The antisemitism report is another pro-genocide stunt from Labor
Nobody is surprised that Jillian Segal’s blueprint for “combating antisemitism” is a blueprint for authoritarianism based on a pack of lies. We’ve seen this time and time again. People who are themselves deeply, passionately racist—like the US right-wingers who dreamed about opening fire on Black Lives Matter protesters, or the European post-fascists whose parties were founded by SS officers and Holocaust deniers—often claim to be outraged by antisemitism.
Not so outraged that they will ever try to build coalitions against fascism, support anti-racist politics, or consider the deeper forces that give rise to racist ideas and conspiracy theories. But just outraged enough to outlaw dissent against Western foreign policy, ban protests and deport oppositionists.
Segal, the federal government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism (and reportedly one of the most significant financial contributors to the right-wing racist lobby group Advance Australia) is no different from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or indeed the quasi-fascist government of Israel itself: hardcore defenders and perpetrators of racist oppression who will stoop to any low, and tell any lie, to crush dissent.
But this isn’t just about the extreme right. Segal herself might have the politics of Peter Dutton. But the centre-left are the true masters of using authoritarian methods backed by slanderous lies to silence dissent.
In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has banned the nonviolent group Palestine Action and made it a criminal offence to express sympathy for them. European liberal governments—such as the purportedly enlightened centre-liberals around French President Emmanuel Macron and the various German governments who purport to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust—have long equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, banned pro-Palestine protests and slogans, and established new norms of repression in dealing with supporters of Palestine.
And here in Australia, it’s Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party who gave Segal the most august title of “envoy”, empowered her to issue her deranged report, and who now will execute whatever repressive measures he chooses to draw from her recommendations.
While the centre-left parties around the world focus their fire on dissent, they do nothing serious to challenge the real sources of antisemitic ideas: the fascist-friendly ultra-nationalist movements and figures of the radicalising global right.
Trump, Musk, and their co-thinkers can posture as the saviours of Western civilisation; Albanese can grandstand as the champion of social cohesion and multiculturalism. All agree that the genocide of the Palestinians can go unchecked, that the complicity of the West should be covered up, and that those who resist should be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
While Segal—who considers wearing a keffiyeh to be an act of anti-Jewish racism—demands a crackdown on dissent, let’s not forget the Palestinians themselves: starving and dispossessed; maimed, bombed and shot as they queue for food and medicine; incinerated in their hospitals; mocked by their murderers.
By facilitating the crushing of dissent, Albanese and his colleagues have once more made themselves complicit in this ongoing genocide. No matter how much it claims to abhor racism, Labor—like centre-left parties throughout the imperialist West—has few limits when it comes defending the crimes of Australia’s military allies and business partners, no matter how racist the politics of those partners, no matter how genocidal the acts of those allies. For the Western alliance, authoritarianism and mass murder are business as usual. Segal’s report is just part of the cover-up.
