RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”Oh, is that rich or what! For two years Jew haters have filled the CBD’s weekend streets, their genocidal chants attracting nothing from the Premier’s police force but indulgence. As for the rest of the city, it has yawned, perhaps tut-tutted, and gone about its normal business. First they came for the Jews, as the saying goes.

It wasn’t that way when anti-lockdown protesters gathered during the Covid hysteria and then-premier Daniel Andrews unleashed VicPol’s body-armoured battalions on his critics. To demand the right to work, to socialise, to leave one’s home — these brought a two-year blitz of rubber bullets and denunciations day and night on Spring Street. Those who protested were beaten, pepper-sprayed, arrested, incarcerated, fined and encouraged to silence by the simple expedient of a jackboot to the mouth.

So don’t kid yourselves, Jews of Melbourne. Premier Allan could have done much to tamp down the hatred over these past two disgraceful years. It’s not as if VicPol’s riot squad threw away their weapons and surrendered the body armour. It’s just that there are electorates brimming with new arrivals where despising Jews is natural as breathing, and no politician, least of all this Premier, is going to ruffle hijabs with stern warnings and harder actions to can that contempt. Multiculturalism, ain’t it just great!

But the Premier and her front-bench hacks have done nothing more than flap their gums. In Victoria’s political ecology keeping onside the homegrown antiSemites of Labor’s hard left is no less important than ignoring diversity’s imported hatreds

It’s not my privilege to be a Jew, but were that the case I’d be thinking ‘what next?’ After two synagogue arsons and what now seems open season on Jews and Jewish businesses, are we to see, say, a car ploughing through worshippers on a temple’s front steps? Will the next firebomb attack be a lethal one? Can the wearing of a yarmulke ever again be a simple statement of faith, rather than an invitation to be bashed by random strangers? 

Sad to even think it, but given the noxious uselessness of the Allan government and what little can be expected of Victoria Police, I’d also be thinking of that Michigan church, the Second Amendment, and the obligation when politicians and authorities betray you and yours of assuming responsibility for your own defence.

Yes, in Melbourne it has come to that.