the first incumbent since John Howard a quarter-century ago to win a second term – a strong bet back in January. It has been a dramatic turnaround. At the fag-end of 2023, the government has been buffeted by the failure of the Voice, continued hikes in interest rates and seemingly immovable inflation. Year-end caught it unprepared for a controversial High Court refugee detention ruling, baring Labor’s perennial Achilles heel, migration and security, and demonstrating that political good fortune is never a bottomless well.  

It is always worth remembering that we live in an age of binary storylines, where nuance is often the first casualty. In 2022, Albanese was probably the recipient of too much praise. In 2023, he has arguably been the target of too much criticism. In 2024, I suspect we will discover the resting heartbeat of his government. Labor’s problem only disguises the still unresolved dilemma for the Liberal Party: how does it intend to rebrand its policies and its image for the next election? As the 2024 the election draws closer, the focus will not just be on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese but also the possibility of a Prime Minister Peter Dutton.

By year end, there was figurative blood on the Albanese government’s saddle. But there was literal blood and carnage, heaps of it, not only in Ukraine where the much-anticipated Spring Offensive has stalled in a stalemate reminiscent of the Great War’s Western Front. With western enthusiasm for the war waning its aid diminishing, and the Ukrainian electorate weary and disillusioned with last years’ Time magazine’s Person of the Year, there is a distinct possibility that Volodymyr Zelensky might be thrown under the figurative bus. Who’d’ve thunk it? from rooster to feather duster in twelve months.

But October 7th trumped the calculus of carnage, For nine months, Israel was racked by large- protests against an extremist, racists and demonstrably undemocratic government’s push for a wide-ranging judicial reform. But on that day, the protests ceased. The end of the year effectively began with the Hamas terrorist group’s almost perfect act of Taqiyyah (deception and dissimulation in an ostensibly Islamic cause): the violent, deadly and brutal pogrom perpetrated on Israeli men women and children in kibbutzim, IDF bases and the Supernova rave party in the Negev by the “heroes” and shahidin of the Hamas soldiery. If the Black Shabbat attack was medieval in its savagery, Israel’s retaliation was biblical in its rage and its destruction, and as civilian deaths mounted and the bodies piled, exceeding twenty thousand by year’s end, a brief moment of sympathy for Israel receded and a tide of virulent anti-Jewish sentiment rose around the world.

In both Ukraine and in Israel/Palestine. The future is dark and uncertain. The military conflict over Ukraine will determine the credibility of US and European power and whether Russia’s aggression will be rewarded; the Israel-Hamas war means the Middle East hovers at an inflection point, either a deepening polarization on both sides or, somehow, a push to resurrect the two-state, Israel and Palestine. What was it Lenin said? “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Hang on – we’re in for a helluva ride.

Of course, many other things happened in 2023, some quite important, but we won’t bore you with recapping the details. But here’s two that are likely to shock and entertain in equal measure in 2024.

Criminal and civil cases proceeded against former US president Donald Trump, even as he maintained a commanding lead in the race for the Republican nomination. The odds of him returning to the White House next November are shortening by the minute. And he is hell bent on revenge – and untrammeled power. It’ll be like some old Roman melodrama.

There will no doubt be legal fireworks here in Australia too. An investigative journalist’s investigation into the powerful, divisive and controversial broadcaster Alan Jones was as early Christmas present. Airing claims of multiple males who allege he indecently assaulted them; this has encouraged even more people to speak out. Predictably, the Parrot has denied all the claims and is threatening legal action. As one would …

The political outlook for 2024?

Australia ended the year as a divided nation. Labor is a culturally progressive party caught in an age dominated by power, patriotism and economic competition; its vulnerability is the progressive mantra of identity politics, group rights and skepticism towards Western liberalism. Elite power and social conscience for the Yes case were on display from corporations, business leaders, philanthropists, universities, celebrities, trade unions, community leaders, public media, remote Indigenous communities, the affluent suburbs and the inner cities while the No vote came from the outer suburbs, the regions, the rural areas, Coalition-held seats, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia – and reflected both a revolt against and an indifference towards what many saw as elite lecturing and progressive sophistry.

As for the world in general?

