In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The same goes for the Left’s moral standing on antiracism. Gradually, through years of selective outrage and wilful blindness to antisemitism, including demonising the Jewish movement of self-determination, Zionism, accelerating after the pogrom carried out by Hamas on October 7. Then suddenly, at the recent Victorian Labor conference, with the passage of so-called “emergency motions” on the Israel-Hamas war. These did not merely seek…