HOST: Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week’s episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at Quillette.com and click the Subscribe button.

And this week, your host will be Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann, who will be addressing a pressing problem in her native Australia—the upsurge of antisemitism that followed the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 2023 and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed.

Now, this kind of antisemitism has been a problem in all western nations. But for reasons that Claire will discuss with her guest—psychiatrist and opinion columnist Tanveer Ahmed—it seems to have become particularly virulent in Australia. On October 9, 2023, for instance, just two days after the Hamas terrorist attacks, and before the ensuring Israeli invasion of Gaza, a large group of protestors openly chanted antisemitic slogans at the iconic Sydney Opera House.

And this month, two Australian nurses at Sydney’s Bankstown Hospital, named Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, were caught on video declaring that they would kill any Israeli patients who presented themselves for care. One said he’d already sent Israelis to Jahannam—an Arabic word meaning hell.

Claire and Tanveer spoke to each other in Sydney earlier this week. Here is a recording of their conversation.

The podcast player above will allow readers to listen to a preview of our latest podcast. To hear the full podcast episode, and gain access to all our articles and podcasts, we invite you to become a Quillette subscriber. To find out more, visit Quillette.com, and click on the Subscribe button. We look forward to having you as part of our community.

If you’re already a Quillette subscriber, go to the FAQ section of our website and click on How to Add Your Private Podcast Feed to Your Favorite Podcast App for instructions on how to access full episodes of this podcast.

Claire Lehmann: Thanks for joining me today, Tanveer. For our listeners at home, I’ve got Dr Tanveer Ahmed with me. He’s a psychiatrist and author. His books include Fragile Nation, The Exotic Rissole, and In Defence of Shame. Tanveer actually works at Bankstown Hospital, where nurses were recently filmed threatening potential Israeli patients, saying they would harm them and refuse treatment.

How did that affect you as a healthcare worker when that news broke? What did it feel like when you first saw the footage?

Tanveer Ahmed: Look, it was especially striking—largely because, until now, many of these incidents have come from anti-social, slightly deviant, rough types. You know, people who’ve graffitied synagogues or done other similar things. And while that’s still frightening and highly problematic, these were pillars of the community. One of the nurses had won awards. They were both highly regarded. Yes, they were young, but they would have been considered high-status people within their communities.

To see something so virulent and so public, in their hospital uniforms... I mean, I learned more about it within days, because I have coworkers who worked with these women on night shifts. They were just killing time, trying to stay awake. So there was a kind of context to it—they’re very young, both in their mid-twenties. But what struck me was that it pulled back the curtain on things I've probably seen throughout much of my life. It was a more substantial exposure than previous incidents over the past eighteen months.

Claire Lehmann: You wrote in your column that you were exposed to antisemitism as a child. You said that visits to the mosque were often filled with clerics waxing lyrical about Jewish conspiracies to dominate the world and to destroy Muslims. So you’ve experienced this casual antisemitism firsthand. Were you surprised when you saw the nurses say what they did—or were you more surprised that they said it in uniform?

Tanveer Ahmed: I was surprised by the nature of their comments, especially as health workers. They used the term Jahannam—which is hell in Arabic—saying, “I sent them to Jahannam.” Now, it’s extremely unlikely they actually did anything. So I think there was a performative component to it.

But to say something like that, in uniform, in an emergency department—that’s what I found especially challenging and striking. And a part of me hoped this would finally open eyes. There’s such denial in some communities, and we saw that during the era of Islamic terrorism too. I thought, surely something like this would force some recognition within the community. That was my hope.

And yes, as a health worker, I know you’ve written about this too—Australia sees itself as an egalitarian society, and healthcare is at the heart of that.

Claire Lehmann: That’s right.

Tanveer Ahmed: I remember, as a junior doctor in my first few days, going into intensive care and seeing three people side-by-side: a homeless person, a barrister, and a businessman. They all got exactly the same care. I remember thinking, this is a great country. This is something really special.

