The actions of two Australian nurses who last week said on camera that they don’t treat and indeed murder Israeli patients shocked their nation, eliciting passionate condemnations from the country’s top politicians, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
On Monday, Australia’s foremost Muslim groups also weighed in, defending the nurses from what they called the “hypocrisy” of the nurses’ critics. Subsequently, a prominent opposition politician called for defunding the Muslims groups that had defended the pair.
The debate about the nurses coincides with a wave of antisemitic incidents in Australia in recent weeks, which has included the torching of a synagogue and the discovery of explosives in a caravan police said was to be used in an attack on Jews. Many of the incidents featured references to Israel.
The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils and the Islamic councils of Victoria and Western Australia joined dozens of other groups, including the radical Hizb ut-Tahrir pro-jihadist group, in a statement.
The letter defending the nurses, who have been suspended and are facing a criminal investigation, prompted fresh criticism by observers, who called it a defense of antisemitism and racism and a demonstration of the depth of Australia’s antisemitism problem.
Sen. James Paterson of the center-right Liberal Party, which is in the opposition, on Wednesday called for “funding to be stripped from Muslim organizations” that signed the statement. “It is alarming that so many representative bodies and Muslim community leaders think it is appropriate to downplay the seriousness of the nurses’ misconduct,” Paterson wrote.
The cosignatories of the statement said the nurses—Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh—“breached the codes of conduct of medical professionals,” but went on to criticise “the double standards and moral manipulation at play while the mass killing of our brothers and sisters in Gaza is met with silence, dismissal, or complicity.”
The statement was titled, “We condemn the hypocrisy over the nurses controversy.”
“The most revealing aspect of the reaction to the nurses’ video is not the video itself—but the speed, intensity, and uniformity of response from certain political leaders and media outlets,” the statement continued. The nurses’ critics “provided active diplomatic and journalistic cover for ongoing crimes by the Zionists,” it added.
“This is more than hypocrisy. It is calculated, politically motivated outrage. It is not a failure of consistency; it is the deliberate engineering of public morality,” the letter states.
Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer for the Spiked opinion and news site, wrote: “If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many ‘Muslim leaders’ are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.”
He was referencing one of the expressions of hatred made by the nurses in a video published by Israeli vlogger Max Veifer. Veifer and the nurses interacted in a chat app that randomly connects people from all over the world. When they saw he was from Israel, the nurses began inveighing against Israelis, saying that when Israelis were under their care, they sent them to “jahanam,” Arabic for hell.
“The threatening comments made by those Aussie nurses, and the justification of them by ‘Muslim leaders’, confirms how out of control the dehumanization of Israel has become,” wrote O’Neill.
