Vice-Chancellors Wrapped in Shame and Keffiyehs

Do the vice-chancellors of our universities really think they are going to get away with their blatant sanctioning of the current, vile anti-Semitic protests at our universities? Perhaps they feel comfortable aligning themselves with the same ugly forces that stampeded towards the Sydney Opera House to shut down the statement of support for Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 pogrom? And perhaps they see themselves ‘on the right side of history’ in condoning this unprecedented outburst of Jew hatred on their campuses – a stain on our nation’s honour that will live in infamy? Do they think that history will absolve them?

Certainly, they already have a lot to answer for. Under their watch, as noted in an earlier article, these are Hitler’s grandchildren and they have made our universities Australia’s Ground Zero in the fight for the future of Western Civilization. While this coterie of self-satisfied administrators on million-dollar salaries strut and preen and insist they strictly observe the principles of free speech and have zero tolerance for racist abuse and harassment, their effective inaction in the face of unprecedented anti-Semitism clearly states the opposite.

The litany of condoned abuses grows daily: not only do the vice-chancellors refuse to condemn Islamist terrorist sloganeering, they engage in mealy-mouthed circumlocutions to justify their cowardice as they open their campuses to protests by militant Islamist groups, have allowed a multitude of young anti-Semites to occupy protest encampments (complete with security protection and the administrations’ imprimatur), intimidate and traumatize Jewish students, disrupt classes, ‘cancel’ visiting Israeli academics, indoctrinate little children in antisemitic hate, teach them anti-Israeli and anti-Australian slogans, conduct them in pro-Hamas chants, cover the walls with hateful posters, violently harass any opposition, and snuggle up in their tents while ordering pizzas and stir-fry through Uber Eats, boast about how they’re copying overseas’ protests, and congratulating each other on social  media. And all the while they call for a global ’intifada’ against the Western world and demand the destruction of Israel and the eradication of the Jewish people.

It seems the vice-chancellors (few if any of whom were born prior to 1960) have convinced themselves that they are living through a re-run of the Sixties protests against the Vietnam War and that their heroic inaction and connivance will place them on the ‘right side of history’, just as they imagine the Sixties protesters were proved to be. (And perhaps they also worry about their luxurious offices being occupied and defiled by protesters or being barricaded in the Council chambers and denied ‘toilet privileges’ after a long lunch, to their great discomfort and humiliation, as happened to their predecessors half-a-century ago.)

This historical analogy is completely fatuous of course, as there is no parallel between the current antisemitic, pro-Hamas, pro-Islamist protests and these anti-war protests. To begin with, Australia is not at war with either of the parties of the Israel-Gaza conflict, we are not sending troops into combat there, we are not conscripting 20-year young men into any war, we are not jailing conscientious objectors, we are not witnessing a significant upsurge of popular anti-war opposition, and we don’t have 70,000+ people marching in our city streets. What we have, in fact, is merely attention-seeking moral posturing by a small minority of pampered students, dressing up as downtrodden Palestinians, while being fortunate enough to have places at our elite universities, where they can look forward to acquiring qualifications that will set them up for life in lucrative professions that perhaps daddy will arrange for them.

The careful connivance of our vice-chancellors in this opportunistic scandal is backed up by the abysmal performance of the federal minister for education who continues to refuse to confront resolutely an unprecedented outbreak of ongoing militant Jew-hatred that will inscribe a scar onto our society that will last for decades. Representing an electorate with some 60,000 Muslims, he has done little more than make anodyne statements condemning Islamophobia and … oh, yes, anti-Semitism too, as if they are equally prevalent or as equally dangerous. He has also repeated the classic Islamist tactic that words don’t really mean what they most obviously do in fact mean. In this case he insists that the endless demands that Palestine will be free  “from the river to the sea” aren’t calls for the annihilation of Israel, despite universal recognition that the phrase has always had that meaning and must always mean it when chanted by anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators. After all, why else would they chant it?!  (This is, of course, the same sort of diversionary ploy used when demands for ‘jihad’ were becoming ubiquitous in the years after 9/11 and the Bali attacks, and Islamist apologists rushed forward to insist that ‘jihad’ refers to a personal spiritual struggle, when in fact, its actual meaning in the present context of global militancy is ‘holy war’.)