And in my entire career, I’ve never seen different standards applied. I’ve had to treat murderers, paedophiles—you name it. And I’ve never seen a healthcare worker act differently because of who the patient was. Actually, that’s not entirely true—some female nurses do find it difficult to treat paedophiles. But even then, they get it together and do their job.

So when I saw the footage, it felt like a real shame. Even among Muslim healthcare workers I know—people who might have strong anti-Israel views, and possibly even antisemitic views—I’ve never seen those views influence how they treat patients. I suspect it was the same for these two nurses. But the fact that they even voiced those opinions? That was a real shame.

Claire Lehmann: That’s really interesting. Now, for our viewers and listeners who may not be familiar with your background—your family’s Bangladeshi. When did you come to Australia? What’s your religious background?

Tanveer Ahmed: Sure. I was born in Bangladesh, which was part of India and then East Pakistan before becoming independent. It’s a predominantly Muslim country. I came to Australia when I was five or six years old and grew up in Western Sydney—out in the suburbs. We arrived in the early 1980s, when more immigrants of non-white backgrounds were coming in. Australia still had remnants of the White Australia policy until the 1970s.

So lots of Asian immigrants were coming at that time. I went to school in Sydney. But our family was a bit different—many people in my community were quite religious. In fact, many of the kids became even more religious than their parents. They found identity in a more rigid, Islamic religious identity.

Our family was more secular, though. I’d describe us as culturally Muslim—we might fast during Ramadan, we’d go to the mosque occasionally, that sort of thing. Then I became a doctor and later a psychiatrist. So I bring both a personal and psychiatric lens to this topic.

You mentioned going to the mosque. As a child, you don’t think much of it. Even the notion of a Jew was novel—I never met a Jewish person until high school. And I think that’s not uncommon in Australia, where the Jewish community is relatively small and tends to be concentrated in segregated pockets in Sydney and Melbourne.

So when you hear things being said—often outrageous things—it’s just accepted. And to be fair, a lot of clerics talked nonsense about a lot of things. So to some extent, we’d take it with a grain of salt.

But then you’d also hear those conspiracies at dinner parties—your parents would say things about Jews controlling things, or being deceitful. It wasn’t always virulent, but there was this ambient sense that Jews were somehow pulling strings. That kind of feeling was always around.

Claire Lehmann: Okay, we’ve published a number of articles at Quillette about antisemitism. Some of them are very fascinating and they look at antisemitism from different angles. I wouldn’t say some of them are very fascinating—they’re all fascinating. Benny Morris wrote an interesting article for us about Muslim antisemitism and there are those quotes from scripture about, you know, “search for the Jews to kill them if he’s hiding behind a rock or a tree,” and the reference to Jews as pigs, and so on. So we know those kinds of antisemitic passages are in scripture. But I feel like the conspiracy theories are somewhat different. I’m not sure if that really is part of traditional Muslim teachings. And a lot of what you just described now, with the vague conspiracies about control and deceit—a lot of that feels European to me.

Tanveer Ahmed: Yeah, that’s exactly—I think that’s a very important point. I think the nature of Muslim antisemitism has more to do with the history of antisemitism, partly from Christian communities. So if you look throughout history, arguably Muslims got on better with Jews than Christians did for much of human history. They’ve often coexisted reasonably well. Muslims do have a special place for Jews. I mean, the reality is the Quran borrows heavily from Torah-type themes. Muslims used to face towards Jerusalem for the first hundred years or so of Islam’s existence. They’re quite wedded at the hip—they’re seen as ‘people of the book,’ like Christians. They’re monotheists.

And I think Jews were to a large extent treated well. There are certainly verses where there’s some anti-Jewish tropes, but Muslim scholars would probably say Muhammad, by and large, only said things in specific settings where there may have been a particular Jewish group that behaved badly or betrayed him—or didn’t do what they were told, whatever it was—and he then acted against them. But he would rarely have spoken of Jews en masse as a collective in negative terms. Likely, as with many things, the Quran would have some verses that are positive and some that aren’t. So I don’t think the scriptural side really gives us the answers about modern Muslim antisemitism.

Claire Lehmann: Right.

