What if the cookies were Hamas

Antisemitism is sweeping across university campuses, or at least it is if you have the bad judgement to still be reading The Saturday Paper in this year of our Lord 2024.

In last weekend’s edition, Saturday Paper associate editor Martin McKenzie-Murray largely rehashed an article published in The Australian in May, only five months later and in twice as many words. At the centre of both articles is University of Sydney director of European studies Professor Peter Morgan, who was confronted by pro-Palestinian student activists during a lecture and has been sooking about it ever since.

Besides the fact that the students chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — described by Morgan as “sinister” and by McKenzie-Murray as “sufficiently ambiguous that its justification is elastic” — Morgan claims the intrusion into his lecture was antisemitic “at the deepest level” because “it identified Jews, per se, as the executors of military operations which you as a pro-Palestinian object to”. It’s at this point, some 1,600 words into the article, that McKenzie-Murray remembers to mention Morgan himself is not Jewish.

McKenzie-Murray’s thinking is more fully on display in ‘Hard Choices, Parlous World’, a recent interview published on his Substack. (I apologise for making you aware of the title.) In a 5,000-word exchange with conservative commentator Gray Connolly, McKenzie-Murray writes that “Hamas must wear responsibility” for “Israel’s response to October 7” and engages in some misty-eyed and baffling historical revisionism in which Israel and Bill Clinton’s tireless efforts to broker peace were scuttled by intransigent Palestinians.

I could go on about this but Abraham Edwards has already unpacked the many journalistic failings in McKenzie-Murray’s Saturday Paper article, and there are more important things to get to.