Nation­alism, tribalism and authoritarianism are on the march throughout the earth, as are millions of refugees. A veritable “United Nations” of migrants is queuing up at the US’ border with Mexico as migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East join those from Central and South America seeking a safer, better life in the land of the increasingly less free and arguably more unstable. Old wars stagger on and new ones break out bringing with them more death, destruction, starvation and displacement. The world faces a travail of great power rivalry, regional war, climate upheaval, population movements, technological disruption and growing inequality. US analyst Fareed Zakaria observed that with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and China’s challenge to the global order, “if America retreats, in each of these three areas, aggression and disorder will rise”. As L Cohen sang, “I’ve seen the future, brother and it’s murder:

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing (won’t be nothing)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it’s overturned
The order of the soul
L Cohen

Gaza

On our block

On our own rural island of tranquilly, unexpected but welcome spring and summer rains appear to have prevented what we feared would be a bushfire season like that the Black Summer of 2019-29. We were, nevertheless, well prepared with our bushfire plan in place. The year was for us The Year of The Forest. Our forest, that is. Aided by a grant from the state government’s Biodiversity Conservation Trust, we undertook a major project to eradicate weeds and vines – and our trees heaved a great big sigh of relief:  Thinking globally, acting locally – how landowners can protect koalasWe had the pleasure of two koala sightings – that’s three in three years, which is more than most in our shire have seen in a lifetime – and the excellent koala detection pooches of Canines for Wildlife discovered joey scats. At year end, we bit the bullet and brought in an arborist A Team to fell sixteen Queensland maple trees that were once recommended as rainforest trees and are now declared weeds and whose progeny have infested our koala habitat. They died to protect the forest.

Stepping back a bit, in September, my old school, Moseley Grammar School, celebrated its 100th year in September. And what a grand day it must’ve been. Wish I could’ve been there. It started life as a theological college, and reopened as Moseley Secondary School in 1923. I spent eight years of the sixties at this grand old place. In my day, it was Moseley Grammar, a boys-only, and in my recollection after six decades, all white school. There were about twenty Catholics including moi, half a dozen Jews, and several hundred nominally C of E. In the early seventies, it merged with the secondary modern over the fence and is now Moseley School and Sixth Form. And my, how things have changed. As an old Greek once said, “Everything Flows, Nothing Stands Still”, as the Bobster put it, “everything passes, everything changes”.

The passing parade

Many of our icons ascended to the choir invisible this year. Why in this sad and demoralising year do I feel that we’re trading time on the downward escalator? We’ve already name checked Shane, but I’ll let the picture tell the story. Special mention to the icons of my youth and later years, particularly Robbie Robertson, Jeff Beck, David Crosby, Tina Turner, Burt Bacharach, Raquel Welsh, Harry Belafonte, Glenda Harris, Rodriguez, Dame Edna, David McGowan, and Sinead O’Connor. That old Machiavelli Henry Kissinger lurks in the background. I note in the picture, a barely subtle reference to the dead of Israel and Palestine. The Tree of Life in the centre is a gorgeous touch referencing the pointless felling of the ancient Sycamore Gap tree near Hadrian’s Wall. Too late to be included is celebrated if controversial Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger who almost made it to ‘24. He’s probably the only journo to have a word named after him.

Closer to home, people we are acquainted with slip off their mortal perches, including two good friends. My former wife’s longtime partner Robert “Tas” Taylor (Tas as in “fantastic”) took off in March after a long illness. He’d been with Libby as long as we’d been separated, a talented book editor, fellow Neil Young and all-round good bloke. In December, it was ooroo  to our very good mate Trevor Bailey who peacefully departed his bush paradise in the Forest at the End of the Road. His was a life well lived. Traveller, businessman, raconteur, perfect host, partner in booze, longtime Bellingen resident, and forest defender (he played a key role in the creation of the Dunggirr National Park, named for our precious but endangered koala). His death was unexpected – he died in his sleep – but were told that he was “slowing down”. Memento mori, I guess. My doctor tells me I ought to slow down too and act my age.