Tanveer Ahmed: And if you’re really looking over the last hundred years, I think the growth in what we might call Islamism—which has huge overlaps with Islamic terrorism—has carried with it trends around Jews, Israel, Western domination, Islamic humiliation. I think all of those things tell us more about the character of modern Muslim antisemitism.

There are some interesting historical points. A hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire crashes. Then you have the Arab world in huge flux. World War II happens—and even researching this article, Claire, I didn’t know that the Nazis had an Arabist Arabic service. They used to bellow out antisemitic propaganda and they were actually seen quite sympathetically by many in the Arab world. So they had quite a bit of influence.

Again, a lot of the classic Christian antisemitic tropes—Jews are deceitful, conspiratorial, all of those things—they come from the Christian world. But modern Muslim antisemitism has embraced or absorbed them.

And a key intellectual here is Sayyid Qutb, who is seen as one of the key intellectual fathers of Islamism. He starts writing about Jews in a much more negative light—that they should be seen as potential enemies, that they betrayed Muhammad. He makes references to Medina. So he incorporates that as a broader, almost reimagined view of how Muslims should see Jews. And that’s been very influential as well.

Claire Lehmann: So Qutb is the father of the Muslim Brotherhood, and he did his writings in Egypt, is that correct?

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes.

Claire Lehmann: And he has been very influential in the 20th century—Osama bin Laden, for example, and various other people who have gone on to commit terrorist acts. There’s a fascinating book that I read by a writer called Paul Berman on the Muslim Brotherhood and the influence of Islamism. It’s called Terror and Liberalism. In this book, Berman argues that Qutb was actually influenced by European ideas of totalitarianism.

When Qutb observed that in the West, liberalism was schizophrenic—because in the West the government doesn’t impose ideas of what the good life is, and we have to work it out on our own—he saw that as incompatible with Islam. In Islam, if you want a pious population committed to the teachings of Islam, it has to be enforced by the state. So Berman argues that Qutb’s philosophy was a reaction against the West, and it’s been influencing people ever since.

Tanveer Ahmed: Yeah, I think that's true. Absolutely. I mean, I think—I’m not sure if it was Qutb or not—but one of the formative stories he tells has this sexual undertone. He’s on a train in America or something, and a hostess bends over to serve him and flashes some breast or something. He took this as a symbol of Western decay.

As a psychiatrist, it’s very interesting how there’s this sexual undertone to a lot of Islamic extremist thinking.

But you’re right—even Arab nationalism, which was such a prominent force after World War II, borrows heavily from national socialism and the big political trends in Europe at the time. So those themes have been very influential too.

I guess one of the big questions around modern Muslim antisemitism is that a lot of Muslims will say, even in response to this column, ‘No, we’re not anti-Jewish, we’re just anti-Israel.’ So a key question is: Are there some deeper views about Jewish people in general—their place in Western society, their role in the global system—that are independent of Israel but still influence antisemitism?

Because many Muslims will counter with, ‘No, no, it’s just Israel that we hate.’ But I think the evidence suggests otherwise.

You could also argue that Israel becomes a front for the antisemitism—that strong anti-Jewish views are expressed through criticism of Israel, which acts as a kind of cushion.

Claire Lehmann: Absolutely. The anti-Israel or anti-Zionist focus is a form of Soviet antisemitism. After Israel was successful in the Six-Day War, during the Cold War, I believe the Soviets were shocked and discouraged. So they turned to a strategy of demonising Israel as a way of demonising the West and the US in particular.

So these narratives of imperial domination coming out of Israel then dovetailed with the Soviet portrayal of Jewish people as bloodthirsty. We’re seeing a convergence of different historical antisemitic trends.

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes—and that’s what’s interesting. You could argue that modern Muslim antisemitism is a combination of all these European sources: Soviet, Western European, Nazi. It’s heavily derivative. It doesn’t really have roots in Islamic theology or scripture—not much at all.

Claire Lehmann: Right.

Tanveer Ahmed: And it’s right around that postcolonial phase where Israel and Jews take on a different meaning. Suddenly they’re seen as dominators. You could argue that Israel is essentially an expression of Western colonial guilt—initially supported by Britain and later by the US. So suddenly Israel is perceived as a Western outpost in the Middle East.

