On the home front (Jillian Segal, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and now a million-dollar Envoy calls it the ‘local war’), there were bizarre ant-Semitism hoaxes and a neo-Nazi rally enabled by the state government, despite denials from the Premier.
That one of the ‘neo-Nazis’ bore a Jewish tattoo only added to the absurdity. (The tattoo is rooted in Jewish tradition; a phrase which often appears in stories connected to King Solomon.) All that was missing was a ring through our noses for us to be led up the garden path.
It’s an imbroglio that inevitably stirred the routine ritual of arguing what an Australian is. There is a long history of racialised immigration politics, from the Howard/Abbott/Morrison era to today’s Opposition rhetoric. (Who remembers when Abbott demanded Muslim leaders attend him to claim responsibility for ‘Islamist extremism’ and no leaders turned up?)
It’s always been a rite of passage for migrants to prove assimilation into the dominant Anglo culture. European migrants and later Asians and those from the Middle East were tasked with having to prove themselves ‘Aussie.’
Some cohorts, like Muslims, are always outsiders because their religion was never going to allow the conformity that whites demand. Social cohesion cannot exist while some are kept outside society; they will always be ‘othered.’
We’re being engineered by some very cynical manipulators, but perhaps at some stage we will recognise that ‘Australian-ness’ is a fluid thing. We are better than a slice of processed cheese on a soggy SAO and the Australian rainbow flag has 100 colours. Our pronoun is ‘us.’
To end this year, I should tie off observations I’ve been writing about here all year about Zionism. It’s been a bulging bag of fear and hatred, so let’s put a handle on it.
That the Chair of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Mark Leibler, was taken to the Human Rights Commission by Jews for anti-Semitism illuminates the complexity of the narrative.
So too Zionist extremists like the Lions of Zion, screaming racist abuse at Jews Against the Occupation on Bondi Beach.
When the NSN held a banner, “Abolish the Jewish Lobby,” I immediately thought of Jewish lobbies like the Jewish Council of Australia, Jewish Voices for Peace, Jews Against the Occupation, not the Zionists, ECAJ, ZFA and AIJAC.
Jewish academics have grappled with this racial‑supremacist state ideology piggybacking on Judaism. Almost 20% of NSW Jews came from South Africa, and many of them brought with them an apartheid project that hollowed out and instrumentalised religious and ethical tradition.
Zionists have replaced religion with politics, replaced God with Israel, and replaced Judaism with white supremacy, even eugenics, if you consider the efforts to wipe out a generation of Palestinians by murdering the children.
The awful truth may be that the nightmare for the people of Gaza will not end until the last child has drawn his/her final breath.
The Zionist liberation movement became a project for domination. The children of Moses became the Pharaoh.
Jews became “the Zionist cult that used to be Jewish” for many.”
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