RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was bad enough when two Australian nurses were caught on camera saying they wouldn’t treat Israeli patients and instead would ‘kill them’. But now 50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defence. If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many ‘Muslim leaders’ are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.

This sordid story started a week ago with the release of a video showing two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney engaging in the most abhorrent Israelophobic chatter. They were talking with an Israeli TikToker, Max Veifer, after encountering him on a video chat site. He told them he was Israeli. One of the nurses drew his fingers across his throat to suggest Veifer deserved to die. He said he sends Israelis to Jahannam – the Islamic version of hell. The other nurse said she would never treat an Israeli. ‘I won’t treat them, I will kill them.’

The clip went viral and the nurses were suspended. Australian PM Anthony Albanese slammed their ‘anti-Semitic comments’. There was horror across Oz that these nurses seemed to have sacrificed the core moral principle of medicine – ‘First do no harm’ – at the altar of their burning hatred for the Jewish State. Yet there’s a section of Aussie society that seems pretty blasé about the whole thing: self-appointed Muslim leaders.

A coalition of prominent Muslim groups has written an open letter criticising the ‘selective outrage’ over the nurses’ behaviour. It says the nurses were just being ‘emotional and hyperbolic’. Nice try. We all get ‘emotional’ at times but we don’t go around fantasising about the deaths of people from the world’s only Jewish nation. Emotion is no excuse for violent-minded loathing for a whole national group.

The letter says the nurses were raging against Israel, not Jews. They were expressing ‘frustration and anger’ over Israel’s ‘violent and inhumane policies’. Apparently, the ‘hypocrites’ who have called the nurses out – that would be most of Oz – are seeking to ‘weaponise accusations of anti-Semitism to silence dissent [on Israel]’. This, the letter concludes, is ‘dishonest’ and ‘dangerous’.

The only people being dangerous here are these snivelling excuse-makers for what was clearly an act of unhinged Israelophobia. Since when did anger over foreign wars justify calling for the death of citizens from the nations involved? I hated the Iraq War but I didn’t go around saying American people should have their throats slit. I oppose Rwanda’s meddling in the Democratic Republic of Congo but I don’t view Rwandans as some kind of subspecies who should be dispatched to the everlasting fires of hell.

‘We’re just criticising Israel’ has become the back-covering cry of every Israelophobe who must know, in the recesses of whatever soul they have left, that they are doing something far worse. People will march in the streets with placards showing the Star of David mangled with the Nazi swastika, or go online and call Israel a uniquely murderous nation that loves spilling the blood of children, and then squeal: ‘We’re just criticising Israel!’ The rest of us can see what’s really happening. We can see that a positively medieval vision of the Jews as a crafty and bloodlusting people is being snuck back into public life under the banner of ‘anti-Zionism’.

Now it seems even nurses telling an Israeli that his ‘time will come’ can be chalked up to ‘anger’ over Israel’s policies. How long before physical attacks on Israelis will be excused as ‘criticism of Israel’? Actually, we’ve seen that already, in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom, when some in the West called the slaughter ‘resistance’. Raping and killing Israeli women – it’s just ‘criticism of Israel’.

The threatening comments made by those Aussie nurses, and the justification of them by ‘Muslim leaders’, confirms how out of control the dehumanisation of Israel has become. What we have on our streets, on our campuses and in our press is not ‘criticism of Israel’ – it’s the feverish singling out of Israel as the most murderous and morally corrupt nation on Earth. It’s the damning of Israel as Nazi-esque. As a child-killing machine. As a people in the grip of ‘genocidal mania’. As a country so unholy, so poisonous, that every virtuous Westerner must forcefield his life from its wares and its ideas by signing up to BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).

The message we receive over and over is that Israel is the demon of world affairs, a moral pox on the Earth. Even to read its writers or eat its fruits is to pollute one’s body with its toxins. Hence, the activist dream of erasing it: save humanity, destroy the Jewish State. It is inevitable that such singular vilification of a state will lead to suspicion and even contempt for that state’s inhabitants. When you make the Jewish nation into the epitome of human debasement, and make hatred for the Jewish nation into the central credo of polite society, you actively incite bigotry. You can’t spread the calumny that Israel is a barbarous aberration among the family of nations and then reach for the smelling salts when someone draws his fingers across his throat to show how much he hates that horrible country.

Anti-Israel activism belongs less to the realm of political critique than to the realm of pre-modern hysteria, with ‘the Jewish State’ now playing the role of ‘the Jews’ as the great, delirious menace to mankind. Those nurses are not outliers. They were giving voice to a mania that is mainstream. Wishing death on Israelis is the logical conclusion to wishing death on Israel. And yet when Jews push back against this frothing demonisation of their homeland, they’re accused of ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’, as that letter says. Jews were accused of ‘weaponising’ the Holocaust to further their global power. They were accused of ‘weaponising’ 7 October to justify conquering Gaza. Now they’re accused of ‘weaponising’ acts of anti-Jewish hatred to fortify their victim status. These accusations of ‘weaponisation’ depict the Jews as such a soulless, mercenary people that they’ll even sell their own suffering for political gain.

Australia having nurses who passionately hate Israelis is deeply worrying. Australia having ‘Muslim groups’ that are willing to defend those nurses is even more so. It exposes the depth of the moral rot under the ideology of multiculturalism. Israelophobia is an old hatred in new garb. It is the social malady that springs from our rejection of civilisational values. Tackling it is the great task of our time.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy