For several years, we’ve been told that campaigning against the Palestinian genocide has undermined “social cohesion” and been terrible for the “psycho-social safety” of Australia’s entire Jewish population. Indeed, the Palestine solidarity movement has routinely been compared to or mentioned alongside Nazism. People opposed to a foreign government’s war crimes purportedly ripped Australia’s social fabric to such an extent that the government has convened a year-long royal commission.
But those words—cohesion and safety—seem to have magically disappeared as the far-right presence in official politics has grown.
Pauline Hanson, now the preferred prime minister according to at least one poll, has questioned whether there are any “good Muslims”, demanded that Australia become a “monocultural” society, and called for mass deportations, a blanket ban on Muslim immigration, and property expropriations of temporary visa holders (some senior members of her party briefly said they were for expropriations of all non-citizens’ property).
In her 17 June National Press Club address, Hanson was clear about what all this meant: people who cannot speak English and/or are not from “Judeo-Christian” societies should be allowed in the country.
Some of what Hanson says and proposes echoes various aspects of the German Nazis’ 1920 25-point program—only with Muslims/Islam, rather than Jews/Judaism, as a key target alongside non-citizens. That program included provisions such as: “no Jew may be a member of the nation”, “A non-citizen may live in Germany only as a guest”, “If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported”, and “[the party] combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us”.
The program also called for expropriations for the common good—although, to avoid any gotcha moments from the press about potentially sweeping attacks on private property, Hitler clarified eight years later (not nearly as quickly as Barnaby Joyce), that these would be “directed primarily against Jewish real estate speculation companies”.
Commentators and politicians have spent the last few years warning of the terrible return of bigotry and even Nazism. Yet many of the loudest voices demanding a crackdown on free speech to silence the anti-genocide movement have fallen silent in the face of Hanson’s racist far-right onslaught. Many, unsurprisingly, are as sympathetic to it as Robert Menzies and the broader Australian establishment were to Hitler himself.
ABC reporter David Speers described the Press Club speech only as a “fiery, action-packed ... display of defiance”. All the talk is about listening to the “legitimate grievances” of the people saying they will vote for One Nation. Widespread grievances about the Australian government supporting an apartheid state and facilitating the growth of the billionaire and investor classes are, of course, illegitimate. But as soon as the grievances tend toward fascism, they miraculously demand a fair hearing at the Press Club.
It is a gobsmacking situation, drooling with hypocrisy. Imagine for a moment that an elected official, at any level of government, asked indignantly live on air, “How can you tell me there are good Jews?” Imagine if a challenger for the country’s highest office demanded an end to Jewish immigration? Imagine if a major daily newspaper published a cartoon depicting Jewish secondary school students beheading a teacher for suggesting they read a book about Palestinian oppression?
Actually, the Australian newspaper did just this, but with Muslim students depicted doing just that, at a teacher’s suggestion that they read the diary of Anne Frank. Don’t expect Johannes Leak, the cartoonist, or Michelle Gunn, the paper’s editor in chief, to be hauled before a royal commission to explain why they are creating a hostile environment for Muslims.
Imagine a civil court found a Muslim man, on the balance of probability, guilty of murder and war crimes. Imagine he was later criminally charged. Imagine he was then let out on bail. Of course it wouldn’t happen. But so it is for the war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, who walks among us. Contrast his treatment with that of the women returning from Syria, having gone to join the Islamic State several years ago. Arrested on arrival in Australia, some have been denied bail after being charged with lesser crimes than Roberts-Smith.
Or take Australian citizens who joined the genocidal war in Gaza. In the last three years, Israel has killed more Palestinians than the Islamic State has killed worldwide in its entire existence. We know that Australians left the country specifically to serve in the terrorist Israeli military and have since returned home. Where is the concern for social cohesion and psycho-social safety when there are terrorist killers walking among us?
Protecting the feelings of supporters of the Palestinian genocide remains one of the most important considerations in Australian political life—along with tiptoeing around the words “racist” and “fascist” when dealing with racists and fascists.
The royal commission continues doggedly to dig up sob stories from Zionists who, to great distress, discover that some people won’t abide living in a share house with apartheid-supporting ethno-supremacists. As with proponents of the “anti-white racism” derangement, in Australia there will always be wells of establishment concern for the “psycho-social safety” of those who support Jewish supremacy in Palestine. The establishment will even allow citizens to join the conflict—as long as they fight on the side of the oppressor nation.
It all goes to show that concerns about “social cohesion” and “psycho-social safety” were bullshit to begin with.
