Antisemitism training. Labor’s march to authoritarianism

From curbing protests to controlling what can be said, state and Federal Labor governments are becoming authoritarian. Next up is the thought police entering the campus. Nick Riemer reports.

In December, the NSW Labor government gave itself the power to ban street marches indefinitely. We saw what this meant on February 9, when violent police attacked, slapped, beat, and arrested protesters against Herzog’s visit.

In January, the federal ALP introduced new hate speech laws that give the government unprecedented discretion to criminalize speech and groups it objects to. Now, taking another step on its authoritarian path, the federal government is reportedly pushing ahead with plans for political education for Australian university staff.

According to a few last reportsThe federal government has agreed that ‘antisemitism education’ will be a ‘key’ area in which universities’ response to antisemitism will be assessed. It seems that university employees will need to be brainwashed into the ideology of the pro-Israel lobby, which defines Zionism and Judaism and regards critics of Israel as possibly anti-Semites.

The education will include ‘an understanding of the Jewish people, their commitment to Israel, and their identity beyond faith’; is the characteristically vague statement of Jillian Segal, the ‘Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism’ who is responsible for the government’s ‘Antisemitism report card’ scheme.

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

thought police

Compulsory education in a political ideology befits a police state, not a conceptual democracy; A status that Minns, Albanians and the rest of the political establishment have undermined like never before them.

Amid the uproar over Herzog’s visit, the move did not receive the controversy it deserved. Requiring university staff to be ‘trained’ in Israeli apartheid ideology is as unacceptable as requiring training in South African apartheid or Hindu supremacy.

Compulsory education on any ideology (Zionism, fascism, liberalism) is a heavy blow to the independence of the university.

Segal’s plan was harshly criticized by progressives in politics. Jewish organizationsbut it has the support of the entire Zionist establishment and major parties.

Stop free inquiry

The plan was originally conceived in mid-2025 but was put on hold after Segal was discredited. revelations His family’s connections to the far-right, anti-immigrant group Advance through generous donations. Now the ALP appears to be implementing this. The purpose of the education provided under the guise of combating compulsory antisemitism is clearly to further attack opponents of genocide in higher education.

This measure demonstrates a clear underestimation of the fundamental role of universities in a so-called liberal society; the necessary cliché that the campus is a place where controversial ideas can be expressed and debated, no matter what powerful political actors it alienates. Academic freedom is an ideal, not a reality, but it is nevertheless a fundamental principle of true intellectual work.

The extent to which it is observed is indicative of the general state of democracy in a country.

Little is currently known about how antisemitism education will work in practice. Segal’s plot is – no doubt deliberately – extremely vague. Whatever form it takes, education is designed to elevate anti-Semitic hatred, which specifically deserves redress, above all other forms of racism – what other form of racism has its own education? – and to reinforce the Zionists’ chauvinist insistence that they are the only Jews worthy of the name.

Both intentions are deeply racist.

It is also unclear how education will be evaluated. We have no knowledge of what the consequences will be for many university staff who refuse to subscribe to Zionist doctrine. We also have no idea the magnitude of the financial penalties imposed on non-compliant universities, which Segal has implemented in a very Trumpian manner. wants to apply. Accordingly Times Higher EducationThey will be ‘important’.

to Trump’s right

The current US administration has already mandated mass student education designed to denounce Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic. Australia’s decision to make a similar offer for university staff puts Albanese and his government to the right of Trump.

The government appointed Greg Craven, the former VC of the Australian Catholic University, as political commissioner responsible for education and other elements of Segal’s ‘report card’ process.

Craven downplayed the idea that cracking down on anti-Zionist rhetoric could pose any threat to civil liberties. The thing is, it writesIt is basically a ‘national defence’. For example, Albanese’s new hate speech laws are needed because our current legal and constitutional regulations

It is based on the assumption that our community faces no lethal external or internal threats.

Read again. Craven thinks we’re actually at war. This means that we must be the ones to suspend the basic democratic norms we hold dear, otherwise the jihadists will do it for us. He thinks pro-Palestinian critics of hate speech laws are spreading a “morally bankrupt intellectual current.”

‘For Louise Adler, several decades of house arrest were attractive,’ he writes. This is the kind of right-wing trolling that equips whoever the ALP will entrust with the future of academic freedom in Australia in 2026.

University leaders cannot be trusted

Mass challenge to education is the only possible response. University officials simply cannot be trusted to back down. They have made it clear that they are extremely willing to turn their institutions into Zionist propaganda mills. Universities Australia welcomed Segal’s recommendations, first made in July; The supine Group of Eight did not make even the slightest protest against the political education proposal.

However, education will create serious headaches for university administrators. But far from protesting, they may even welcome the opportunity to discipline pro-Palestinian staff who are often at the forefront of union and other progressive campus activism. The wanton purge of academics at Macquarie University last year were disproportionately targeted Palestine supporters, union activists and women.

Many Vice-Chancellors and their deputies are more than willing to sacrifice wholesale higher education at any cost, as demonstrated by their decades of cuts and austerity in the sector. The rewards are the prestige and salary that come with a career in top-level university administration.

In this year’s Australia Day honors, Professor Annamarie Jagose, Chancellor of the University of Sydney, was awarded an Order of Australia medal for ‘service to higher education’. He wasn’t the only university administrator to receive a gong. To now give this honor to the second-highest office holder in Sydney, who has led the crackdown on anti-genocide activism, is not comforting, and it is hard not to read it as a federal decision.

It is a reward for the university’s political and ideological readiness to serve the genocide cause.

Police state on campus

Not content with praising Israel’s bomb-signing arch-terrorist, Albanese is also destroying the conceptual independence of the university system, imposing a political standard to which teaching and administrative staff must comply, and placing campuses in the hands of a far-right lobby that waters down the atrocities at Bondi at all costs.

After Bondi, no authoritarian bridge seems too far away for the ALP and the Coalition. Pushing through dangerous new frontiers of political repression will be the primary legacy of Anthony Albanese and his Labor colleagues. His reforms threaten to fundamentally change the character of society, which will become more autocratic, more racist, less rational and less free.

Everyone who supports the reckless and bankrupt Labor Party is responsible.

During the genocide, universities played the role of a testing ground for repressive policies that soon began to be implemented more widely. Before the NSW government restricted street protests, Australian Vice-Chancellors were also restricting protests on campus. The federal government’s hate speech laws were prefigured by crackdowns on anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian speech at universities.

Under their so-called ‘liberal’ leadership, campuses have continually experimented with later features of the Australian police state. Once Zionist political education became established in universities,

There is nothing to prevent it from spreading more widely.

“Globalize the intifada.” Banning words is not the way to stop hate