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roger hawcroft's avatar

"There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. There is an anti-Palestinian crisis in Australia. An anti-Arab crisis in Australia. A pro-genocide crisis in Australia." - Precisely.

... and to anyone who uses the intelligence they have, it ought to be obvious.

As for the cowardly hypocritical rhetoric of politicians and others crying out against hate speech against Jews ... when it comes to Israel's genocidal slaughter of 45,000+ Palestinians known killed and another 15,000 missing and presumed killed, 70% of them women and children, I've been listening acutely and all I hear is silence - 60,000 dead, many many more maimed and injured, their homes, businesses, schools, hospitals and all infrastructure razed to the ground is evidently not as newsworthy as some graffiti on a wall.

We need some maturity across our population, both intellectual maturity and emotional maturity and a recognition, as the majority of us sit in cosy homes with full bellies and banal television to keep our minds dulled, that it could be us suffering the outrageously brutal and cruel actions of Netanyahu and his IDF, with the implicit approval, funding and arms of the USA. The Palestinians are human beings with the same needs, hopes, dreams and universalities of emotion as have we.

I know it is cliche´ and apologise for that but isn't it long past time we considered what it must be like to walk in a Palestinian's shoes?

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Marten's avatar

Amen, Most People are virtually powerless in the face of their "programming" and also their "emotions" in one word, Humans have been domesticated by Dark Forces....

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Stephen Walker's avatar

The corporate media in US empire-controlled countries is beyond contempt—it’s complicit in an ongoing genocide. But the most frightening question is: why is it so easy to convince a majority of the population to go along with the lies and false narratives the corporate media spews?

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Literally Mussolini's avatar

As someone who was a pro-Israel American for most of my 60 years, the way the formation of Israel was taught in school made me susceptible to the media narratives.

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Stephen Walker's avatar

Interesting, because I’m only two years younger than you, but I grew up in New Zealand and we weren’t taught *anything* at school about how Israel came to exist. Maybe the teachers knew it made a mockery of the UN Charter so they avoided the topic completely.

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Literally Mussolini's avatar

Oh, it wasn't much here:

A "Jewish homeland" emerging right after the horrors of the Holocaust, with UN approval. Then jump later to a few minutes/pages on the wars in the 1960s and 70s as Israel defended itself against hordes of Arab aggressors.

---

That's all it took to soften up my young brain--and I'm sure those of most of my classmates. The media was then ready from there to really get to work on me, and them.

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Rick's avatar

And yet here you are now on a page full of antisemitic terrorist, conspiracy theorist, malinformationists. Congratulations on surviving your "education". I'm nine years older than you and survived two Catholic schools where the same shit was probably taught, but fortunately I was a poor student and failed to retain anything.

As a young adult I believed what I read in the newspaper and saw on TV because it didn't occur to me to question it, but no more. As they say in metaphysical circles, you get it when you get it.

Welcome to the other side, glad you made it.

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Megan Baker's avatar

Public schools in the U.S., at least, are appendages of the state. They are controlled entirely by politicians and their corporate sponsors, not exactly a recipe for critical thinking or real learning of anything at all. They're about as reformable as the mainstream media or Congress, but for some reason they're the left's very favorite tool of the oligarchy. Tells you how much insight they got into the real world during their own confinement...

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jamenta's avatar

"why is it so easy to convince a majority of the population to go along with the lies and false narratives"

I often think of the Milgram Experiments of 1961 at Yale University. Many people seem to automatically look up and follow authority figures without question, and believe these so-called leaders are ethically beyond reproach. It is how demagogues come to power. A kind of hidden "Daddy" complex. Dad will keep us safe.

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Carrie Deitzel's avatar

It’s easy, Stephen Walker, because too many people are intellectually lazy and won’t even take the time to ask Siri when they encounter issues that seem questionable or that they don’t understand. They believe every meme they find online and repeat them ad nauseum never even asking themselves if they’re reading a reliable information source.

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Clare McElroy's avatar

Thank you for writing this. You’ve summed up everything that’s been going through my head.

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Kamran Ahmed's avatar

Brilliant take Caitlin-thank you for sharing.

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Indu Abeysekara's avatar

Caitlin, From one fellow Australian to another I salute you for this brilliant essay exposing the pure truth as never before.

" We have a morality crisis. An apathy crisis. A crisis of our hearts, minds and souls. But what we do not have in this country, in any meaningful way, is an antisemitism crisis". Wise words spoken like a true humanitarian. You gave voice to the frustrations and inadequacy we have been feeling surveying the political scene here in Australia.

Most of us have had our suspicions about what was really happening. It was a rather clumsy crude way of distracting the public away from Israeli crimes against humanity to the hurt feelings of a once holocaust victims. In the process they only highlighted the similarities of what they endured in a bygone era with the present day wholesale destruction and the slaughter of a nation. Did they even think that their hurt feelings were in anyway comparable to the slaughter of thousands?!

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narjis of many camels's avatar

Australia and all of the West has a serious Islamophobia problem, and a serious problem with racism against Black people (want to know if someone is racist? See if they use "Black" as a noun.)

It infuriates me that I am supposed to care about manufactured hatred toward a privileged group while people are being murdered because of who they are and where they were born. Yeah, discrimination against anyone is bad, but there's a sliding scale and genocide is at the far end of it. And thoughts of genocide, even if they're not good to have, are not the same as doing genocide, and not the same as funding and supporting genocide.

Want to know what it's like to experience hate? Be a visible Muslim in the West. Or be a non-visible white Muslim in the West who bigots feel comfortable talking to without knowing who they're talking to.

I am done with these fake crises. How can anyone still listen to mainstream media or respect any Western politicians after everything they've done for a year and a half?!?