That’s why it’s been so fascinating to watch the sheer upheaval over the last eighteen months. Arguably, Australia has seen more institutional upheaval than almost any other Western country in response to the Israel–Palestine issue since October 7. Across the arts, politics, health—there have been consequences for individuals and institutions alike.

Claire Lehmann: Why do you think that might be? Do you have any theories as to why that might be?

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes, I probably do. On one level, we should actually have a more socially cohesive population, because Australia has traditionally been effective at multiculturalism due to skilled migration.

Now, it’s worth talking about Bankstown Hospital. That area of Sydney—South-Western Sydney—is quite interesting. Most viewers might not be familiar with it, but it’s a highly multicultural region. You could almost compare it to somewhere like Brick Lane in London, which has historically been home to successive waves of immigrants.

So, half a century ago, it might have been one group—after the Lebanese Civil War, for example, many Lebanese migrants arrived in the ’70s and ’80s. More recently, you see people from Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. For example, there are quite a few Rohingya refugees in that area. These waves tend to consist of lower socioeconomic groups, and the area remains economically disadvantaged.

When we talk about migration and integration, it’s worth noting that Australia really has only had one group that struggled to integrate: the Lebanese migrants from the Civil War period. They’ve generally faced more challenges. They’ve remained geographically concentrated, lacked social mobility, and have disproportionately high rates of crime, disability, and welfare dependence. And they’re based in the exact region we’re talking about—around Bankstown.

Now, I realise this might be a controversial view, but I think many of the most extreme acts—whether it’s protests getting out of control or recent antisemitic incidents—often involve individuals who aren’t necessarily Muslim, but rather come from more marginalised, antisocial backgrounds. They might live in housing estates and belong to lower socioeconomic groups. That, I’ve found interesting.

It’s possible that some of these individuals already had a predisposition to commit crimes, and now they’re just channelling broader public tensions. We see that dynamic in other types of crime too. That’s not to say there isn’t significant antisemitic sentiment out there—there is—but it’s possible that those who actually go out and commit the acts are doing so for reasons that are far less ideologically driven and far more opportunistic or unsophisticated.

Claire Lehmann: Right. So they’re just being opportunistic. If the prejudice were directed at a different group, they’d probably go out and scribble on something else.

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly. If there were suddenly lots of public anger about vegetarians, they might vandalise a vegetarian restaurant. I’m being facetious, of course—but it speaks to the opportunistic nature of some of the criminal behaviour. And that’s another reason why the incident involving the nurses stands out.

Claire Lehmann: Because it’s unusual. I’ve seen some of the alleged offenders on TV, and they look like methamphetamine addicts. They don’t seem like upstanding citizens.

Tanveer Ahmed: They’re rough as guts—really rough. And you wonder if they even know where Israel is.

Claire Lehmann: Some of the graffiti even had ‘Israel’ spelled incorrectly. So their knowledge of the situation must be quite limited.

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly.

Claire Lehmann: I wanted to talk to you about antisemitism from your perspective as a psychiatrist. It seems to me that a lot of people who fall into the trap of antisemitism tend to sit on the conspiratorial end of the spectrum. So much of antisemitism really is just conspiracy thinking—this idea that a particular group secretly runs the world, dominates finance and media, and so on. And that’s cast as sinister rather than just a reflection of cultural patterns, professional interests, or historical circumstances.

What’s your experience with people who are more towards that conspiratorial mindset?

Tanveer Ahmed: We probably learnt a lot about this during the pandemic, when there was a massive surge in conspiratorial thinking—about vaccines, governments, and various groups. Many of these ideas originated in the US, but they spread quickly.

There’s definitely a group of people more prone to paranoid thinking. And when the world feels too complex, people often reach for simple explanations—scapegoats—to create some sense of order. That’s their way of making sense of things.

This has only gotten worse in the online age. If we increasingly see society as a bunch of autonomous individuals linked only via the internet—and many are barely connected to real-world communities—then you get this phenomenon of people latching on to online communities.

