This week, the Greens’ Nick McKim used the federal parliament’s official condolences to the victims of the Bondi massacre and their families, to make the extraordinary claim that ‘Jewish Australians won’t be safe from the scourge of antisemitism… until we reckon with the brutality and the underlying violence of the colonisation of this continent based on the lie of terra nullius.’

The link between Isis terrorists and terra nullius may seem like a bit of a stretch to most Australians, but not to the radical left. They inhabit a parallel universe where the greatest crime is to be a settler colony or a settler colonialist. That is the logic of the Invasion Day protesters, who will paint our town monuments red while most Australians are celebrating Australia Day.

It is the absurd, ineradicable original sin of colonisation of which Israel stands accused by both Marxists and Islamists, albeit using starkly different mind maps. The Islamists accept the Old Testament as the word of God, which clearly demonstrates the ancestral claim of the Israelites to the land of Zion. However, the prior existence of the Jewish state is nullified by the Jews’ refusal to follow Islam. For the Marxists, religion is irrelevant, since it is merely the opiate of the masses. Their post-modern analysis casts Israelis as the oppressors by virtue of their economic success.

What is certain, however, is that if Marxists and Islamists do not accept Israel’s right to exist, they do not accept Australia’s either, so at some point, all the horrors that Islamists have rained down on Israelis could just as easily be visited on Australians. It certainly seems to be what Lidia Thorpe has in mind when she talks about burning down the federal parliament. And it is what the Greens seemed to say when they claimed that the Bondi massacre could have happened to LGBT people or Muslims.

The Greens usually seem to turn a blind eye to the atrocities that Islamic extremists – such as Hamas – inflict on anyone who doesn’t strictly adhere to their fundamentalist reading of the Koran. But the point here is that it is not LGBT people or Muslims who have been subjected to a tidal wave of attacks over the last two years; it is the Jewish community.

The trouble is the Greens, like the rest of the pro-Palestinian left, seem to be incapable of accepting that Jews can be victims in need of protection, instead resorting to the claim that ‘powerful forces’ were using the massacre for political ends, by which they meant forcing the parliament to combat antisemitism.

Who were these powerful forces? The opposition parties, the state premiers and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We saw the same accusation a fortnight ago in a cartoon by Cathy Wilcox. The powerful force controlling Australian politics was a subterranean Bibi banging a drum to which his puppets – conservative politicians and the Murdoch press – danced, pushing for a royal commission into antisemitism.

It’s not new. As T.S. Eliot put it, ‘The rats are underneath the piles. The jew (sic) is underneath the lot.

Pro-Palestinians are outraged at any suggestion that their endless rallies contributed to the zeitgeist in which the massacre occurred. There are no prizes for guessing who they blamed instead. At Sydney’s first pro-Palestinian protest since marches were banned following the Bondi atrocity, Uncle Ken Canning, a Murri poet and activist, accused NSW Premier Chris Minns of spending ‘all of five minutes giving condolences to the families for the atrocities committed at Bondi’ and ‘spent the rest of the time blaming pro-Palestinian marches, blaming Islamic people, blaming everybody except Zionists’. It’s hardly surprising that Palestinians and their supporters blame the massacre on ‘Zionists’ since they blame virtually everything malign in the world on Zionists.

The NSW police attended the rally, and as if to prove that nothing has changed, it was a man wearing a ‘Make Australia Safe Again’ cap, with a cardboard sign that read ‘Blame Hamas’, who was arrested for breaching the peace. He stood in a sea of protesters waving Palestinian and Lebanese flags, placards that read ‘Globalise the Resistance’ and chanting ‘Long live the intifada’. The Labor Friends of Palestine held a banner calling for sanctions against Israel. We can safely assume that the NSW police did not arrest them.

The pals of Palestine should be thrilled with the appointment of barrister Phillip Boulten SC as a NSW Supreme Court judge. Aside from reposting a comment that described the Antisemitism Commissioner as a ‘deplorable racist’, he posted on Gaza in 2024 that, ‘These outrageous murders are a part of Israel’s demonstrated perfidy’. Former NSW Labor premier and foreign minister Bob Carr couldn’t contain his glee saying, ‘Delighted that Phil Boulten appointed to NSW Supreme Court in rebuff to The Lobby and its view that criticism of Israel and its ethnonationalist supporters is an automatic disqualification for public office.’

The Grand Mufti of Australia condemned the Bondi massacre but is on the board of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), an organisation that is funded by Qatar, that promotes virulent antisemitism. As an example, it published an article last September by Bouguerra Soltani, the former head of the Algerian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which reads, ‘Oh Jews, enemies of liberty and world peace, remember that in 1939 Adolf Hitler became convinced that you were the cause of the world’s problems. In his famous speech of January 30 that year, he called to purge Europe of you so that the world could enjoy peace… He put his theory into practice in 1941… Today, humanity has realised that you are a threat to the world’s peace and security, and the countdown to your end… has already begun… between 2025 and 2033 you will be nothing but history… this time the world will not take pity on you… When its anger boils over, not one of you will be left upon the Earth.’

The spectre of Hitler was also haunting the streets of Melbourne, where two people driving a white utility chased a group of schoolboys through the streets for eight minutes, shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ and making Nazi salutes. When the boys took refuge in their school, the assailants threatened to return the following day with knives. The scene played out within 100 metres of the Adass synagogue, which was firebombed last year. Of course, the boys could have been LGBT people or Muslims as the Greens suggested. But they weren’t. They were Jews.