Minns’ protest ban: breathtakingly racist, authoritarian, and must be resisted

Chris Minns’ ban on protests involves the assumption that preventing the killing of Jews in Sydney means consenting to the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. This isn’t just authoritarian: It’s breathtakingly racist and must be challenged, he writes Nick Riemer.

A week after the vicious antisemitic attack in Bondi, NSW premier Chris Minns has ruled that protesters opposing genocide in Gaza have the blood of Jewish people on their hands.

Given the seriousness and horror of the Bondi crimes, Minns’ responsibility to carefully identify and act on the motives could not be more serious. There is no shortage of possible angles: if he had believed that the terrorists’ crimes in Bondi were facilitated by the wider social climate, he could have named influential antisemitic figures and highlighted recent antisemitic acts.

But neither the recent blood-chilling pop-up protest by neo-Nazis outside the state parliament nor the spate of overtly racist far-right marches with obnoxious speakers in Sydney were even mentioned.

Minns could have highlighted the obvious shortcomings of the police and security agencies. If he were honest, he might even invoke some of the structural drivers of jihadist terrorism: decades of Western intervention in the Middle East and state-sponsored Islamophobia in places like Australia since October 7, 2023; These are factors that do not explicitly excuse the Akrams’ heinous crimes, but are plausibly part of the explanation for them.

Season opened for peace protesters

Instead, Minns chose to declare the inaugural season of a broad-based peace and justice movement in which many Jews prominently participated.

The top priority for the NSW premier in responding to the Bondi massacre was to ensure that there were no more peace marches, or marches of any kind for that matter, in Sydney, at least for now. His suggestions should make your blood run cold.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in NSW have demonstrated behind a ‘Stop the war in Gaza’ banner in the last two years. Free Palestine’ or ‘March for Humanity’ on 3 August this year. ‘Liberate Gaza’. ‘Palestinian lives matter’ or ‘Immediate ceasefire!’ They carried numerous homemade banners bearing humanitarian slogans such as their calls. or ‘Stop killing children’.

I have been one of these protesters many times. We also recently marched against the openly anti-Semitic far right. Minns thinks that people like me, those who call for peace and justice for all, deserve the strongest retaliation.

Against Zionists Keane, Riemer, Kostakidis. Huge test cases for Australia’s freedom of expression

Attack on fundamental democratic rights, media is silent

The dangers of Minns’ attack on basic democratic rights have been extensively analyzed everywhere except the mainstream media. ‘Here’s why,’ Sydney Morning Herald declares this in its latest marketing campaign.

Not once did the imprint express reservations about a wildly unreasonable and slanderous witch hunt against peaceful anti-genocide protesters; this will do nothing to achieve the stated goals of Jewish security or community harmony. reporter and the rest of the kakistocracy that controls politics in NSW are moving in line with Minns’ plans.

Minns is proposing a ban on protest marches across all of NSW for up to three months. The basis for the ban is the blasphemous claim that public opposition to the genocide of Palestinians is inherently a threat to Jewish security and must therefore be blocked.

This position has a clear implication: genocide must be allowed to run its course unchallenged. Another Bondi thwart for the NSW premier requirements Allowing the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Racism is terrible, it is disgusting.

Four days after the attack, Minns at the joint launch of a federal-state support package for families of Bondi victims in question ‘The attack caused unimaginable suffering for the victims, families and the Jewish community and shook our entire state.’ Who could disagree? ‘Our responsibility,’ he continued, ‘is to stand with people who are suffering, to provide real support and to help society heal, not just in the coming days but for as long as necessary…. I urge anyone who is struggling or in need to reach out for help. “The support is available and we want people to use it.” This measure is a model of the attitude that governments should adopt towards their own societies.

But there is also a vicious racist side to this.

Two years on from the Gaza genocide, not even remotely a support package has been offered to the hundreds of Palestinians in Sydney whose Gazan relatives were killed, dispossessed, maimed and starved by Israel with the help of the NSW government and business.

Minns did not offer them an iota of help, not even a word of compassion, offering only cruelty and slander.

Last FridayIsrael killed six people at a shelter for displaced people in Gaza. At the same time, babies continued to freeze to death due to the ongoing blockade of humanitarian aid. “These horrors can continue because we oppose them peacefully,” Minns says.to release[es] Uncontrollable forces in our society‘.

The security of the Jews requires the suppression of the most fundamental moral claim one can imagine: the claim to kill people. en masseIt’s wrong because of who they are.

That’s why we are told to be silent while Palestinians are being killed in Gaza.

