The Jihadist Nurses Down Under
Shocked at the would-be jihadist nurses? Then you haven't been hanging around universities lately.
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This is a guest essay written by Julie Szego, a journalist and writer of the newsletter, “Szego Unplugged.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Macabre as this may sound, I wasn’t shocked at the nurses from Sydney’s Bankstown Hospital, cheerfully boasting, during a quiet moment on night shift, that they would not treat Israeli patients but would kill them.
Horrified? Certainly.
My late father was an Auschwitz survivor who had been forced to present himself before the “angel of death,” Dr. Josef Mengele. He knew of fellow Holocaust survivors so traumatised that even decades later in Australia they did not trust gentile doctors; fortunately, there were plenty of the other sort around.
The spectre of Jews being murdered in hospital wards by assassins disguised in the scrubs of a healing profession evokes dark associations.
But shocked? No way.
Frankly, I’m shocked others are so shocked. New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park, whose decisive action in this crisis cannot be faulted, called the pair, Sarah Abu Lebdeh and Ahmad “Rashad” Nadir, “deranged.” Nonsense. They strike me as perfectly sane.
Indeed, Nadir’s bio suggests a man of intelligence and resilience. He fled Afghanistan as a child and arrived in Australia speaking limited English. According to a 2021 social media post from not-for-profit group, The Helmsman Project, he’d been working part time as a nurse while studying for a master’s. His was a migrant success story.
The nurses were disinhibited about wanting to kill Israelis, with Nadir even bragging, please god falsely, that he’d already dispatched several “to the afterlife” because — to state the obvious — they had no inkling they were breaching a taboo.
And in a broad sense they weren’t. The idea that Israel, and by logical extension Israelis, should be sent “to hell,” as Nadir put it, has become almost mainstream in the wake of October 7th.
It’s just a question of time and place. One must keep the exuberance in check, that’s all.
The nurses were merely a tad too earthy, too literal in their support for an ideology that has become a weekend catch-cry on the streets and the mark of respectability in institutions throughout the West.
And for those seeking to “globalise the intifada,” no part of society should be allowed to remain neutral on the subject of Israel’s existence, which means that every profession must relax their protocols to allow for a carve-out to rid their ranks of Zionist evil — meaning, Jews.
And so we saw keffiyeh-clad actors (whom I’d describe as useful idiots for the pro-Iranian axis) imposing their views on audiences. Clusters of teachers pushing pro-Palestine activism in the classroom. Journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and elsewhere lobbying editors to suspend the usual rules of journalism and report the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a morality tale wherein all the strife can be traced back to a Jewish state deemed guilty from birth. And so on.
Similarly at Bankstown1, the real story lurks just off-camera. A nurse at New South Wales Health has since come forward with claims that in the aftermath of October 7th she’d publicly raised the alarm about her colleagues wearing their uniforms while chanting “From the river to the sea” — effectively a call to eliminate Israel — only to find herself under investigation by the health regulator.
And soon after the video surfaced, Bankstown Hospital scrubbed from its Instagram account a photo of a woman wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt depicting a raised fist in the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Before this week’s controversy, Bankstown Hospital, its website full of the usual social justice blather about supporting “culturally and linguistically diverse communities,” saw nothing wrong with disseminating a photo with what a spokesperson now calls “political messaging.” It had no concerns such an image might undermine people’s faith that Bankstown provided excellent healthcare to all, regardless of ethnicity or political views.
If “Free Palestine” is the hospital vibe, why be shocked at nurses broadcasting to the world a delightful, lighthearted riff on snuffing out Israeli patients?
In a similar vein, why be shocked at Macquarie University2 academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, the recipient of $870,000 in commonwealth research grants belatedly coming under review, posting with scholarly nuance on X: “May 2025 be the end of Israel.” She previously has insisted “Zionists” aren’t entitled to “cultural safety.”
This might mean, and I’m improvising here, that I have no moral right to demand public hospitals be free of “Free Palestine” sloganeering or of nurses prepared to share their homicidal thoughts on Israelis to the world at large while working their shift.
Adjusting for differences in socio-economic background and cultural capital, the nurses’ sentiments are barely distinguishable from what passes as correct-think in academic and human rights circles.
For instance, when in November 2023 Greens3 senator Mehreen Faruqi claimed not to have noticed a placard beside her that urged Israel be thrown in the bin, I believed her. Why would she have noticed?
The sentiment is hardly noteworthy on the Israel-hating hard Left. The members of the intelligentsia who want to cleanse the world of Israelis perceive themselves to be on the side of the angels. They believe they’re righteous warriors against a state framed in their discourse as a genocidal, settler-colonial, white supremacist, apartheid entity; the fact it’s also the world’s only Jewish state, and home to roughly half the Jews on the planet, is simply coincidence.
Hence, one of the most inhospitable places for Jews today is the anti-racism movement, as we saw at Queensland University of Technology’s recent closed-door, Israel-hating and ironically named “National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action.” Among a laundry list of outrages, the one dissident in the audience, a Jewish academic, was shamed and threatened with being punched in the throat.
I’m certainly not interested in “safety” if it means safe rooms for Jewish students on otherwise hostile university campuses. Or Jewish suburbs where firebombed synagogues are rebuilt as fortresses. Or Jews avoiding certain hospitals in certain parts of town because — well, better be safe than sorry.
Park has said Bankstown Hospital will examine whether improvements can be made to the state Health Department from a “cultural perspective.” What’s needed at Bankstown and everywhere in Australia is nothing less than cultural revolution.
Everyone from the federal government down must stop pairing their condemnation of anti-Semitism with that of “Islamophobia” because this conceals and obfuscates the reality that much of the Jew-hatred we’re seeing today emanates from a section of the Islamic community.
And our leaders must say without equivocation that calling for the destruction of Israel is vile and racist, whether that call comes in the vernacular of western Sydney or the turgid jargon of the highly educated.
This piece was first published in The Weekend Australian.
A suburb of Sydney, Australia
A public research university in Sydney
A confederation of green state and territory political parties in Australia
Sadly, my reaction was exactly the same. Appalled but not surprised.8
Not shocked at all. Lately? Its been going on since the early 1980s in the US. They lost their jobs. (too bad - too sad)
There was a pro hamas rally with an iman in downtown fort lauderdale in 2008 - they were chanting "go back to the ovens"
As we saw in 1937 when the grand mufti and ah met in berlin - Judenhass comes from both sides. Thanks for sharing this.- It's important that more gen # 2s speak up and loudly. We already know what people are capable of doing to Jews.
PS: My father was also a survivor - my mother a nazi refugee... most of my paternal including my paternal grandparents and many maternal family members were murdered in Auschwitz, very few actually survived.
LINK to 2008 rally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Xl68kP4wo&t=9s