The Lynch mob: baying for for a genocidal bloodbath

From The Australian, May 26, 2015, by Ted Lapkin:

Replacing Israel with a unitary Arab-Jewish state is lunacy

Jake Lynch, second right, just before the Kemp address, with the protesters who shortly afterwards forcefully disrupted the lecture. He claims that they took him “completely by surprise”....

Picture: David Sokol/J-Wire Source: Supplied

University of Sydney associate professor Jake Lynch vociferously denied harbouring anti-Semitic intent as he whipped out a $5 note from his wallet and waved it beneath the nose of a 75-year-old Jewish woman. He has since issued a statement proclaiming his horror this incident might “invoke a vile stereotype, connected to the persecution of Jews in Europe”.

Lacking a window into the depths of Lynch’s soul, I’m unable to assess the authenticity of his demurrer. Perhaps he truly is that ­obtuse.

The event in question took place in March during the riotous disruption of a lecture given at the university by retired British Army colonel Richard Kemp. Kemp has attracted particular venom from the anti-Zionist Left over his statements upholding the moral legitimacy and legal validity of Israeli army combat tactics. The colonel goes so far as to argue — as an infantry officer of 30 years’ experience — that Israel’s military takes greater care to avoid gratuitous civilian battlefield casualties than did British troops in Afghanistan.

But campus radicals were disinclined to tolerate such an overt challenge to their anti-Zionist trope and dispatched a squad to quash this event. A contingent ...muscled their way into the lecture hall, brandishing vacuously worded placards and chanting all the usual inanities through a loudspeaker that drowned out the colonel’s voice.

Lynch declares that this tumultuous onslaught by anti-Israel protesters took him “completely by surprise”. Yet a photograph taken shortly before the start of the Kemp address shows Lynch immersed in a convivial chat with the same leftist radicals whose invasion of the lecture hall was imminent. In fact, one may be excused for counting him among the ranks of the protesters because he appears in this snapshot holding up one end of the squad’s ­Israel-phobic banner.

But in view of Lynch’s professed dedication to the principle that contentious issues should be “respectfully discussed”, perhaps he was using this opportunity to provide instruction on the finer points of civil debate. Indeed.

In his statement Lynch asseverates that his support for an academic boycott of Israel “does not make me anti-Israeli, much less anti-Semitic”. But this assertion makes sense only if one accepts the dubious proposition that there’s nothing anti-Jewish about hostility towards the world’s only Jewish state.

Lynch goes on to aver that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement seeks only “an end to the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip”. Yet the movement’s global umbrella body, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, makes no bones about its more ambitious objective — the eradication of Israel as we know it. 

Just last year, BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti proudly declared: 

“Definitely, most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The BDS movement instead advocates the merger of Israel and the Palestinian territories into a non-sectarian Arab-Jewish unitary state. Barghouti blithely assures us that such a unified Israel-Palestine will become a model of secular democracy where inter-communal goodwill reigns supreme. He pledges a one-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will create “a truly promising land, rather than a false Promised Land”.


But such halcyon theories wither into nothingness on exposure to the deeply rooted path­ologies that afflict the political culture of the Muslim Middle East. All those liberal dreams of freedom generated by the Arab Spring in 2011 have long since been crushed beneath the treads of army tanks and the heels of jihadi boots. There’s no cogent reason to believe an Arab-majority Israel-Palestine would fare any better.

The past quarter-century has taught us a well-established culture of political pluralism is a necessary precondition for peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence. From Sarajevo in the 1990s to present-day Syria we’ve witnessed the bloody descent into barbarism of culturally diverse societies lacking strong democratic traditions.

An Arab-dominated Israel-Palestine inevitably would degenerate into another failed Levantine satrapy where Islamic radicals battle secular autocrats for absolute power; with individual liberty nowhere to be seen.

The murderous brutality with which Hamas has suppressed political dissent in Gaza would be a mere prologue for the bloodiness to come. And one only has to observe the ongoing massacres of Yazidis and Christians in Syria and Iraq to envisage a similar fate befalling a Jewish community reduced to minority status in the Land of Israel.

The anti-Zionist campaign to replace Israel with a unitary Arab-Jewish state is a symptom of political lunacy. 

At best, proponents of a one-state solution are afflicted by a utopian delirium that blinds them to the truth that their policy formula is a recipe for a genocidal anti-Semitic bloodbath. 

At worst, these high-minded professions of progressive virtue urging the demise of the Middle East’s sole democracy are mere window-dressing that conceals a more ancient and insidious agenda.