‘Antisemitism’, mendacity & zionist propaganda in Australia

Jan 4, 2023
Jerusalem, Israel-Palestine

Propaganda is a dark and devious art. It exploits ignorance to peddle dogma. It violates truth, logic and right reason. It is the negation of philosophy and science.

It confines understanding in a straight-jacket of faux dictionary definitions. Like a woke lexicon, it is precious, politically correct and distorts language. For as Orwell well knew, once language is unnaturally twisted, monstrous misrepresentation follows. And the consequences can be very dangerous and real.

Such were the wages of Nazi propaganda. It is sometimes alleged that there has recently been a recrudescence of Antisemitism. Usually this is a stalking horse for apologetic excuses for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and the global condemnation it properly attracts. This is a sleight of hand fallacy, citing a secondary phenomenon of the Fascist Right for a primary development on the Democratic left, with a view to compromising and confounding the latter. Accordingly, the contention that Antisemitism is on the rise in the mainstream is patently false and misleading. For as the scholarly Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism acknowledges, the rising democratic criticism of the conduct of the State of Israel is a clean, different thing from the marginal Neo-fascist return to the traditional politics of scapegoating Jews.

To speak of Israeli crimes against Palestinians is no abstract hyperbole. In 1948, Zionist militia broke out of their enclaves to attack Palestinian communities who had been disarmed during British repression of the Great Arab Rebellion of 1936-9, that had protested British imperial demographic engineering of the Mandate. Three quarters of a million Palestinians, about half the national population of the country, were displaced at gunpoint by terrorist militias and their threatening propaganda. They had been trained in `irregular warfare’ by British Army specialist Orde Wingate, deliberately shooting up Palestinian villages under `Plan Dalet’ or D, on the basis of long prepared intelligence. This Palestinian `Catastrophe’ or Nakba was inextricably linked with the unilateral foundation of the State of Israel. Given subsequent events, it must be recognised that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine still proceeds apace. In 2020, serried ranks of Israeli Defence Force snipers injured with fragmenting battlefield ammunition over 6106, amputating limbs and killing 183, including a young woman who had been shot in the head tending to the wounded as a Red Crescent nurse. The IDF boasted of its workmanship, claiming every shot had found its mark. It was all bravely done against unarmed protestors from behind the ‘separation fence’, backed up with a ditch and earthen mound rampart that was never breached. These militaristic methods of crowd control mock Israel’s claim to be a democracy. The repeated aerial bombardment of civilians in Gaza is a case in point.

Such a mendacious ethnocracy needs to misrepresent the truth and undermine free speech and criticism by lawfare prosecutions and the pseudo-definition mongering necessary to prepare it. The misleadingly named `International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ has been rolling out its pseudo-definition of ‘Antisemitism’ for some time to criminalise free speech criticism of Israeli human rights abuses and violations of international law. In recent times the Labor Victorian and New South Wales Tory governments have been seduced coercively into sneaking the IHRA pseudo definition, intended to criminalise criticism of Israel administratively and in our educational institutions, through their parliaments. Likewise, as Opposition Leader, the Prime Minister was obliged by the Zionist lobby to consider discretion the better part of valour and acquiesce in the pseudo-definition. In South Australia last year, the autonomy of the State Parliamentary Labor Party was federally quashed on the issue of the pseudo-definition, it is said by Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong. The SA Labor Party was ordered to endorse it and vote with One Nation and the Liberal Opposition in the Legislative Council.

This device is really just a toxic meme. It is not a definition. It is not an objective record of the essence of a received idiom. Its purpose is to stigmatise expressions of academic freedom and free speech critical of Israeli atrocities. The historical sketch in this article would fall foul of tacit and explicit Israeli denials of the ethnic cleansing initiated even prior to 1948 and continuing to this day. Traditionally, Israel has misrepresented this abuse of the 4th Geneva Convention by claiming that in 1948 the opportunistic attacks of neighbouring Arab regimes, actually motivated by territorial ambition and fear of the Arab Street’s sympathetic apprehension of the risk of genocide represented by ethnic cleansing, constituted an existential threat to drown the Zionist State in blood. This is historically quite false.

It is well known that the sleep of reason breeds monsters. Further efforts to roll out the pseudo-definition are to be expected, there where it has as yet not reached in other jurisdictions of the Commonwealth, to judge by last year’s precedents. Every effort to silence freedom of speech on this issue is to be contested, for no such effort will be wasted. Should the pseudo-definition pass, we will see a new Zionist McCarthyism abroad in the country. Any humanitarian criticising Israel will run the risk of being denounced, cavalierly, without evidence and on mere interested suspicion, and asked ‘Are you now or have you ever been an Antisemite?’ Freedom itself will be on the line, and it will be necessary to defend it with a free speech campaign.

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