Now, many of these communities are perfectly healthy. But people can also now find what feel like totally reasonable peer groups centred on pathological beliefs. Whether it’s paedophiles, terrorists, anti-vaxxers—you can find thousands of people online and feel like you belong.

The antisemitic aspect is particularly interesting. If you were to raise the topic at, say, a dinner party with friends of my parents—who are highly educated, mind you—they might say, “Well, hang on, half the people on the rich list are Jewish. They dominate Hollywood. They dominate Wall Street.”

Claire Lehmann: Yes, that’s a common perception.

Tanveer Ahmed: And they’d say, “Well, isn’t part of it based on fact?” They might genuinely believe that. We’ve even had recent incidents here—take Antoinette Lattouf, for example, a Lebanese-Australian journalist. There’s been talk about the influence of the so-called ‘Jewish lobby.’ And there have been coordinated campaigns from Jewish legal groups and others.

So you see how some people begin to believe in this idea of undue influence. And international figures like Mehdi Hasan—who you and I might not agree with politically, but is clearly a smart person—would argue that there’s a factual basis for these beliefs. If seven out of the ten richest people are Jewish, then…

Claire Lehmann: I get your point. But I think where that narrative breaks down is the assumption of a shared agenda.

You can take prominent Jewish intellectuals in Australia or the US—some are on the left, others on the right. They don’t necessarily share any agenda apart from a common cultural or religious background. It’s the same as saying, “I’m a woman, therefore I must agree with Clementine Ford”—which obviously isn’t true.

That’s where the whole narrative of control and world domination starts to fall apart, which is at the heart of the antisemitic conspiracy theory. I think where that falls down is when people get out these charts and say, “Well, these people are working in media institutions—they must all have a shared agenda.”

Tanveer Ahmed: That’s right. I totally agree. Often, they’re disagreeing with each other on very important issues, with fundamentally different values.

I guess the point I’d add is that while there may be enormous cultural power in a place like Hollywood, for example, there’s still a huge skew toward certain narratives—like Holocaust stories. That could reflect a cultural influence that is disproportionate. As a psychiatrist, I’d say the argument some might make is that that level of economic and cultural power allows other forms of influence, like dominating stories of suffering.

We live in a time when political power comes from proclaiming pain. People compete over victimhood and suffering.

Claire Lehmann: Right.

Tanveer Ahmed: And that’s what some other groups would argue. That’s why we’re seeing this big debate—Islamophobia versus antisemitism. It becomes a competition over who gets to dominate the suffering narrative.

I agree with you. I’ve been to Israel—actually through your referral, with Rebel Media—and what struck me was how diverse the political culture is. You’ve got so many critics, all these people shouting at each other. It’s a very robust democracy. Even now, there are huge critics of Netanyahu and his policies. That diversity really undermines the idea of a monolithic Jewish agenda.

Another interesting point is that historically, antisemitism came from the Right. But modern antisemitism—politically speaking—has arguably shifted to the Left. You mentioned the Soviet influence. That shift overlaps with this idea of Israel and Jews becoming dominators, no longer seen as marginalised “parasites” but rather as figures of power.

Claire Lehmann: Yes—left-wing antisemitism is often framed as “punching up.” As you say, Jews are a successful minority group in education and economic terms. The Left struggles with unequal outcomes between groups, because it’s hesitant to accept that different cultures prioritise different things. Even acknowledging the role of genes is taboo.

But I can look at two groups with different economic or educational outcomes and not see anything sinister—just different values, maybe a different emphasis on education, for example.

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly. It’s about cultural emphasis. In Australia, selective schools aren’t dominated by Anglo-Australian kids—they’re dominated by East Asian migrants. That’s not because of some sinister agenda; it’s about priorities.

But in certain political philosophies, that’s hard to accept. There’s an ideal that everyone should have the same outcomes. And when they don’t, some look for external explanations—often conspiratorial ones.

That’s something I’ve written about in the past, especially in relation to Islamic terrorism. There’s often a mingling of personal humiliation—feeling you’re being shafted in society—with a broader sense of civilisational humiliation. “Islam is being dominated by the West,” including Israel.

