Clover Moore capitulates, cancels ‘Globalise the Intifada’ debate

Clover Moore capitulates to Murdoch media and Minns and cancels debate on “Globalization of the Intifada” in Sydney. Andrew Brown She writes about the impact of cancel culture.

What Comes After Words?

There is a special kind of cowardice that wears the mask of governance. It doesn’t come by announcing itself. It comes step by step, each step dressed in the language of security, balance, social harmony and protecting the defenseless.

When the architecture becomes visible, it is almost complete. Australia is almost there.

Clover Moore did not call off the rebellion. He canceled a conversation.

A ticketed speech at a municipal venue advertised as a debate about whether it is right or wrong to say a sentence. There are no weapons. No walking. There is no threat mentioned in his statement, no mention of police advice, and no legal basis is provided.

The words and the possibility of Australians hearing them were enough.

The Mayor of Australia’s most populous city has canceled a public debate because his tabloid campaign necessitated it. He later issued a statement condemning the tabloid campaign.

This is what surrender looks like when it should feel like principle.

But Moore’s cancellation isn’t the story. This is a symptom. You have to read the list to understand the story.

Tame, Kostakidis, Lattouf, Abdel-Fattah

“Globalize the intifada,” former Australian of the Year Grace Tame told a public rally. Mary Kostakidis, one of this country’s most decorated journalists, retweeted a tweet. Antoinette Lattouf republished a Human Rights Watch report documenting Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah has been invited to speak about literature at Adelaide Writers’ Week. I wore a T-shirt.

Each of these actions triggered a coordinated campaign of pressure, complaints, and punishment. None of them were against the law. None of them threatened a single person.

What they shared was so subtle that it would embarrass the institutions that are treating this as a crisis: Each person expressed some form of solidarity with the Palestinian people or opposition to the stance of the state of Israel.

That was enough. This has always been enough.

Capitulation and the Israel lobby

The Federal Court ruled that Lattouf’s dismissal from ABC was unlawful. The complaint that caused this did not come from the editorial management, which acted on journalistic grounds.

This came from an organized campaign through the same lobbying networks that had spent years cultivating relationships within Australian newsrooms, university administrations and federal and state ministerial offices.

The lesson the ABC’s capitulation sent to every journalist in this country was not a subtle one.

Cover this battle carefully.

Cover as approved. Do not go beyond the approved framework. Or we will make the call and your employer will answer it.

Abdel-Fattah was not invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli publicly recommended that other writers’ festivals also ban him. He wasn’t ashamed to say it.

He said this as if it were a reasonable position for a democratically elected leader to have: A Palestinian Australian writer should not be welcome at literary festivals in his own country for writing about what is being done to his people. No one in the federal parliament thought this warranted serious scrutiny.

bondi and t-shirt

I wore my t-shirt twice at Bondi Beach. It says clearly what I believe about Israel and Zionism.

On Easter Monday, eighteen police officers surrounded me. I was taken into custody and arrested for causing a crime. It’s not provocation. It’s not a threat. Crime.

Police swarm to Bondi Beach and recapture man in ‘F… Israel’ t-shirt

The Australian Constitution protects political communication as a right so fundamental that the High Court found it was implied in the structure of the document. Eighteen officers appeared not to have read this. Apparently the commanders who sent them didn’t either.

When Isaac Herzog arrived in Sydney in February, thousands of people marched to City Hall. A UN commissioner has already said his visit was a tragic mistake and that Australia had a legal and moral obligation to detain him. The Australian government granted him diplomatic immunity and he was covered by the state instead.

What the protesters faced wasn’t crowd management. Police used pepper spray and detained him. Demonstrators were beaten and pushed. One woman described being picked up and punched in the head while recording footage near the City Hall steps.

Police officers were filmed forcibly dispersing a group of Muslims praying on the street. Deputy police commissioner Peter McKenna held a press conference and said he was very proud of his officers’ actions. Minns accused the march organizers of refusing to move to Hyde Park.

A democratic march in a democratic city defeated by a state that decided that the sensitivities of a foreign head of state outweighed the physical safety of its own citizens.

The impact of cancel culture

Now comes the law that makes the temporary permanent.

