For what happened in Sydney could happen in any city in the world where one is still frivolous enough to believe that words are just words and that slogans bind only those who chant them
December 16, 2025 17:01
When, in the aftermath of October 7, demonstrators gather in front of Sydney’s Opera House, shouting “F**k the Jews” and “Gas the Jews”; when others, or the same ones, smear the walls of Australian cities – this land of refuge where so many survivors of the Shoah believed they had found, at the end of the world, a home beyond the reach of the pack – with graffiti proclaiming “Glory to Hamas” or “October 7, do it again”;
when, in New York, hundreds of supposedly pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in Times Square and shout at the top of their lungs: “Resistance is justified” and “Globalise the Intifada”; when, on the most prestigious university campuses, respected professors record videos explaining that October 7 was “the most beautiful day of their life”; when, again in New York, the man preparing to become the city’s mayor sees no problem with his future constituents calling to “globalise the intifada”;
when this call to “globalise the intifada” – which means, if words have meaning, repeating the October 7 pogrom throughout the world and wherever there are Jews – becomes a global slogan and the Western street competes with the Arab street for the title of most radical;
when the extreme leftist French political party, La France Insoumise, which on October 7 refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist group and wanted to see in the massacre of the kibbutzim and of the Nova music festival nothing but “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces in the context of an intensification of Israeli occupation,” when this group misses no opportunity to offer the support of its MPs to an influencer calling to “bring the intifada” to Paris and Marseille; to a rally where the question posed to demonstrators was: “Do you agree to continue to be this Al-Aqsa Flood that, everywhere in the world, floods the streets, floods souls, floods consciences?”;
or to those who threw incendiary devices in the theatre and terrorised an audience who came to listen to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; and when, as if this were not enough, these sowers of fire label those who denounce their seditious actions or who simply have a different view of how to make peace in the Middle East as “genocidal”, then the inconceivable happens; then, entering a synagogue becomes a mortal risk; then, you feel fear in your gut when your child leaves for school in the morning; then, rabbis tremble; then, believers hide their kippahs under baseball caps; and one day, ordinary men push to the limit what the words say; they take them, in a sense, at their word; they place bodies, faces, lives at the end of the words of extreme-leftist politicians; they acquire weapons; they train; and, on a Hanukkah evening, by the sea, in a place of joy and innocence resembling the Nova Festival, they shoot women, men, and children like rabbits, whose only crime was gathering to celebrate the triumph of light.
I know one must arm oneself with prudence before establishing a causal link between words and crimes. And I know the danger of this slope, of this moral butterfly effect, and of the temptation to transform speech into culpability and to equate a call to murder with the act itself. But I also remember Primo Levi’s lesson in The Drowned and the Saved, reminding us that massacres never begin with weapons but with words.
I recall Victor Klemperer, the philologist who analysed the corruption of the German language by Nazism in The Language of the Third Reich, stating that “words can be like tiny doses of arsenic”.
Or quite simply Jean-Paul Sartre, whose famous phrase seems to me rarely as apt: words are “loaded pistols”.
And that is why, in sadness and anger, but without polemical spirit, I invite all those who, two years later, continue to believe that one can play with words of Jew-hatred and pogrom without consequence to an examination of conscience.
For what happened in Sydney is not an accident but a sign. Given that the same causes risk producing the same effects, it could happen tomorrow in New York, London, Rome, Madrid, or Paris. In truth, it could happen in any city in the world where one is still frivolous enough to believe that words are just words, that slogans bind only those who chant them, and that hatred – when draped in the supposed love of an oppressed people – can be absolved of its consequences.
This is not about giving in to panic nor concluding that we face an irresistible wave like those at the most tragic hours of Western history.
But if keeping one’s cool is a virtue, turning away can be a crime – and wisdom demands acknowledging that there are moments when History gives warning.
Sydney is one of them. But one must still hear, see what is being said, and act accordingly.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher and writer. Translated by Emily Hamilton
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