That’s the price of preventing the same thing from happening to Jews in Sydney.

not antisemitic

For all the violence in this exchange, Minns’ statement was right about one thing: Gaza protests are indeed unleashed forces that cannot be contained. But these forces are not the violent and deadly Jew hatred that Minns believes. On the contrary, they are calls for justice, peace and an end to Australia’s complicity in Israeli crimes.

These demands were voiced by the most sustained and powerful left street movement we have ever seen. The strength and longevity of their demands present a frontal challenge to Minns’ politics.

They challenge him long term loyalty To the apartheid state of Israel. They oppose Israel’s reliance on the deadly NSW arms industry, which is directly linked to its attacks on Gaza (Minns was, so was he). in questionHe is “proud” and “delighted” to welcome the recent Indo-Pacific arms fair in Sydney. Perhaps most profoundly, they challenge the overt authoritarianism of the protest movement, which it has repeatedly despised, most spectacularly at the Harbor Bridge march in August.

It goes without saying that neither Minns nor others who blame Bondi on Palestinian protesters ever attended the Palestinian march.

They have no idea what they’re like. Jennifer Westacott, WSU Chancellor and former president of the Business Council of Australia. requested It was stated that the weekly protests on Saturday hosted ‘signs calling for the harm or even death of Jewish Australians’.

Misrepresentation is unacceptable.

In fact, the banners held at the rallies contained messages such as ‘Health, not war’ and ‘Stop supporting the genocide in Gaza’. Nothing justifies genocide or ‘stop arming Israel’. Some said, ‘Boycott apartheid Israel.’ ‘Free Palestine’, ‘Feed Gaza Now’.

Another sign read: ‘This is not true’, accompanied by a photo of an emaciated, starving child. Immediate sanctions!’. Children were a recurring theme: ‘I am breastfeeding my son. ‘The mothers of Gaza are burying their own’; ‘All children matter’; ‘Israel has created more amputee children in Gaza than in the history of the world. Labor Party…Stop your two-way arms deal with Israel’.

Even a cursory scan of the numerous publicly available photographs from the demonstrations will confirm this; these signs, overwhelming The protests have been continuing since the first day.

Participants could not have been clearer about the universality of their politics: ‘I support Palestine because I believe in basic human rights’ read one of the banners carried by headscarved women at a protest in Sydney. Another implied, “Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?” he asked. nobody He deserves the treatment given to Gazans.

It’s about humanity

The clear message was: As a different banner put it, ‘It’s not about religion, it’s about humanity’ or, as another put it, ‘No one is free when others are oppressed’.

Most of the banners were about respect for international law and the UN. Some, such as AUKUS, opposed broader government policies such as US bases and arms sales. Most of them didn’t even mention Israel. Far from Minns’ fantasy of a paranoid call for jihad, the ‘river to sea’ slogan was juxtaposed with images of hearts or doves with olive branches.

The diversity of the movement was celebrated: ‘Samoans for Gaza’, ‘Bourgeois British for Palestine’, ‘Aborigines for Gaza’, ‘Jews against occupation’.

A dangerous prejudice

Minns and Westacott think these banners are marred by a very small detail: teeny – the number of others is clearly – clearly – do not express the politics of the marches. Their prejudices and selectivity would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous.

They also feel that these emotions threaten social harmony. Minns says:We need calmness and unity, not separation.’ What he means is that we should be silenced by the most violent authoritarian crackdown we have seen in generations, ‘comfortable and comfortable’ under the genocidal auspices of his own policy.

as Michael Bradley wrote The political instrumentalization of the Bondi tragedy on Crikey last week, long before the victims’ relatives had even properly mourned, was obscene. In a less ugly world, bereaved people could mourn their dead without their pain being weaponized.

But if we want to limit the freedom of politicians to use tragedy for their own purposes, we have no choice but to respond. Minns’ public statements have made clear that he regrets the inconvenience caused by constitutional limits on his authority to ban protests.

For him, freedom of expression and the right to protest are unimportant. They will be cursed. But as more than 1100 people have written now In emails to state MPs, ‘demonstrations and marches are not an optional extra in a democracy: a state that bans protests, even temporarily, suspends its democratic character.’ The letter continues: ‘The proposal to do this is extremely worrying and should give us goosebumps.’ It is impossible not to think that this is what is felt as the walls begin to close.

Defenders of civil liberties must continue to mobilize against genocide and racism despite attempts to suppress us. In the wake of last week’s massacre, in which fifteen innocent people celebrating the Jewish holiday were killed, dozens injured and an entire community terrorized, the prime minister cannot be allowed to silence calls for peace, justice and an end to race hatred. All its ugly appearances,

In Bondi, Gaza or elsewhere.

Mary Kostakidis. Forced to defend against Israel’s war in Australian court