Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Feb. 18, 2025
“The threatening comments made by those Aussie nurses, and the justification of them by ‘Muslim leaders’, confirms how out of control the dehumanisation of Israel has become.:
It was bad enough when two Australian nurses were caught on camera saying they wouldn’t treat Israeli patients and instead would ‘kill them’. But now 50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defence. If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many ‘Muslim leaders’ are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.
This sordid story started a week ago with the release of a video showing two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney engaging in the most abhorrent Israelophobic chatter. They were talking with an Israeli TikToker, Max Veifer, after encountering him on a video chat site. He told them he was Israeli. One of the nurses drew his fingers across his throat to suggest Veifer deserved to die. He said he sends Israelis to Jahannam – the Islamic version of hell. The other nurse said she would never treat an Israeli. ‘I won’t treat them, I will kill them.’
The clip went viral and the nurses were suspended. Australian PM Anthony Albanese slammed their ‘anti-Semitic comments’. There was horror across Oz that these nurses seemed to have sacrificed the core moral principle of medicine – ‘First do no harm’ – at the altar of their burning hatred for the Jewish State. Yet there’s a section of Aussie society that seems pretty blaséabout the whole thing: self-appointed Muslim leaders.
A coalition of prominent Muslim groups has written an open letter criticising the ‘selective outrage’ over the nurses’ behaviour. It says the nurses were just being ‘emotional and hyperbolic’. Nice try. We all get ‘emotional’ at times but we don’t go around fantasising about the deaths of people from the world’s only Jewish nation. Emotion is no excuse for violent-minded loathing for a whole national group.
The letter says the nurses were raging against Israel, not Jews. They were expressing ‘frustration and anger’ over Israel’s ‘violent and inhumane policies’. Apparently, the ‘hypocrites’ who have called the nurses out – that would be most of Oz – are seeking to ‘weaponise accusations of anti-Semitism to silence dissent [on Israel]’. This, the letter concludes, is ‘dishonest’ and ‘dangerous’.
The only people being dangerous here are these snivelling excuse-makers for what was clearly an act of unhinged Israelophobia. Since when did anger over foreign wars justify calling for the death of citizens from the nations involved? I hated the Iraq War but I didn’t go around saying American people should have their throats slit. I oppose Rwanda’s meddling in the Democratic Republic of Congo but I don’t view Rwandans as some kind of subspecies who should be dispatched to the everlasting fires of hell. …Source