Trevor and Paul discus the meaning of life

What we wrote in 2023 

The rise and fall of The Voice dominated In That Howling Infinite’s posts from April onwards. There were six in all. The first cautiously optimistic, and as referendum day approached, hopes that the better angels of our nature might overcome the negativity and scaremongering of the Naysayers, gave way to despondency as we fought what we saw as our good fight to the end at market stalls and polling booths.  Warrior woman – the trials and triumphs of Marcia Langton; A Voice crying in the wilderness; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken … the emptiness of “No”; Hopes and fears – the morning after the referendum for The Voice; The Uluru Statement from the Heart and Silencing The Voice – the Anatomy of a No voter

On the hustings in Dorrrigo

October 7 and the Gaza War has been intellectually and emotionally challenging. I wrote an enormous amount, but published little. In That Howling Infinite did however publish two pieces on the conflict, both emphasising the unprecedented rise in antisemitism: “You want it darker?” …  Gaza and the devil that never went away, and The Calculus of Carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality. Ironically, we’d addressed antisemitism earlier in the year after watching American filmmaker Ken Burns latest documentary, a searing indictment of America’s response to the catastrophe that was approaching for European Jewry: The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece.

Prince Charles’ long wait for his apotheosis ended with his archaic and in many ways arcane coronation on May 6th. The passing of Her Maj last year and his ascension reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers). I could resist detailing the arcane and archaic ceremonials of Chuck’s Big Day in The Rite Stuff – the coronation’s pomp and circumstance. Most of the baubles used in the coronation were stolen during the age of Empire. Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff tells a talk of Britain’s sticky fingers. Bad Brits also cop a serve in Outlander – If I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all…After nearly a decade, we succumbed to the celebrated time-shifting highland fling. The promise of exotic Celtic locations, steamy sex scenes, and graphic violence was too irresistible.

Last year saw many articles on the history and politics of Russia and Ukraine, and whilst the Gaza war has dominated much of the international reportage, the war grinds on ineluctably. The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely  discussed the work of my deceased university tutor. I managed to transcribe a handwritten paper I’d written for him as an undergraduate before it faded away, Большой террор … Stalin’s Great Terror. In January, I’d read English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history. Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. But I persevered, and Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war recorded by thoughts and observations on this tumultuous and terrible time.

The Vietnam War adventures of our recently departed friend Tim Page was said to have been the model for Denis Hopper’s strung-out photojournalist in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Rewatching the film, for the first time in decades, I thought Hopper’s over the top, incongruous and unexplained character bears little resemblance to the Tim Page we knew. And yet, as Tim and his partner Mau were later to point out to me, Hopper’s cracked and crazed camera cowboy illustrated exactly what the soldiers at ground zero experienced in America’s war, a war that has since been defined as chaos without compass. The result was my review, The Ride of the psychotic Valkyries – Apocalypse Now Redux

Anzac Day, our national day of remembrance, has always inspired articles in In That Howling Infinite, and this year, we commemorated the Australians who’d volunteered to fight for the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, So far away from home – the Diggers who fought in Spain ; and we republished two excellent articles on Wilfred Owen and the poets of the First World War: I am the enemy you killed – Wilfred Owen’s solemn testament. An altogether different kind of war story is told in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the 2022 Booker Prize winning novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka: The dark nights of a restless soul – a Sri Lankan ghost story.

An entertaining, indeed, hilarious episode on my favourite podcast, The Rest is History inspired Rider Haggard and the book that launched a genre, the story behind King Soloman’s mines, the adventure story that inspired a multitude of spin-offs in fiction and in film. The podcast’s hosts, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, were given a tribute with The Rest is History- a gift that keeps on giving, whilst Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion reviewed his story of how Christianity and its precursors shaped the thinking of the modern world.

I wrote several “memoir” pieces this year: The great outdoors – camping days, Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller, a sequel to a  a 2021 piece, recalling how I came to take the famous Hippie Trail to India, and a tribute to a particularly favourite record album: McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. But music did not get much of a look in in ‘23, although the Bobster got a gig in Lost in the rain with no direction home – Dylan’s poem for Woody.

By year’s end, events have left me somewhat disillusioned and disconsolate, and in a kind of “slough of despond”, the allegorical bog that entrapped John Bunyan’s pilgrim. This inspired It’s 3am and an hour of existential angst: who hasn’t awoken at 3am and stayed awake into the early hours overthinking everything when random thoughts scatter and shatter? And also, Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment, a mostly irrelevant contemplation of nostalgia.

