By Daphne Anson
Back in 2012, I drew attention on this blog to a disturbing trend identified at a schools in north-west England.
The repellent state of affairs had been revealed by the noted Anglo-Jewish historian Professor Geoffrey Alderman:
‘Last November, in my capacity as a visiting professor at York St John University, I had the privilege of hearing a presentation by doctoral student Joy Schmack. Mrs Schmack, an extremely experienced teacher and inspector of secondary-school religious education, is researching the use of the word “Jew” in teenage classrooms in the north-west of England. She presented chilling evidence of the unmistakeable revival of the word “Jew” as a common term of abuse amongst teenagers, who apparently habitually use it as a synonym for “cheat” or “swindler”, or “snitch”. “Don’t you dare Jew me”, one Merseyside youngster might say to another – perhaps hardly realising the significance of these words.
Scarcely four months after hearing this presentation I received a communication from a retired gentleman whose family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1934 and who now devotes his retirement to talking about antisemitism to youngsters in schools in Cheshire, Merseyside and Lancashire. He had been moved to write to me because of his experience at one such school, where his presentation was discourteously received and where a teacher confessed to him that the word “Jew” had now replaced the word “gay” as a playground term of abuse. The teacher said: “If kids wish to insult each other, they now use (the word) Jew” [Emphasis added]….’
Now, the Australian Jewish News, in a scoop, reveals the antisemitic targeting that Jewish schoolkids at non-Jewish day schools in Melbourne have been enduring, causing them extreme anxiety and distress, and of the craven, odious response of the school authorities when the abused kids’ parents (having tardily learned of the abuse from their persecuted offspring). That response was basically: “It’s not antisemitism, it’s bullying, and your kids should learn to toughen up”.
They refused one set of parents’ request to teach the school body about the realities and consequences of antisemitism.
One of the two kids on whom the Australian Jewish News‘s spotlight falls is a five-year-old boy who showed every sign of wanting to avoid school, to his parents’ puzzlement, until, unable to cope any longer, he collapsed onto the floor one breakfast time telling his mother that she shouldn’t love him because
“I’m a worthless Jewish rodent. I’m vermin.”
The other is a twelve-year-old keen footballer who was constantly picked on by a pack of bullies who called him such charming things as
“Jewish ape … Jewish nigger … Jewish gimp … a cooked up Jewish c**t”
They also made his life a misery outside the school grounds, and on one occasion forced him to bow down and kiss a Muslim student’s feet, eagerly capturing the incident with their mobile phones (see above).
Jewish daycare education is prohibitively expensive in Melbourne for many Jewish families, but it is heart-warming to learn that this unfortunate young person, who left his school as the result of threats from the principal antisemitic bully’s older brother, has with the help of a sympathetic communal leader now found a place at one, as his now-deceased Holocaust survivor grandfather always envisioned.
As for those despicable school authorities, they might at least have pointed out to their students, assembled together, that Australia’s greatest soldier, First World War hero Sir John Monash, was a Jew.
I wonder what the antisemites would have made of that.
Read the schoolkids’ sorry saga here
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