In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc dissect Australia’s reaction to the Hanukkah massacre and how the West flicks aside antisemitic violence.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Victor Davis Hanson: So, we have this mass murder in Australia, and then you ask yourself, is he an ISIS plant? Did he try to coordinate it online with other violence that day? But that all said, when you put the Australia thing and the Brown [University] thing and the [Rob] Reiner killing all in a 48-hour period, it kind of shocks Americans.
Like, they’ve lost control. We’ve lost control of the American narrative. It’s kind of tragic.
When people in Australia, to take an example, when they comment on Bondi Beach, which we’ll get to in a minute, they usually say two things: “We’re going to have gun control.” They have gun control there. It’s much stricter than California. But ask themselves, why did they allow somebody they knew had ISIS ties to have six guns? Yet, they’ll double down on that.
And then the second thing they’ll always do is they’ll say, “Well, we’re going to look at extremist groups, like white nationalists and maybe, I don’t know, white supremacists.” Or, “We’re going to investigate Islamophobia.” That was the wrong thing to say.
[Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese] should have said, “We have open borders, and we can’t vet people, so we’re going to take a time out until we get our house in order, so we don’t let people in who have a desire to kill us.” I’m so tired of these Western bureaucrats who say, “This is not who we are. We don’t tolerate this.” Well, what are you going to do about that?
And then always gun control or, “Well, we’re going to have a special task force for antisemitism and Islamophobia.” But they never tell us the data, as I said earlier. They know the data. The data does not support the idea that Islamic citizens, residents are the objects of hate crime.
If you look at the hate crime [statistics]—and it’s very hard to find because people in these blue cities don’t want to report it to the FBI—it’s mostly Jews who are 3% of the population. No, there are only six million, so maybe 2% of the population, they account for about 40 % of violent hate crimes. And they’re almost never the perpetrator. And Muslims are overrepresented, both as victims, but more importantly, as perpetrators.
Sami Winc: The other criticism in Australia was of the police department, which was only one block away. But you heard talk about how they hadn’t done enough to stop these guys. And we saw the one guy who was not police that tackled the father of the son-father duo in Australia. But the police chief came out and said, that’s not true. We shot one of the one of the perpetrators.
Killed him, I believe, and they also arrested the other one.
Hanson: Yeah, he shot him after what? After he killed 15 people? Tell that to the 15 people. The police were on the scene pretty quickly. I mean, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, but I think the Western public is so tired of all these contortions, gymnastics, linguistic tomfoolery. They always praise everybody. It’s like T-ball.
But why don’t they just say, “We’re going to make sure that this never happens again, and we’re going to want to warn everybody out there. If you point a gun at somebody in a crowd, and we hear a shot, you’re going to go down.”
But they never talk like that. That’s only in the movies that show that the American people and Western publics want that, so Hollywood will supply it. But in the real world they don’t get it. I’m not talking about vigilantism.
It’s just like Parkland. Why didn’t the police just rush in there and say, “That’s my job. I signed up for this.” But you saw them cowering while these kids were butchered like animals.
And when I watch that picture of Bondi Beach and you juxtapose it to Oct. 7, and then you think of the Holocaust Museum butchery, and then you look at things that happened in Israel where a couple of people were killed, and then you look at what’s happening in Europe. I would say the West is slouching toward open season on Jews. I really do. I think they’re going to be hunted like animals.
It’s just sick and nobody speaks out against it. There are three things going on: Open borders and immigration from the Middle East, the corruption of the university that has these Middle East hate Israel programs, and a quarter million people from the Middle East who think it’s their country and can say, “From the river to the sea and Hamas,” right? And then DEI that protects them.
When I mean slouching toward open season on Jews, then you have Tucker [Carlson] and Candace Owens, almost every major event now in the news. Maduro, we move on him—the Jews. Taking out the Iranian nuclear bomb—the Jews. Charlie Kirk’s death—Jews. 9-11—Jews.