I feel like I'm going insane with the hypocrisy.

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gypsy33's avatar

Hi Narjis

IsraHell is among the top ten countries that Blacks should avoid visiting because of virulent racism against them.

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narjis of many camels's avatar

Alright there, jokester. I can take it. BLACKS RULE!!!

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gypsy33's avatar

Blacks DO rule. I’m very proud to be part Moorish.

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Indu Abeysekara's avatar

👏👏👏

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Rodolfo Marusi Guareschi's avatar

In truth, the term "Semites" refers to all peoples who speak or have spoken languages of the Semitic stock, that is, the Arabs, the Jews, the Arameans, the Assyrians, the Canaanite-Phoenicians and from a purely linguistic point of view also the Abyssinians. The term "Semitic" was introduced by August Ludwig von Schlözer in the text Von den Chäldaem in 1781 and popularized in 1787 by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn who wanted to refer to the biblical definition of Genesis X-XI, which indicated a series of nations descended from Shem, one of the sons of the patriarch Noah; the others were Ham and Japheth. In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term "anti-Semitism" in the pamphlet "The Victory of Germanism over Judaism", founding the «League of Anti-Semites» in the same year.

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Rick's avatar

Great piece Caitlin and Tim. Pretty much what I was myself thinking today.

Strange indeed that Australian police can find no trace of the perpetrators of much publicised "anti semitic attacks". Maybe they are looking in the wrong place. Maybe they should ask Mossad?

I remember well the term "Jewish stocktake" from my years in Melbourne in the 80's and 90's which referred to the strange coincidence of unprofitable Jewish businesses becoming unusually flammable. And I truly wonder what the insurance policy on the "firebombed" synagog looks like, when its value last increased, and what was the general state of the building. Was it perhaps in need of a major reno?

The (Jewish) Australian newspaper today has another propaganda piece on the front page promoting the "Antisemitic crisis", same as every weekend edition for many months now. One of the recent ones had three full pages of it across the first five pages. Nothing subtle about their intentions.

I've got no problems with Jews, in fact I live and work on a property owned by two of them. I DO have a major problem with the murderous Israelis though, and with people who want to piss on my head and tell me it's raining.

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Peter Sawchuk's avatar

Again, be very wary of what you say. You refer to the (Jewish) Australian newspaper. We must begin to use the word Zionist so as not to tar decent people of the Jewish faith with the same brush. If we do this we may be able to show the evils of Zionism without attacking innocent people of the Jewish Faith. We must be wary of fomenting hatred of people when we are dealing with an evil, political entity. Decent Jews are suffering under the banner of Zionism as much as anybody with the exception of the Palestinians.

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Indu Abeysekara's avatar

Yes, Peter Sawchuck thank you. Following from your caring thoughts, I often think of the harm that could be done to the psyche of Jewish school kids when their schools come to be guarded and fortified against a threat, even a manufactured one.

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Rick's avatar

Yeah, valid point Peter.

I never said I was good at this commenting shit, just interested. I promise to do better.

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PJ London's avatar

But how can you be a victim if nobody persecutes you?

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Patrick Powers's avatar

Constructed lie number 316. The whole edifice is constructed upon layers of lies.

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Rod Dawson's avatar

Anti-Semitism is racism. Israel is a racist state, inflicting racist apartheid on its Palestinian citizens, racist ethnic cleansing, and racist genocide against people its proudly racist leaders have described as 'inhuman animals', and who have used almost 80 years of racist propaganda to convince anyone it can that Arab lives have zero value. To support Israel is, therefore, to support racism. How bizarre, then, that this charge of racism - 'you're an anti-Semite' - carries such weight with them. Racists calling racists racists. Can only one sort be wrong?

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Ilija Prentovski's avatar

Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians... are Semites; those murdering them are not. That’s all you need to know about “antisemitism”.

As for the “millions”:

https://x.com/badazn/status/1875295518278218087

https://x.com/drfrensor/status/1754893260676309122

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Rick's avatar

Well I learnt something new today thanks to you Ilija, something that I never even questioned. Thank you.

According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, semitic means:

: of, relating to, or constituting a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic language family that includes Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic.

I do note though that it includes Hebrew, which I understand is the official language of Israel..

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Rick's avatar

Yeah, I get your point about their country of origin, and I'm surprised that there were not more from Brooklyn, where I understand many of the "settlers" are from. However I understand Hebrew to be a language, one that the Israelis revived to make the appearance of having been there for centuries. I don't see it as a nationality, and the reference refers to it as a "language family".

Anyhow, chill out Ilija. We are on the same team. We don't need to argue with each other.

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Nic's avatar

Genetic proof? https://youtu.be/-dEL2yhT7Uo

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Megan Baker's avatar

The Hebrew of Israel is an amalgam concocted to try to promote cohesion amongst the colonial settler founders of the state, who came from all over but were primarily European, as their ruling class is today. Bad Empanada (an Australian podcaster) did a good episode on it a while back. Very informative.

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Isaac Middle's avatar

We deserve better Hasbara

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The Revolution Continues's avatar

No, we don't. Nobody deserves any hasbara or propaganda to cover for a horrific genocide and the war criminals committing it.

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Hilary Jones's avatar

Similar situation here in Canada. The "alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents" stems from categorizing any criticism of the Israeli government or Zionism, demonstrations calling for a ceasefire, or displaying the Palestinian flag as "anti-Semitism". That word has also been redefined to mean "anti-Jewish", ignoring the fact that significant numbers of the protestors are Jewish.

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mike birch's avatar

i love your thinking and your writing, Thank you

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Ziton's avatar

This is very well crafted and spot on. Well done.

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