My Speech to the Mayors' Summit on Antisemitism
My take on the modern recrudescence of the oldest hatred
By Ted Lapkin
Thank you very much.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength
These slogans from Orwell’s 1984 convey the perversion of truth at the heart of his dystopian novel.
Today, we’re living through a similar corruption of morality;
Not in fiction, but in fact.
A rising tide of depravity is sweeping through Australia, transmutating evil into pseudo-good through the toxic political alchemy of woke.
Week upon week, our streets throng with mobs baying for violence against the Jewish state and Jewish people.
Month upon month, our major institutions succumb to the agitprop thuggery of keffiyeh-clad hooligans.
We watch as leaders of politics and culture voice flagrant Jew hatred without embarrassment.
We hear demands to liquidate the world’s largest Jewish community bellowed through megaphones in our public squares.
What happened when screams of “gas the Jews” sounded at the Opera House as Hamas marauders still pillaged southern Israel?
New South Wales Police reported: ‘nutin’ to see here, folks.’
Or when Jewish students were harassed by leftist goon squads at Sydney University?
Vice Chancellor Mark Scott mumbled mealy-mouthed excuses on his way to collect a $150,000 pay bump.
Over the past eight decades, the catastrophe of the Shoah rendered overt Jew-hatred unwelcome in polite society.
But since October 7, it’s become painfully clear that this holiday from Jewish history is over, as pre-1945 norms resurge with a vengeance.
Orwell also wrote:
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
Our enemies (let’s be honest here) are waging a political war against who we were – who we are – and who we will be as Jews.
So, when entering the fray, here are a few tidbits of tactical advice.
Never allow the other side to frame terms of debate.
Never respond to their allegations point-by-point, because that means you’re reacting to their agenda rather than making them react to yours.
Instead, seize the initiative by going after the skewed premise of their arguments.
Case in point – Gaza war casualties.
Avoid tit-for-tat exchanges over civilian–to–combatant ratios.
We’ve seen how this line of debate leads into a no-win minefield on programs like Piers Morgan.
Instead, start by conceding the obvious:
Yes, civilians are suffering in Gaza, and
Yes, the deaths of innocents are a tragedy.
But then point out that inadvertent non-combatant casualties are an unavoidable facet of modern war.
A war that began when Hamas conducted a cross-border orgy of gang rape, mass murder and kidnapping on October 7.
Then reframe the issue by challenging the moral absurdity of equating casualties with righteousness.
During the Second World War, 450,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing, versus only 70,000 Britons who died from Nazi air attacks.
Did this higher death toll make the Third Reich more virtuous?
‘An outrageous suggestion!’ the Greens will snarl … before turning around to apply that same warped calculus to Israel.
We must pierce the veil of sophistry that pollutes every word of our enemies’ arguments.
We must stress how their catchphrases: ‘all Zionists are terrorists’ or ‘from the river to the sea’ are shorthand for the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of its Jews.
The IDF could be fighting with Nerf guns and they’d scream about the inhumanity of foam rubber darts.
The ugly truth that lurks beneath our enemies’ high-sounding rhetoric is that they’ll only be satisfied by the extinction of the Jewish state.
THIS is the core issue that’s buried beneath the political hurly burly surrounding the daily news cycle.
Don’t allow this to happen.
Be a broken record.
Always return to the truth of our enemies’ exterminationist agenda.
Because by so doing, we suck the moral oxygen out of their arguments.
None of this is new.
In February 1947, British Foreign Minister Earnst Bevin rose in the House of Commons and declared:
His Majesty's Government is faced with an irreconcilable conflict … For the Jews, the essential point is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point is to resist the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.
Bevin spoke words a year before Arab armies mounted an invasion to snuff out the newly declared Jewish state.
A year before the exodus of 700,000 Arabs from an active war zone and the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from their homes throughout the Muslim Middle East.
In February 1947, there was no ‘occupation’ because there was no Israel.
Rejectionism by the Arabs then, and their cheerleaders now, marks a recalcitrant refusal to recognize the natural right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland.