Regrettably, our federal minister for education also feels comfortable revealing his ignorance and/or the biased nature of the advice he receives, by also insisting that ‘intifada’ doesn’t in fact mean an Arab or Palestinian rebellion or uprising when it manifestly does mean exactly that. Indeed, it has certainly done so since the early 1950s as the Muslim world has periodically threatened to tear itself apart in over two dozen major insurrections, revolts, massacres, and civil wars involving millions of people in various places including Iraq, Sudan, Bahrain, the Spanish Sahara, Lebanon, Egypt, Western Sahara, Tunisia, and Yemen.

And of course there have been the decades of ultra-violence and oppression by the Taliban, and the greatly vaunted insurrectionary first and second Arab Springs, which promised so much and delivered so little. More than anything else over the past six decades, this unrelenting political violence and social upheaval has prevented the Muslim world from taking its proper place within the community of peaceful and economically prosperous nations. However, rather than confront this, their leaders seek to divert attention from their failure by engaging in a never-ending intifada against Israel and the ‘Great Satan’ beyond – the United States and allies such as Australia, an intifada that is being romanticized on our campuses.

But most obviously in the present context, the repeated demands for an ‘intifada’ refer to the first (1987-93) and second (2000-5) Intifadas. These were spearheaded by various notorious militant and terrorist groups including the PLO, PFLP, DFLP,  Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian Communist Party, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, etc., and they saw thousands killed and injured, and immense economic, property and infrastructure damage and destruction.

Taken together, these were all major events that impacted greatly on the lives of tens of millions of people and on the global economy and political security. In other words, it’s inconceivable that education minister Jason Clare didn’t know about them or that he could really have believed demands for an ‘intifada’ weren’t demands for yet more deadly and destructive insurrections. So, is Clare an imbecile, or is he catering in a very clumsy and obvious way to his primary electoral constituency? Is he happy to engage in such deceit, confident that the Australian people are so ignorant that they won’t notice the absurdity of his claims? And is he confident that the mainstream media (e.g., the ABC, Nine, Seven, the SMH, the Age, the Guardian, etc.) and social media will sugar-coat his utterances and successfully mislead and divert public attention, perhaps by focusing on the promised ‘relief’ from HECS indebtedness that arranges for the taxes of hardworking tradespeople and others who don’t have university qualifications to pay off the debts of those who do?

Finally, there is another dimension to these calls for an intifada of which both the minister and the vice-chancellors are apparently unaware. This is the call to ‘globalize the Intifada’ by making the Israel-Gaza conflict the flashpoint (in true Trotskyite fashion) for the mobilisation of a global revolutionary movement, led by university students and their external handlers. The primary targets for subversion and insurrection (in accordance with current radical analyses) are ‘settler-colonialist’ societies like the US, Australia, and Israel. A shadowy organisation called ‘global Intifada’ claims to have been around since 2012, and the slogan conveniently surfaced immediately after the October 7 outrage, as pro-Hamas protestors began chanting it as they attempted to force their way into a Cooper Union College library building in New York to attack some Jewish students who had sought refuge there. This was followed up by internet posts headed ‘Globalize the Intifada’ that provided a map of selected Israeli and American companies and transit hubs for protests. In London, in December, the public display of banners proclaiming the slogan led to the arrest of nine activists under the Public Order Act. Meanwhile, in Melbourne the local global intifadinistas have their own radio program on Community Radio 3CR:

Global Intifada brings you current affairs through revolutionary & protest music from around the world – because Music Is Our Bomb.

Predictably, the hosts are pictured holding a Molotov Cocktail with their faces hidden behind  keffiyehs! As Karl Marx observed about Napoleon III, ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce!’ But that doesn’t make such activity any less dangerous or social destructive.

In their inaction and connivance in these protests and related activities our vice-chancellors and our education minister risk following in the footsteps of the Joseph Goebbels as he oversaw the German Student Union spearheading the infamous 1933 campaign of book-burning of “gutter Jewish literati [and] intellectual filth”. No doubt Goebbels also felt he was on the ‘right side of history’ as he condoned the destruction of innumerable classics of Western Civilisation. Perhaps our vice-chancellors are confident that they will come out of this better than did Goebbels (who took cyanide with wife Magda after poisoning their six children upon the Nazi defeat), but this will be so only if these new forces of darkness are successful in their campaign of hate and manage to direct the future of our country down the darkest of paths, paths that far more resolute generations of Australians fought and died to avoid. In all likelihood, they will have to answer to history, and it won’t be pretty.