Anti-Zionism in Australian Academia.

THE DOMINANT political culture on Australian university campuses brings to mind a scene from the classic movie Casablanca. A naive young woman approaches the nightclub owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) to enquire about the character of the thoroughly dissolute French police captain played by Claude Rains. "He's like any other man, only more so," quips the jaded Bogart in response.

And in paraphrased form, this witticism could easily be applied to Australian higher education, where all the pernicious norms of politicised academia have taken root with a vengeance. When it comes to Marxist dogma, queer theory--and yes, anti-Zionism--Australian campuses are like most other Western universities, only more so.

The ubiquity of left-wing politics in Australian academia means that the task of writing about campus Israel-phobia requires a solid sense of discrimination. The pool of subjects is so large, and the horror stories are so abundant, that considerable selectivity is required lest the end product be a tome the size of War and Peace.

I have thus employed the principles of journalistic triage, focusing solely on a handful of Australia's most egregious university anti-Zionists. And while there are many likely candidates who might be eligible for nomination, the Oscar for anti-Israel virulence undoubtedly goes to the University of Sydney's Evan Jones.

JONES' DAY JOB involves the teaching of economics. But his true passion comes to light in a weblog that is particularly venomous, even by the incendiary standards of the leftist blogosphere. Entitled "Alert and Alarmed", this blog is an obvious play on the slogan of an Australian government public awareness campaign on terrorism, "Be alert, but not alarmed".

While Evan Jones detests the Bush administration and the Australian government of John Howard, there's nothing that moves him quite like the question of Israel. His anti-Zionist animus runs so deep that he exemplifies the argument that hostility to the Jewish state is synonymous with hostility to Jews, per se. Yet the very fervency of Jones' hostility towards Israel renders him tone deaf to the anti-Semitic overtones of his rhetoric.

Take for example, Jones' oft-expressed view that the Jews dominate press coverage on issues relating to Israel. A typical example of his belief in Jewish media omnipotence emerged in a blog posting that appeared under the title "The Wall and 'topographical considerations'":