A School bus in Australia was reportedly attacked by an angry anti-semitic gang, which shouted Nazi slogans and threatened to murder every schoolboy and girl on board.
Australia’s Daily Telegraph reported that on Wednesday, a group of at least eight men boarded the Jewish school bus and began abusing and threatening the children on it.
One mother, Jackie Blackburn, who spoke to the Telegraph, said her three girls, aged 12, 10 and eight-years-old, called her in a panic:
“She said: ‘Hey Mummy, please help us, there are eight strange men who have been let on to a school bus and they are screaming ‘Heil Hitler! Kill the Jews!’ they want to cut out our throats.’”
At which point, the paper reports, the phone went dead and the poor mother was left wondering what might have happened to her daughters.
Blackburn continued, “The next thing, her friend Noah Stanton called me and said “Jacqui it’s bad, it’s really bad. Get hold of my mum. Please help us!”
According to the caller, the anti-semitic gang were: “screaming ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘kill the Jews’, ‘Palestine must kill you Jews’, ‘we’re going to cut your throats and slice your throats open’ — just all very bad anti-Semitic stuff,” she said.
Blackburn also told the paper that she couldn’t understand why the driver chose to open the doors of the bus and allow the gang aboard.
When she confronted him, she said, “He wouldn’t give me his name or details. He said they weren’t drunk, he was justifying why he let them on, he was denying what the kids had gone through and been traumatized by.”
Isabelle Stanton, another mother whose daughters were on the bus, said she was shocked that the wave of anti-Semitism which has engulfed Europe recently had found its way to Australia:
“I am shaken up because I never expected something like this to happen in Australia and in Sydney. I expect it in Belgium where I’m from where there’s been anti-Semitic attack. It’s absolutely wrong to import something from the Middle East, I have no words, when children are involved it triggers some terrible emotions.”
In another anti-Jewish incident in Perth on Monday, Rabbi Avraham Shalom Halberstam, also known as the Stropkover rebbe, was attacked along with his assistant in a shopping mall in the city. A witness, Danny Mayer, described to JTA how six teenagers surrounded the two men, hurling abuse at them:
“They were surrounding him, so I raced over to get him into the car and they surrounded the car screaming , ‘You are killing babies in Gaza,’” he recounted.
Despite the situation in Gaza , however bad that might be, surely attacking innocent Jewish schoolgirls on a bus in Australia is not something that any western, civilised society can accept. No doubt, the Australian authorities will do everything in their power to bring the perpetrators of the disgusting incident to justice.