Why do they do that? And then they say, well, you can be anti-[Israel] and … [Vice President] JD Vance, I like him a lot, he tweeted, you can be against Israel and not be an antisemite. Yes, you can. But why do people who condemn Israel always go down the antisemitic road? And you know what I’m saying?
Winc: Yes, because haven’t we pointed this out in our podcast that if they are anti-Israel, then all the things they apply to Israel they should apply in other places like Turkey and Ukraine.
Hanson: They never do. Israel shouldn’t take out these targets. Look at Ukraine. That’s pretty dangerous to sink a submarine of a nuclear-powered Russia. We always say no ceasefires. Netanyahu and Israelis—ceasefires.
Coalition government, Israel. No coalition government, [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky. Collateral damage, Israel. We don’t care about what you kill, kill the Russians all you want. And “occupation, occupation, occupation.” Yeah, that’s right. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed 150,000 Armenians I didn’t hear a peep.
Turkey went into Cyprus and slaughtered innocents in 1974, and they occupy illegally the northern part of the country. They took paradise and turned it into a backwater state. And then they forced the poor Greeks to go to the southern part of the island, the traditionally less affluent, and they turned it into paradise. Nobody talks about that.
And so, the other thing is, when people say, “From the River to the Sea,” and I heard that ad nauseam at Stanford.
I was walking to my office: “River of the sea, Palestine shall be free.” And I told you once, I asked this young woman, “Which sea? Which river?” Everybody asked that. She had no idea. And I was just kind of joking. It was a Red Sea? Close. Was it the North Sea? Not close. Maybe the Mediterranean? What river? The Euphrates? The Tigris? The Nile? Or the Jordan? Which is it?
And then I asked, this is what I remember the most. I was walking by and a very affluent student from the Middle East, and I say that because of my Victor gold antenna went up with the jewelry and stuff. Student, student. And she was out screaming.
And I said to her, “What do you do with a two million? River to the sea means you want to get rid of Israel, erase it. Because if you take them, you’re going to take the Jews and kill them?” “Oh, no. They can go back.”
Remember Helen Thomas, the journalist that was the very left-wing journalist at all the press conferences, they gave her the top seat. She goes, well, those Jews, they should just get out of Israel and go back to Poland or wherever they came. Helen, Helen, 3,500 years in counting Jews have been in that place. The Arab world did not get there until the seventh century. And that was about 4,000 years after Jews were there. If that’s the game you want to play.
What was fascinating is when you ask that, I always would ask, “What do you do with the 2 million Arabs? River to the sea, so you’re going to go in and you’re going to destroy Israel and kill 9 million Jews, but you let 2 million Arabs live who right now vote and are the only Arabs in the Middle East that have constitutional freedom and security and economic outside of the Gulf, prosperity. But Saudi Arabia, can you vote with a free and unfettered election? No.
Gaza? No. West Bank? No. Egypt? No. Tunisia? No. Morocco? No. Algeria? No. Syria? No. Iraq? Not really. Lebanon? If you want to risk your life. I mean free and unfettered. Can you say anything you want if you’re an Arab citizen in Israel? Pretty much. Can you say it anywhere else in the Arab homeland? Nope. Nope.
If Israel said tomorrow, “We will let Arabs live here in Israel,” they would have a flood of people.
Winc: Of course they would.
Hanson: Israel ethnically cleansed their own Jews from Gaza. They were settlements, we’re going to get out. So, there are no Jews in Gaza.
There’s no more expansion. They’re really working on not allowing the expansion. But my point is this: If you’re an Arab citizen in Israel and you own property, the Israelis say, OK. They may not want more. But if you say, “Hmm, I like this view in the West Bank, I’m going to buy property and I’m a Jew.” You can’t live there. You have to be in this particular settlement and armed.
All these things just go out the window when you talk to these students and professors, given the hate.
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