Gaza

And that is that for 2023. Here’s 2024 and whatever it may bring. We’ll leave you with a bit of lighthearted twizz – Time magazine’s Person of the Year, Taylor Swift, and simply the best kitty pic ever. He’s to Tay Tay and Benjamin Button.

For previous annual retrospectives in In That Howling Infinite, see That was the year that was … 

The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims.

The Syrian civil War has killed over half a million souls. 150,000 have did in Yemen.  In Sudan, more than ten thousand people have perished in the latest civil war. ISIS killed tens of thousands. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. Muslims killed by Muslims. And millions displaced and enduring famine and disease.

In recent years Muslims have slain more Muslims than those killed by Israeli forces and settlers since 1948 (though we”ll never know how many  – official and semiofficial figures cite casualties from the Independence War and al Nakba of 1948 to 2021, 63,543, including 31,227 fatalities, plus, of course, the ghastly toll of the current Gaza war, but this is probably massively understated).

There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists.

Why this apparent indifference? Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC.

And what of the rise in antisemitism around the world? After the blood Hamas pogrom of October 7, it took just 24 hours for anti-Israeli sentiment to turn into anti-Jewish sentiment. It was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of the men and women and children murdered had even been counted and identified, and the number of hostages revealed; and before Israel’s relentless and brutal retaliation again Gaza which has killed tens of thousands more innocents.

A charitable explanation would be a mix of political and historical ignorance and a dogmatic belief that renders Jews, whether Israeli or in the diaspora ‘white’, ‘colonial’ and ‘oppressors’, and Muslims ‘oppressed’, and encourages progressives to turn a blinkered or blind eye to some of the most hideous crimes on the planet. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century.

But there is also reality that what we’ve been seeing in cities around the world is that antisemitism is the devil that never goes away.

I republish below an article that summarizes quite well the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality. It is written by a rightwing author in a right-wing publication, and many of his observations thereon may be selective, subjective, controversial, and potentially exaggerated and inaccurate, but the underlying basic arguments is sound. Countries subject to interminable potentially intractable and often internecine conflict, rigid, authoritarian, and ofttimes theocratic conservative beliefs and social structures, and endemic political instability rarely prosper in our modern interconnected world and often end up serving as expendable pawns in more powerful players’ power games. 

I also republish a recent article by The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheriden on how the rising antisemitism in the West is undoubtable fueled by the increasing numbers of migrants form conservative countries where antisemitism is encouraged and inculcated by the media, by educational systems and by socialization.

These communities often have an enormous political and cultural impact on their host countries. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia and other western countries are law-abiding, productive citizens, a small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.

In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group. Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.

See also in On That Howling Infinite, “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away …

For more on antisemitism in In That Howling Infinite, see: Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question; and The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece 

For more on Palestine and Israel in In That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The paradox of piety
Observes no disconnect,
Nor registers anxiety
As the ship of fools is wrecked.
So, leaders urge with eloquence,
And martyrs die in consequence.
We talk in past and present tense.
As greed and fear persist.
For reasons only dead men know,
Few can resist the call to go.
That is your fate, the wise man said,
The good book in his fist!

From E Lucevan Le Stelle, Paul Hemphill

Journalists should not be duped into blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems

Chris Mitchell, Australian Business Review, 17 December 2023

Syrians run for cover following Syrian government air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus in 2018. Picture: AFP

Syrians run for cover following government air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma, Damascus 2018. AFP

Why do so many journalists analysing the Middle East’s problems think the answers lie in a tiny country of 9.7 million people, seven million of whom are Jewish?

Israel has no natural resources while Arab countries surrounding it occupy 1000 times more land, dominate global oil production and have a combined population of more than 400 million?

Look at income distribution patterns and one thing becomes apparent. The Arab and Persian worlds are among the poorest areas on Earth, despite the vast wealth of their rulers. Israel, with ingenuity its only resource, has average income about the same as Australia’s, while most in the Middle East languish on lower wages than black South Africans or Brazilians.

Yet it’s not only the grinding daily poverty of the Arab street that the moralising Western left ignores. It’s also the violence done to ordinary Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa by other Muslims. Add the 48,000 Islamic terror attacks listed by the French think tank Fondapol between 1979 and 2021 and their 210,000 mostly Muslim victims.

Where is the left on the medieval Arab and Persian regimes that spread Islamist terror from the Middle East to Europe, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia?

