A fizzled campaign to muzzle free speech in Australia
JVL Introduction
In an encouraging report, John Menadue provides an update on the state of the campaign to dragoon Australian universities into adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The juggernaut appears to have been halted in its tracks. There are 43 universities in Australia, of which six (now seven with Adelaide – news is just in) have rejected the definition and only two have adopted it, but even these with the qualification that that debate on Israel/Palestine is not intrinsically antisemitic.
Nonetheless, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australian Union of Jewish Students are pressing ahead with their campaigns to discourage free speech on Palestine, so we shouldn’t expect the IHRA definition to disappear any time soon in the Australian debate.
This article was originally published by Pearls and Irritations: John Menadue's public policy journal on Tue 11 Apr 2023. Read the original here.
A fizzled campaign to muzzle free speech
Antisemitism, like all forms of racism, is a scourge and Australia has not been immune to it. Traditional antisemitism is not hard to identify or call out whether it is in graffiti, slogans or slurs. However, when it comes to debate over Israel and Palestine, what is or is not antisemitic is a highly political issue.
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The Israeli state is just making more and more and more enemies against itself around the world. Needless to say they couldn’t give a flying fox, but they will end up with everyone on the planet apart from Zionists despising them, not just for their inhuman treatment of the Palestinians during the past seventy years or more, but for their onslaught on freedom of speech around the world and their malevolent propaganda and demonisation of those who criticise them. And it’s ESPECIALLY malevolent when they do so to Jewish people.
They use the Holocaust to justfy their theft and occupation of Palestine, yet what they are doing will inevitably lead to more and more ill feeling towards Israel, and less and less sympathy toward Jews generallly and what they have suffered historically.
And playing on those fears – as they do – is just pure, unadulterated evil.