Peter and I are Baby Boomers, born in that particularly fecund period just after World War II. This means, by inference, that World War II was an important part of our family history. Peter’s father ended up in a German POW camp after being captured at Tobruk. My parents and their five small children lived in occupied Amsterdam for the entire war.
As I grew up, I became increasingly interested in Nazism and the Holocaust, particularly how something like that had been able to happen in a rich, civilized country like Germany. I went to university and studied history.
If you want to know how something like Nazism can happen in a civilized country, look around you. Right now.
Social media has made it so much easier to indoctrinate people. Make a nice meme, or a good chant, show pictures of crying children in bombed-out buildings. Appeal to the masses and don’t worry about facts.
The events of 7th October when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and raped, tortured, and murdered civilians have already been assigned (by some) to the rubbish bin of disinformation, despite the fact their ‘exploits’ were filmed by body cameras. Apparently, it was all Israel’s fault. Chants of ‘gas the Jews’ rang in Australian streets as pro-Palestinian mobs celebrated these vile acts. Imams in mosques praised Hamas and urged their followers to Jihad. A pro-Palestinian march took place in the heart of Melbourne’s Jewish community, next to a synagogue, on their sabbath. Kids at Jewish schools are too scared to wear their school uniforms for fear of discrimination.
On the other hand, much of the media was prepared to accept Hamas claims that Israel had deliberately bombed a Gaza hospital. Even when the Israelis provided proof that it was an errant missile fired by a pro Hamas group, too often corrections were tardy.
Josef Goebbels couldn’t have orchestrated it better. It’s a playbook from 1930s Germany.
But most of those marching in the streets know nothing about that. Especially the idiot school children drafted for the cause. The war might as well have been in a different galaxy, and the Holocaust – what was that?
“From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.” It sounds good and it rhymes. But what it means is destroying the state of Israel. Hamas wants to destroy not just Israel, but all Jews, everywhere. Is that really what these pro-Palestinian Western teenagers want to see? Maybe they should be shown the images collected from the terrorists’ body cameras after the October attacks, to see what they’re really supporting.
Yet few of our ‘leaders’ have the guts to call out this behaviour. The police action has been inadequate. Anti-semitism is alive and well – an absurd hatred for people who worship the same Abrahamic God you’ll find in the bible and the koran, but in a slightly different way.
I despair.
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