This is not another call for a Muslim reformation, but for political and media honesty.

Yet the Islamic Middle East certainly needs modernisation. The left’s favourite French economist Thomas Piketty and fellow Paris School of Economics writers Facundo Alvaredo and Lydia Assouad in 2018 analysed income inequality in the Middle East. They found “the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world with a top decile share as high as 64 per cent (of national wealth) compared with 37 per cent in Western Europe, 47 per cent in the US and 55 per cent in Brazil”.

Regular readers will know this writer has a daughter living in Tel Aviv and working in the tech sector. Previously, family members have lived and worked in Jordan. Comparisons between the two countries are fascinating given both were once part of British mandate Palestine.

Thomas Piketty and colleagues analysed Middle East income inequality. Picture: Getty Images
Thomas Piketty and colleagues analysed Middle East income inequality. Getty 

Jordan has a slightly larger population of 11.3 million. With at least three million Palestinians according to the government, and perhaps many more if you follow the historical arguments, it occupies four times the land area of Israel.

Life expectancy for males in Israel is 81 years and 85 for females.

In Jordan the averages are 72 and 77.

Israel’s unemployment rate is 3.5 per cent, Jordan’s 17.9.

Average income in Israel is $80,000 and in Jordan $6,500.

Jordan is a good and safe place to visit but it is clear within hours that it is much poorer than Israel. Israel’s GDP of $783bn dwarfs Jordan’s of $72bn.

The wealth picture is less stark comparing Israel with the Middle East’s oil states. Saudi Arabia has 32 million people, GDP of $1.5 trillion and is the world’s No.18 economy. Its GDP per capita is $40,000, so half Israel’s. Saudi average wages are less than Israel’s, although Saudi prices can be cheaper.

Iranian GDP sits at $549bn but its wage levels are far below those in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Its legislated minimum wage this year sits at $1700 a month.

The Western left also ignores violence against Muslims by Muslims. Few demonstrators took to the streets of Western cities to protest during the Syrian civil war this past decade. The death toll as of last March stood at 613,000, dwarfing the casualties in Gaza the past two months.

Ditto the ongoing Yemen civil war that started in 2014 and in which 150,000 have died fighting and 227,000 have perished in famine.

The disastrous Somalian civil war has been going for 40 years. Genocide Watch last year said between 350,000 and one million mainly Muslims have been killed since 1991 and 3.5 million displaced Somalis, including 1.5 million children, face starvation. The country is 99 per cent Muslim.

Add the millions killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the thousands killed by al-Qa’ida in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003.

To put the Israel story into perspective, between 1948 and 2021 total Palestinian deaths number 31,227. Total Israeli deaths in war excluding terrorism number 24,981. The 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars that cost Palestinians so much of their land followed invasions by Israel’s Arab neighbours.

Former farmer Habiba Osman Ahmed in Dollow refugee camp in southern Somalia in 2011. After Somalia's 20-year civil war pushed the drought into famine she didn’t even have a pot to cook in, and had to share with another family.
Former farmer Habiba Osman Ahmed in Dollow refugee camp in southern Somalia. 2011. After Somalia’s 20-year civil war pushed the drought into famine she didn’t even have a pot to cook in, and had to share with another family.

Islam has also been waging war on black Africa for much of the past 100 years.

Tablet Magazine on December 12 said “the same Jihad that targeted Jews on October 7 has been targeting black Africans for decades”.

Tablet discusses the “hidden holocaust” from 1983 to 2005 when “northern Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the black Sudanese of the mostly Christian south. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million black Sudanese. The Arab Muslim government’s jihad utilised kidnapping as its terror weapon of choice, not to mention casual gang rape and mutilation”.

Tablet cites Arab pogroms against black Africans in Nigeria, Mauritania and Sudan’s Western Darfur. Asking why the civil rights left ignores these, it says “on account of their ‘intersectional’ dogma – which makes Jews ‘white’ and Muslims ‘oppressed’ – the Western human rights industry, media and campus left activists are ideologically determined to mostly ignore some of the most hideous crimes on the planet”.

Trouble is, most journalists know nothing about Islam or Islamism. The Koran is not a peaceful book: it does encourage Jew hatred and other violent behaviours against non-believers. When large communities celebrate the martyrdom of their sons and daughters, the left needs to understand that fanatics mean and do what they say. They really do see Jihad as the road to paradise.

