Last Saturday, 67 neo-Nazis – members of the Nationalist Socialist Network (NSN), the activist branch of their ‘White Australia’ party – lined up on the steps of the NSW Parliament to demand the abolition of the ‘Jewish lobby’. They are angry about NSW’s hate speech legislation, not that it stopped them from holding their rally and spouting their views.

‘The Jewish lobby in Australia is so powerful they were able to pressure the government to enact hate speech legislation that destroys free speech in this country,’ said NSW leader Jack Eltis, who says the pretext for the laws was ‘hoaxes, embellishment, exaggeration of anti-Semitic crimes that never occurred.’

If ‘exaggerating crimes that never occurred’ sounds like a contradiction, that’s because logic isn’t a neo-Nazi strong suit. Joel Davis, an NSN activist, appeared on video last year, saying he ‘leaned’ to the ‘pro-Hitler camp’ because Hitler was fighting the communists, seemingly unfamiliar with the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

Davis told the wannabe stormtroopers that the NSW government had passed laws restricting political speech and protest ‘under the direction and the pressure of the Jewish lobby’ which had ‘concocted’ a ‘pressure campaign’ with the complicity of the ‘Jewish-controlled media’ and ‘pushed a fake anti-Semitism crisis’.

Eltis fulminated that over the last year, ‘Over $130 million of the Australian taxpayer’s money has been given to the Jewish community as a result of these lobby groups,’ without seeming to make the connection that if it wasn’t for the threats from Nazis and Islamists, the money wouldn’t be needed to protect Jewish Australians from antisemitic violence.

No one should have been surprised that the NSW police authorised the rally, and there were no apologies. Commissioner Mal Lanyon said he was unaware that the protest had been approved and described his ignorance as a ‘communication error’ but he was untroubled that the event had gone ahead. The police are, after all, as punctilious in respecting the rights of Nazis to demand the abolition of the ‘Jewish lobby’ as they are in protecting the rights of Islamists to demand the destruction of the ‘Jewish state’. Why bat an eyelid at neo-Nazis chanting the Hitler Youth cry of ‘Blood and Honour’, when police stood by impassively as a mob of Islamists that had illegally marched to the steps of the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023, bayed ‘Gas the Jews’ and (illegally) launched red flares. No doubt they will spend several months looking into the call for ‘Blood and Honour’ before concluding that what was really said was ‘Mud on Donna,’ a reference to the messy nature of women’s football.

Premier Chris Minns, on the other hand, was outraged, condemning the rally as a ‘shocking display of hatred, racism and antisemitism’ and calling its leader ‘pissants’, saying that if the government had its time again, the rally would not have been permitted. But Minns’ outrage didn’t extend to condemning former Labor NSW premier and former foreign minister Bob Carr, who has repeatedly attacked ‘the Jewish-Israeli Lobby in Australia’ as a ‘foreign influence operation’, accusing it of bullying the government into supporting war crimes like those perpetrated by Stalin and Mao and claiming that ‘no other lobby is so well-funded, no other country has an operation with offices in every Australian capital city.’

Perhaps Carr has forgotten about the Chinese lobby, which has no shortage of funds for Labor politicians in brown paper bags, offices on most university campuses and reveres Mao.

Qatar can also be generous in assisting grand muftis who visit Gaza and Doha and sing the praises of Hamas, and it funds the terrorists that brought the world 9/11, Isis, and the Taleban.

But Minns could hardly criticise Carr when only last week the NSW government appointed Carr to the board of Sydney Water to the tune of $80,000, and last year Carr was appointed by the Albanese government to the board of the Australian Heritage Council with a modest stipend of $85,870.

We should perhaps count ourselves lucky that Australian Islamists confined themselves to launching flares outside the Opera House. Last Thursday, four pro-Palestine protesters set off flares and set chairs alight inside the concert hall of the Cité de la Musique conservatory in Paris during a performance given by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, graduating from the standard Parisian protest of ‘voitures brulées’ to the more confronting ‘sièges brulés’. It gives a whole new meaning to the concept of the ‘burning platform’.

Arson wasn’t the only threat the Israeli Philharmonic faced. France’s entertainment union wanted the orchestra to be deplatformed, condemning the concert as an attempt to ‘normalise’ Israel after the war in Gaza. French Culture Minister Rachida Dati rejected the calls, saying the boycott went against the country’s belief in ‘freedom of creation and programming’. The conductor of the Israeli Philharmonic, pianist Lahav Shani, wasn’t so lucky in Belgium, where his performance in September at the Ghent Festival with the Munich Philharmonic was cancelled.

Similarly, 200 employees of Britain’s Royal Ballet and Opera protested at Tosca being performed in the Tel Aviv opera house and succeeded in their boycott.

But antisemitism descended to comical levels of idiocy with a statement put out by 700 musicians called ‘Classical Music for Palestine’ which claimed classical music maintains an undeniable link with the history of European states and must not be ‘confused with a certain form of conservatism that would manifest in the appropriation and instrumentalisation of these musics of the past by a political camp aligned with domination – whether geopolitical, social or societal’. Who knows what this gobbledygook means, but the ‘political camp associated with domination’ is, apparently, code for Israel.

Are supporters of these boycotts aware that sharia law bans music and dance because it leads to moral decay? Patriotic songs and religious chants may be acceptable in Gaza, but public concerts have been banned as immoral because, for example, women were clapping and singing along with men.

What we have learned in Australia over the past two years is that, as far as the police are concerned, it is okay to burn an Israeli flag but not to wave one in support of Israel – that will get you manhandled, detained, arrested, and temporarily banned from the city, ostensibly for your own protection. Because in Labor’s Australia, the cry of ‘Blood and Honour’ meets no resistance, Islamist flares light up the Opera House — and Bob (with his board seats) is your uncle.