https://quadrant.org.au/features/qed/hating-and-hounding-jews-on-campus/
‘I made a workplace complaint to the police about students [who performed Nazi salutes], and then suddenly, my contract wasn’t renewed.’ — Jewish academic in Senate committee submission
At the weekend I began reading the submissions to the Senate committee on a Bill for a judicial inquiry into anti-Semitism at universities. I had no idea how intense the Jew-hatred is, how it’s tolerated, and even fostered by administrators.
My mother when a young Perth journalist, honeymooned to Holland and Germany in 1938. She wrote,
“At Aachen we had our first contact with Nazis, swastikas crawling like black spiders on the uniforms of the border guards. In Berlin we tried to read Dr Goebbel’s noticeboards with their hideous anti-Jewish cartoons. ‘Juden verboten’ signs on the public toilets were clear enough. English-speaking Germans would sometimes make a cautious approach, begging us to tell the outside world how their relatives had disappeared in concentration camps…”[1]
The same elements — swastikas, Nazi-style cartoons, “Jews unwanted!” signs — can be found at Australian universities today. In place of concentration camps and gas chambers, there are omnipresent chants of “from the river to sea” for exterminating Israel and its citizens.
Jewish students and staff are “disappearing” from our universities because of hostility and anti-Semitism in tutorials, classes and social life. Jewish Liberal MHR Julian Leeser says,
“Jewish tradition values education as one of the highest virtues. Jews are taught to have arguments for the sake of heaven – to arrive at truth through debate and discussion. This is the essence of a university. There is a particular tragedy about campus antisemitism which seeks to exclude Jews from the intellectual life of the nation. What happens on campus today sets the tone for the Australia of tomorrow…
It’s tempting to think of antisemitism as the domain of the uneducated. But history tells us that antisemitism also lives in the minds of society’s best educated. More than half of the people who attended the Wannsee Conference that developed the ‘final solution’ were either doctors or had PhDs.
From last August 5 to September 6, the federal government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, organised interviews of 65 Jewish students and academics nationally. To protect subjects from reprisals, she was unable to publicise the most harrowing and confronting testimonies. What she does spell out is so traumatic I have to wonder what she had to omit. One para really hit home:
Several students and staff who were interviewed reported seeking medical assistance and being prescribed anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication to manage their response to the rise in antisemitism in their university environment. Approximately half of those interviewed were visibly teary during their interview…A culture that excludes one group, intimidates, traumatises and makes them feel unsafe is contrary to the mission of universities and contrary to the best interests of the nation.”