This religious outlook has served the interests of the Sunni princes who finance the spread of Wahabism and the Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren) that spread it to Pakistan and Indonesia. It serves Iran well to finance Hamas and Hezbollah.

Blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems lets the mullahs and princes off the hook for what they don’t do for their own people. Journalists covering the Middle East should not be duped the way the Arab street is. Of course Palestinian lives matter but Islamism is the real “context”.

Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman

Back on August 26, 2014, after another Israeli-Gaza war, former AP Jerusalem bureau editor Matti Friedman published a fascinating account in Tablet explaining how much the Western media mis-reports what is really happening in Israel and Palestine. He says AP had more than 40 staff in Israel in 2011 but only a single stringer in Syria where tens of thousands were dying each week. Its Israel bureau was bigger than staff numbers in Russia, China or India. Why?

The answer then was the same as now: it’s about Western media assumptions about Jews, power and victimhood.

That combines with a complete media disregard for what real Palestinians think and want and what Islamists really believe.

Here’s a clue. Most Palestinians and Hamas do not support a two-state solution. They support the elimination of Israel, and at least some support the elimination of all Jews.

A poll last week by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found 72 per cent support across Gaza and the West Bank for Hamas’s murder of 1200 civilians on October 7. While 95 per cent thought Israel had committed war crimes since October 7, only 10 per cent believed Hamas had.

Chris Mitchell began his career in late 1973 in Brisbane on the afternoon daily, The Telegraph. He worked on the Townsville Daily Bulletin, the Daily Telegraph Sydney and the Australian Financial Review before joining The Australian in 1984. He was appointed editor of The Australian in 1992 and editor in chief of Queensland Newspapers in 1995. He returned to Sydney as editor in chief of The Australian in 2002 and held that position until his retirement in December 2015.

Muslim migrants and Western Left create new anti-Semitism crisis

Greg Sheridan.

Palestinian supporters demonstrate in Melbourne against the current Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian supporters demonstrate in Melbourne against the Israeli bombardment and invasionThe worldwide crisis in anti-Semitism, so much of it fuelled by Arab and North African anti-Semitism, now in a crude alliance with the anti-Semitism of the far left, points to a deeper malaise in Western democ­racies.

It raises again the compatibility of large Arab and North African populations with the traditions and culture of liberal democracy.

Consider. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson declared Europe confronts a “huge risk of terrorist attacks” over Christmas because of the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

In December a terrorist killed one tourist and injured others in Paris. In Dublin a knife attack allegedly by a Muslim asylum-seeker left children and adults severely wounded, though Irish police say they believe it was not terror related. In Germany, alleged terrorists were arrested preparing a bomb. In Brussels in October a Tunisian terrorist killed two Swedish football fans.

If Middle East conflict pro­duces terrorism in Western democratic nations, it’s reasonable to ask how anyone living in a modern, free, democratic society views random murder as a constructive, purposeful, moral response.

Australian agencies believe there is an increased risk of politically or communally motivated violence here, too, but not to the point where they’ve formally altered the terror alert level.

We’ve also seen US President Joe Biden plead for the world, including Western feminists, to condemn the “horrific” sexual violence of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. The deliberate, premeditated Hamas attacks were the most depraved, sexualised sadism the world has seen. Yet Western feminists, deafening in their silence, practise #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

In Australia, the authorities decided that Islamic clerics who welcomed the Hamas atrocities and urged all Muslim nations to spit on Israel so it would drown had no legal case to answer. Demonstrators filmed on the Sydney Opera House forecourt screaming “Kill the Jews! Gas the Jews! F..k the Jews!” – none of them has been arrested or charged either.

Imagine the shuddering national convulsions that would follow if some group of extremist Christian activists gathered a few hundred demonstrators to scream: “Kill the Muslims!” All society would be rightly outraged. The whole nation would denounce it. The counselling bill at the ABC alone would double the national debt.

But society seems never to react this way when the target group is Jewish, although NSW has moved to strengthen its laws.

The Albanese government has been mealy-mouthed, equivocal, all at sea on all of this. It can’t mention anti-Semitism without conjuring a spectral, matching Islamophobia. Let’s be clear. The global anti-Semitism crisis, a profound civilisational challenge, is not matched by an equal, opposite and morally equivalent phenomenon called Islamo­phobia.