I say natural right because the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel.
The words of Jewish war leader Simon Maccabee are instructive in this regard.
In the year 168 BCE, Seleucid King Antiochus IV issued an ultimatum to the Jews of Judea and Jerusalem.
Submit or die.
The First Book of Maccabees recounts Simon’s reply:
The land over which we’ve regained sovereignty was the property of our fathers, and no foreigner has claim to its ownership. Our enemies robbed us of our patrimony, but now that Hashem has granted us success, we’ve reclaimed the inheritance of our forefathers.
This assertion of Jewish national self-determination was written two hundred years before the advent of Christianity.
Eight hundred years before the Arab armies of Caliph Umar conquered the Land of Israel in the 7th century.
Our entire Jewish civilisation revolves around Jerusalem, where the Temple was built, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again.
Over two millennia, we’ve recitedשנה הבאה בירושלים – ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ – each Passover eve.
And 77 years ago, the Jewish people arose from literal ashes to rebuild a thriving nation-state that combines the values of Judaism and democracy.
The triumph of Zionism over British imperialism and genocidal Arab malice should be seen as the ultimate de-colonialist success story.
Yet, our enemies peddle the falsehood that Judaism and Zionism are different.
They spew a bilious mythology the Jews are separate and apart from the Jewish state.
All with the transparent aim of evading the taint of antisemitism while pursuing their Israel-phobic agenda.
To this end, they rely on a miniscule smattering of anti-Zionist Jewish voices as a polemical fig-leaf to validate their bigotry.
Never mind that loudest of those voices – the Jewish Council of Australia – squeaks from the far-left fringe of our national politics.
And never mind a Monash University survey, conducted three months before October 7, that found 90% of Australian Jews feeling a strong affection for, and connection to, the State of Israel.
We’ve seen this before.
In the 13th century it was Nicholas Dunin, a Jewish convert to Christianity who goaded Pope Gregory IX to burn the Talmud.
Today it’s a radical clique of Jewish outcasts who make common cause with those who seek our ruination.
These people take ħutzpah to a whole new level.
Would Mehreen Faruqi have the gall to define for African-Americans whether the Ku Klux Klan is or isn’t racist?
Would Adam Bandt have the effrontery to define who does or doesn’t qualify as a First Nations Australian?
Of course not.
So where do these warriors of woke find the audacity to dictate for us what is Judaism and anti-Jewish bigotry?
Why do they make demands of the Jews they wouldn’t dream of applying to any other minority group?
We all know the answer to that question.
Adapting the brilliant Douglas Murray’s comments from last year’s Munk Debate on anti-Zionism:
If you marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge while remaining silent about the slaughter of Druze in Syria, you’re an antisemite.
If you see the keffiyeh as a trendy status symbol rather than a mark of medieval barbarism, you’re not only an antisemite, but a fool.
In his novel Life and Fate about the battle of Stalingrad, Vassily Grossman wrote:
Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end; it’s a measure of contradictions yet to be resolved. It’s a mirror to the failings of individuals, social structures, and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.
Jew-hatred from the far-right is low hanging fruit because everyone loves to hate Nazis.
But antisemitism from the far-left is much more insidious because it flows from positions of institutional power.
Progressive anti-Zionism is pseudo-intellectual snake oil pushed by flimflam artists who turn savagery into decency and vice versa.
Now, in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m a bit of an Orwell fan.
So I’ll end with a quote from his 1942 essay Pacifism and the War:
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other.
This binary logic that Orwell applied to the war against Nazi genocidaires, also holds true to Israel’s war against Hamas genocidaires.
And by extension, this same zero-sum choice confronts us all – Jew and non-Jew alike.
Either we defend the values of our civilization – individual rights, equality for women, freedom of speech and conscience and respect for political dissent;
Or we capitulate to the totalitarian barbarism promoted by this strange bedfellows alliance of hard-left Marxists and hard-right jihadis.
I know where I stand.
I hope you do as well.
Am Yisrael Ħai.
Thank you.