Queensland has already passed laws that impose prison sentences of up to two years for those who publicly chant “globalise the Intifada” or “river to sea”. Twenty-five people were arrested under them.

These are not statements that have been found to constitute provocation by any court. “Intifada” is an Arabic word meaning uprising, used in the context of Palestinian resistance against occupation, which is recognized as legitimate by international law.

Antisemitism crisis. What’s real, what’s not

“From river to sea” is a liberation slogan used for decades in the Arabic-speaking world and by human rights advocates around the world. Under Queensland law, uttering these words in a way that is deemed offensive now carries a more severe criminal penalty than most acts of physical violence.

The legislation does not target those who commit violence. It targets vocals.

And above all this lies the legal and institutional architecture that will make oppression self-sustainable.

Jillian Segal, appointed by the Albanian government as Special Representative to Combat Antisemitism, presented a plan that the government has now fully adopted. At its heart is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which the Australian government has made its official standard.

The original author of the definition, Kenneth Stern, rejected its use as a regulatory tool and explicitly warned that it could be used as a weapon to silence political speech.

This warning was ignored.

Segal controls

Segal’s accompanying handbook, published as authoritative government guidance, states that anti-Zionism is an expression of hatred towards Jews and that describing Israel as a country that practices apartheid, oppression, racism, or genocide is antisemitic.

These are not awkward positions. These are the documented conclusions of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Under the Australian government’s now officially adopted framework, citing these consequences risks being classified as a purveyor of hate.

The plan goes further. Segal proposed appointing himself as an observer to media outlets including the ABC and SBS to ensure fair and balanced reporting. It recommends that charities, universities and cultural institutions deemed to facilitate antisemitism lose public funding.

A coalition of Jewish groups, including Jews Against Occupation, the Jewish Council of Australia and others, wrote that Segal’s plan to censor the media, defund universities and the arts and police political discourse would not make Jews safer.

This statement received almost no coverage in the mainstream press.

The press was busy running the campaigns the plan was designed to make possible.

F word

This is where it is necessary to ask the question that comfortable people prefer not to ask. What is the name of a political system in which the state bans speech, polices journalists, defunds cultural institutions that express dissent, authorizes the police to arrest citizens for words on their clothing, all under the legal guise of protecting a foreign government from criticism?

We have names for such systems.

We also apply these names to other countries. We haven’t implemented it ourselves yet, but the architecture is almost the same.

Democracies rarely die with a declaration.

They accumulate and erode, each decision being defensible on its own, the pattern only becoming apparent when you hold the entire list in your hand and read it from beginning to end. Protest. Tweets. Reports. T-shirts. Sentences. Sentences. Discussions. Literature festivals. Newsrooms. University funding.

The list has been growing for two years and has never gotten shorter.

I support freedom of expression… but

Moore’s statement includes a line that deserves to outlast the news cycle he wrote it for. “I have long supported the principles of peaceful assembly, protest and freedom of expression. But these rights must always be balanced with a responsibility.”

But this lifts the heaviest burden in the history of Australian civil language.

In every country that follows this path, every citizen’s rights have been taken away and, accordingly, they have been taken away. But the security situation. But social harmony. But the sensitivities of the moment.

But.

There’s nothing abstract about where this is going. This is not speculation. The legislation already exists. Arrests have already taken place. Monitoring is already planned. It is already threatened with funding cuts.

A government envoy had already told Australians in an official handbook that opposing the political ideology underlying a foreign state was an act of religious hatred.

I’ve been arrested twice over a t-shirt. 25 people were arrested in Queensland for these remarks. Antoinette Lattouf was fired from the national broadcaster for rebroadcasting. A Palestinian writer cannot speak at a literary festival in his own country. Debate on one sentence was canceled by the Mayor of Sydney because the tabloid press was running a campaign and he was doing the math.

What comes after words?

We learn in full view, in real time, with the open sanctions of elected governments and the silence of a press gallery that has decided it is easier to look elsewhere than to look at what they are a part of.

Each generation that has watched democracy being undermined from within has left behind the same testimony. We didn’t think it would go this far. We didn’t think they meant it. For a while we thought there would be a moment when institutions would catch on.

Institutions do not hold.

Antisemitism Act. Same shirt. Different stairs. Years of imprisonment.