Start with the numbers. There are perhaps 1.9 billion Muslims and about 16 million Jews. There are about 50 Muslim majority nations and one Jewish majority nation. In dozens of other nations, Muslims make up a big minority. Only in the US do Jews pass even 2 per cent. Within Australia there are about 100,000 Jews, perhaps a touch more, and almost 900,000 Muslims. The size of the Jewish population is static. The Muslim population will continue to grow rapidly. Its age profile is younger, it has a higher birthrate and continuing Muslim immigration.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham will lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel in solidarity with the Jewish state. The Albanese government is terrified of being seen as too pro-Jewish or pro-Israel. No head of government solidarity visit from it. Instead, in response to Birmingham, the anonymous Tim Watts, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, will call in on Israel as part of a Middle East Cook’s tour. Foreign Minister Penny Wong will visit Israel early next year as part of a wider Middle East tour. By then it’s certainly not a visit of solidarity but an old-fashioned Australian pretence of participating in Middle East diplomacy.

Jews are the most intensely targeted people in the world for terrorism and irrational hatred. It’s true there have been a small number of violent attacks on Muslims in the US by people it would be fair to call far-right terrorists. Such attacks are horrific and deserve absolute condemnation. Their number, thankfully, is very small.

The vast majority of Muslims who die in terrorism are killed by fellow Muslims. Hamas killed Israeli and foreign Muslims on October 7.

A pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney in October. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Monique Harmer
Pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney in October. CA NewsWire / Monique Harmer

The plague of anti-Semitism is a crime against Jewish people. It is the world’s oldest racial hatred. There are distinct anti-Semitic traditions in the West, but after the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, all of the old Western traditions of anti-Semitism have been repudiated.

The West has a new tradition of anti-Semitism in the West, on the far left, especially at universities.

This week, in US congressional testimony, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all said anti-Semitism was a serious and growing problem at their institutions.

That is astonishing, and grotesquely illiberal, for 2023.

But it’s hooked up with an entirely different anti-Semitism too. For by far the most important dynamic of anti-Semitism, globally and within the West itself, is the age-old Arab and North African anti-Semitism.

Naturally, a concern for the suffering of innocent people in Gaza is not a sign of anti-Semitism. Every human being feels compassion for the people of Gaza. The moral responsibility for their suffering lies 100 per cent with Hamas.

Anti-Semitism has broadened and is now a deep, pervasive ideological, cultural and fanatical strain in contemporary Western life. Proceeding from the left’s identity politics ideology, which damns the entire Western project as intrinsically unjust, sexist, economically exploitative, colonialist, racist, hetero-normative, the left has, logically enough, arrived at a hatred of Jews, for the Jewish tradition is so central to the West. And because the left sees all Muslims as victims, it has allied with Islamic anti-Semitism.

But the cross-pollination of Islamic and Western anti-Semitism goes back a long way. It reached a height in the deep Nazi collaboration with both the Muslim Brotherhood and the mufti of Jerusalem. Arab anti-Semitism long predates either Nazis or the Muslim Brotherhood.

The earliest military victories of Muslims involved conquering and sometimes slaughtering Jewish communities. Christians and Jews were often allowed to live reasonably safely in Muslim kingdoms, but only as acknowledged inferiors, dhimmis. Frequently that status was abrogated.

Bernard Lewis, the legendary scholar of Islam, has written that “the golden age of equal rights (under Islam) was a myth”. In the ninth century Baghdad Jews were required to wear a yellow badge, echoed by the Nazis a millennium later. This happened in many Arab centres.

It’s important to note many Christian kingdoms practised similar or worse persecution of Jews. The facts about Arab history simply establish the obvious that a long and pervasive anti-Semitism flourished in Arab and North African culture. There are indeed some explicitly anti-Jewish pas­sages in the Koran.

The contrast with Christianity is that all Christian denominations comprehensively repudiated their past anti-Semitism, which in any event was never uncontested. There has not been a similar Arabic repudiation of anti-Semitism. Some Arab states are liberalising a little, but it’s easy to over-estimate this.

Arab anti-Semitism also obviously long predates the modern state of Israel.

