Penn Raine - Plus ça change: the rise and rise of antisemitism in the West.

During World War Two France deported 275, 000 Jewish people to the extermination camps. Three thousand returned.

The sanitised view is that the French boldly opposed these actions largely with the courage of the Resistance. The truth is that even before the occupying German force demanded that the deportation quotas be filled the Vichy government of the allegedly Free France had already drawn up its own plans for deportations.

Melanie Phillips: The high stakes in Iran

The stupendous courage of the Iranian people has inspired awe at this massive display of unquenchable human spirit. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian demonstrators literally walked into the guns in their struggle for freedom from the monstrous Islamic regime.

At time of writing, it’s unclear whether US President Donald Trump will come to their aid as he promised. An apparently planned US attack on Wednesday night was reportedly called off at the last minute.

Bruce Cotterill: Bondi terror, soft policing and why NZ needs a new security plan

This week’s column was half-drafted when it happened. I had intended a positive summary of the events of the year. After all, it was the first year in a while in which we made some political and economic progress.

But then Sunday night happened.

My kids both live in Australia. Bondi to be exact. And as we all know, someone else’s war just came to our part of the world.

Dr James Allan: The Marvellous Miseries of Multiculturalism

I start this first column of the new year with the heavy heart that I am sure all our readers have for the families of the victims of the horrific mass-murders on Bondi Beach just before Christmas. And let us not deal in the usual Labour Party euphemisms, misdirecting abstractions and Kumbaya platitudes. This was the deliberate attempt to murder Jews, by Islamic extremists, done solely because they wanted to kill Jews. And they did, with the odd non-Jewish bystander thrown in. That makes Australia, outside of Israel itself, the country where the most Jews have been murdered in a single incident since the Second World War.

Melanie Phillips: American conservatism and “the Jewish Question”

Astonishingly, it looks as if “the Jewish question” — that perennial antisemitic canard — is becoming the hinge issue that will determine the course of American politics.

The Democratic Party and the left in general now promote an increasingly virulent hostility toward Israel and a corresponding embrace of Islamist and black extremism, leading to rising attacks on American Jews.

Simon O'Connor: Blood on their hands

For too long, we have tolerated people calling for the very violence that occurred at Bondi Beach last night.

My heart goes out to the Jewish community in Sydney, and also across Australia and New Zealand – not to mention around the world. Hanukkah is one of the great high festivals of Judaism; a feast of light and yet last evening, the light was shattered – but importantly, it will not be broken or eclipsed despite the violence.

Ani O'Brien: Open Letter to the Helen Clark Foundation

Regarding Professor Peter Davis' public comments justifying antisemitism

I will send the below letter to the Helen Clark Foundation. It is not intended to be aggressive or an attack. It is a good faith attempt at reaching out and asking them to live up to their values and demonstrate their commitment to social cohesion.

Ashley Church: Fighting fire with fire

I’ve attended many Pro-Israel rallies over the years and have been a speaker at most of them – but my first experience of a ‘counter rally’, where pro-Pally protesters turn up to disrupt was in 2018.

That was the year of the 70th anniversary of the modern State of Israel. It was also about a year after the Israel Institute of NZ had been established and I was asked to be the MC for an outdoor event at Silo Park in Auckland.

Guest Post: “When we bring Hitler back…”

A guest post on Kiwiblog by Kara Isaac:

“Hey Jew Jew.” The words came from the 12-year-old boy standing in front of my son as they lined up at school waiting for their turn at a game. “When we bring Hitler back we're going to kill you twice.”

They were dropped with casual disdain and a smirk. The same kind of smirk he had used the week before when the teacher stepped out of the classroom and he took the opportunity to do a Nazi salute with an accompanying “Heil Hitler!”

Dane Giraud: So many Coughlins

On a night in that grey depressive season of 1938, a filth blanketed New York City.

The bandwidth occupied by WMCA.

The pro-Mussolini pro-Hitler priest-turned-radio host Father Charles E. Coughlin made an address to his substantial audience (tens of millions of Americans every week), that bore a closer resemblance to something out of the toxic leaves of Der Stürmer than to any text in the New Testament.

Dane Giraud: Have we finally reached peak Jew-derangement syndrome?

As if the current storm of mistruths and distortions wasn’t enough, the New Zealand Jewish community is having to fight off the mangling of the “chosen people” concept, yet another front that’s opened up against us on social media since the atrocity of Oct 7th.

Sadly, yet unsurprisingly, an effort of self-defense to eradicate the fascist death cult that carried out these unspeakable horrors has been spun into an example of unbridled privilege.

Melanie Phillips: Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg has got herself into a terrible mess. She was suspended from her role as co-host of ABC’s The View talk show after saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. It was instead, she said, about “man’s inhumanity to man” involving “white people doing it to white people”.

She insisted: “It’s about how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews … everybody eats each other”.

This was clearly idiotic. The signature characteristic of German Nazism was that it set out to exterminate Jews as a race, identifying them as targets for annihilation on the basis of even a tenuous ancestral connection with Judaism.

Attempting to apologise in the ensuing storm, Goldberg made things even worse. Saying she had now learned that “Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she then told Stephen Colbert on his late-night comedy show that the Nazis had lied and actually had issues not with race but with ethnicity — which caused further outrage and prompted another apology.