That then gets projected onto Jewish people and fuels the conspiracy narrative. “I didn’t get promoted because of some shadowy influence”—and that connects, symbolically, to the image of Palestinians being oppressed. It all gets bundled together.

Claire Lehmann: It becomes a psycho-spiritual symbol—Palestine as the ultimate image of oppression.

Tanveer Ahmed: Right. Even people who know nothing about Palestinians identify with them. It’s a collective projection of their own struggles. And if Jews are perceived to be at the top of a Western power structure, then even day-to-day frustrations can be attributed to “them”—even when it has nothing to do with Israel.

Claire Lehmann: What strikes me is how persistent these narratives are. To me, it’s absurd to say Jews run the media. Since October 7th, the media coverage has overwhelmingly focused on Palestinian suffering.

Tanveer Ahmed: And many Jewish groups would say the exact opposite—they feel shafted by the media. So when both sides think there’s a conspiracy against them, maybe that means the media is doing a decent job of balance.

Claire Lehmann: Coming back to your work as a psychiatrist—how do you help people break out of conspiratorial thinking?

Tanveer Ahmed: A lot of it comes down to belonging. We pretend to be rational beings, but much of our thinking is driven by tribal identity and emotional attachment to groups.

Evidence rarely works on its own. It's more like addiction—you have to show someone how the conspiracy thinking is hurting them. Has it damaged their relationships? Made them unhappy? You chip away at that, and then you try to create new sites of belonging.

If all their friends are conspiracy theorists, it’s hard to change. It’s like getting someone off marijuana when all their mates are stoners. You need to give them something else to belong to.

Claire Lehmann: Yeah, and I saw something interesting recently. Kanye West tweeted something like, “Actually, I’m not a Nazi,” and then followed it with “Much love to Adam Sandler.” Apparently Sandler has been talking to him.

Tanveer Ahmed: That probably didn’t come from new facts—it came from an emotional connection. A relationship. That has more power to change someone’s mind than data ever could.

You can give rational information after the emotional connection has been made. That’s why facts rarely work in conspiracy circles on their own—like with vaccine sceptics. You can’t just show them the science.

Claire Lehmann: So you have to listen, ask questions, create a safe space?

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly. And remember, people are drawn to these beliefs because they feel sacred. Even secular people are always finding new versions of the sacred—purity, fear of modernity, fear of science.

These beliefs need slow, steady unwinding. You can’t just hit them with logic. It has to happen on an emotional and symbolic level.

Claire Lehmann: I saw Elon Musk tweeting some anti-vax stuff recently. He’s planning to update Grok, his AI tool, because right now it says he’s the biggest spreader of misinformation on Twitter. I’m a fan of what he’s done with Tesla and SpaceX, but I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of him—and his father developed very strange beliefs, even dabbling in witchcraft.

Is there any way to prevent that from happening to us, if it’s in our genes?

Tanveer Ahmed: I think it’s more about making sure we have ways of expressing our non-rational side in a healthy way. We need it—for wonder, for the sacred, for storytelling.

Jordan Peterson, Carl Jung—these thinkers have long talked about archetypes and metaphysical themes. They exist in everyone’s lives. The goal isn’t to eliminate irrational thinking. It’s to channel it in healthy ways.

Claire Lehmann: Through art, for example?

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly. Or through private groups, or spiritual practices. The problem is when these impulses start affecting public outcomes—like health or education—then we need a different kind of intervention.

But we shouldn’t aim to eradicate irrationality altogether. It’s part of what makes us human.

Claire Lehmann: So we need to lean into healthier forms of expression, not fear irrationality, but learn how to manage it.

Tanveer Ahmed: Yes. Otherwise life becomes sterile. A lot of what we’re talking about is a reaction against an overly rational, overly scientific society. People feel alienated.

Claire Lehmann: Well, that’s a topic for another day. But thank you, Tanveer, for finishing on such a fascinating note—and for sharing your insights from psychiatry, as well as from your own experience as someone who migrated to Australia from a Muslim background. It’s been a pleasure.