From the mid-1930s the Nazis strongly backed Arab anti-Semitism. They co-operated especially with Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into Hitler’s SS.

Sayyid Qutb, the leading thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood, was notable for his hatred of the West. However, he also hated Jews, describing them as “the bitterest enemies of Islam” and urging Muslims: “Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”

Sayyid Qutb.
Sayyid Qutb.

The Nazis provided money for the Muslim Brotherhood and translated some Islamist publications into German. The Nazis wanted to eradicate European Jews and also the Jews of the Middle East. For six years, the Nazis broadcast anti-Semitic material, in Arabic, on radio. In the 1930s and ’40s, radio was the one true mass medium.

The first most important rejection of the two-state solution, a Jewish Israel next to an independent Palestine, came when all of Israel’s neighbours and the local Palestinians refused to accept the UN partition of the territory and launched an all-out war against Israel.

Today there are probably 40 million Muslims in Western Europe and North America, though so much population movement is irregular and undocumented that it’s impossible to establish reliable figures. They are having an enormous political and cultural impact. They also have introduced into those nations a savage new burst of anti-Semitism. It is neither racist nor discriminatory to look at the beliefs and behaviours of potential and actual immigrant populations and question problematic features for a liberal democratic society.

It goes without saying, but must be said, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia are law-abiding, productive citizens. A small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.

In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group.

Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.

In 2015 German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted a million Muslim irregular immigrants to Germany. By 2017 she pronounced that German multiculturalism had “utterly failed”. By 2018 she said “refugees or people of Arabic background” had brought a new wave of anti-Semitism to Germany.

In 2020, the libertarian Cato Institute published a long essay, Freedom in the Muslim World, by Mustafa Akyol. This was a systematic comparison of human freedom across a range of dimensions among Muslim societies and against international averages.

Akyol found that Muslim societies were substantially less free than the global average, and much less free than Western Europe or North America. Of course, there was great variety among Muslim nations and some were relatively free. The least free of all were the Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa.

He also found, paradoxically, in numerous Muslim nations increasing democracy led to decreasing personal liberties. In other words, the curtailing of human freedom was often a popular move by Muslim governments.

I’ve spent some time in the past few years in Poland, Hungary and Greece. In Poland and Hungary I interviewed Jewish leaders who told me these were the safest countries for Jews in Europe. In every case the government and society had turned against traditional anti-Semitism. But, most important, there were very few Muslims, so little active, threatening anti-Semitism.

Greece does receive a lot of asylum-seekers but doesn’t give them much welfare and they quickly move on. In Thessaloniki in northern Greece recently I saw a hotel hosting a big international delegation and there was the Israeli flag flying proudly out the front with no sign, in the days I was there, of demonstrations or disturbance.

Australia, on the other hand, is subject to an Israeli travel warning; it’s not safe for identifiable Jews or Israelis.

Nobody wants a religiously or ethnically discriminatory immigration program. But countries and cultures with deep traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment pose a big challenge if they are a major source of immigration.

Consider three books.

The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, establishes an extraordinary degree of hostility towards France itself by its Muslims. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell establishes how attitudes have in some manner grown more radical through succeeding generations among Europe’s Muslims. He also establishes that European voters never wanted this huge influx. The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray shows Europe being eaten up by hostile attitudes among its citizens, both some immig­rants and the left establishment at universities, with no one to defend Europe’s traditional beliefs.

As we watched anti-Semitic demonstrations in London recently, an English colleague remarked: “Imagine what it’ll be like in 20 years, when the Muslim population is twice as big as now.”

In France, where Muslims may be nearly 10 per cent of the population, they are younger and have a higher birthrate than the host population. They could be 40 per cent of France by 2060.

Islam holds that its mission is to establish a political order in accordance with its teachings. Once the Islamic minority becomes big enough, that becomes a problem.

To settle immigrants successfully, a society should be self-confident, secure in its history, civic identity and ethical culture. Sound like the West at the moment? There are now types of self-loathing in our societies almost beyond parody. The Canadian Human Rights Commission recently argued that having public holidays for Christmas and Easter is discriminatory because other religions’ holiest days don’t have public holidays.

There’s plenty of equivalent nuttiness in Australia. When we hate our own traditions that much, how can we imagine migrants with contrary ideas will fall in love with our nation?

Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication.