It’s a privilege to join you today concerning Mary’s court case which is about the most fundamental issues of truth, justice and free speech in a decent society.

Mary has been targeted by the Zionist Thought Police for her courage, her decency and her powerful moral voice.

As a university teacher of philosophy, I have special expertise and credentials in this kind of case: For many years I taught courses about famous court trials in which the same issues were at stake – in the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, and in the trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition in 1633. Like these heretics, Mary is the target of influential agencies who want to silence an important, inspiring dissident voice.

The Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) is charging Mary under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Of course, ZFA barrister Michael Borsky KC told reporters that his case “is not about free speech” because the central issue is whether criticising Israel and Zionism is antisemitic hate speech.

However, former Israeli minister Shulamit Aloni explained in an interview that the charge of antisemitism is “a trick” that is used to deflect criticism, and the Holocaust is invoked to justify everything that Israel does to the Palestinians.

My mother and grandmother survived the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. I grew up hearing their stories and it is a desecration of the memory of the victims of real antisemitism when it is weaponised by Zionists to silence justified criticism of Israel.

Today Gaza looks like Hiroshima after the atom bomb. In a similar context during the Vietnam War, Noam Chomsky (1971) said:

“With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realise that the war is an overwhelming atrocity”.

However, Zionists think the best response is to shut down free speech.

As Mehreen Faruqi, Antoinette Lattouf and Randa Abdel-Fattah have found out, you can’t criticise people killing children because it might hurt the feelings of the killers and their supporters. As Randa has said:

“The feelings and fragility of Zionists are used as a rhetorical shield to deflect from engaging with the moral and material reality of genocide.”

What is Zionism? Leading human rights organisations describe Zionism as an ethno-nationalist, Jewish supremacist, settler-colonial ideology.

But ZFA’s barrister Michael Borsky KC said “Zionism is about wanting a home for the Jewish people.” Well, yes, Zionism is about wanting Someone Else’s Home for the Jewish people.

The founders of the state of Israel were more honest:

The famous general Moshe Dayan, hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, said:

“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here… There is no one place built in the country that did not have a former Arab population” (in Ha’aretz 4th April 1969).

And the first prime minister David Ben Gurion said:

“We have taken their country … We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? (A personal memoir (1978) by Nahum Goldmann)

The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote:

“We must expropriate gently … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor [Arabs] must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. (quote in Morris 2001, p. 22).

Who’s a Nazi? ZFA barrister Borsky complained that Mary compared Zionism to Nazism. However, even if the comparison is open to criticism, it cannot be construed as antisemitic because it is not directed at Jews as such.

To describe Israelis as Nazis, whether justified or not, is a political criticism concerning attitudes, methods and goals. Indeed, the growing appeal to this comparison suggests that Mary is in distinguished company.

• In The New York Times in 1948, Einstein and Hanna Arendt compared the terrorists — later Israeli prime ministers Begin and Shamir — to the Nazis. Their Herut political party was the forerunner of today’s governing Likud Party.
• Professor John J. Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago who is one of the most authoritative academic experts on Israel says:

“It’s not just Israeli leaders who support the genocide. You don’t see any protest among the Israeli public. It’s shocking. It’s sickening. You have to file all this under the Nazification of Israel. They are like the Germans under Hitler.”

Columbia University. Professor Jeffrey Sachs:

“Israelis use the genocidal language of the Nazis — beyond cruel, beyond criminal — Normal talk among Israelis …”

Dr. Israel Shahak was a distinguished Israeli scientist who wrote an important history of rabbinical Judaism. In 1975 he said of Israel:

“ This is Nazification of Jewish society, and this can well bring the same calamity it brought in Europe, only a calamity to Arabs.”

Thirteen Holocaust survivors compare Zionist policies to those of the Nazis.

Jewish Voice for Labor, Monday 15 July, 2024

Holocaust survivor pens letter to IDF general accused of comparing Israel to Nazis:

Jerusalem Post, May 9, 2016 17

Professor Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, a Jewish Israeli academic and a former IDF soldier, comes from a family that survived the Holocaust. He writes, ‘ Israel has turned into a Nazi society’

Susan Abulhawa says Israel’s “nation-state law” parallels the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. They essentially codified “Jewish supremacy” into law, which effectively mirrors the Nazi-era legislation of ethno religious stratification of German citizenry.

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Israeli newspaper Haaretz writes:

It is not yet the Holocaust, but one of its foundational elements has long been in place: the dehumanisation of victims that took hold among the Nazis is now blowing in full force in Israel.

Gideon Levy on Piers Morgan show:

Can you believe that a Jew, a human being, can be proud of starvation of mass murder and genocide? Proud of slaughtering 20,000 children? Only the Nazis spoke like this. Only the Nazis were proud about mass killing and genocide.

J.S. Mill on the Free Press Mary said to the media: “I am a strong believer in freedom of the press and freedom of political expression …” These words evoke the most famous essay “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” by the philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859. He said, if you try to prevent opinions being heard because you think they are not only false, but pernicious and even immoral …

… this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal.

These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.

… [these are the] instances memorable in history, when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best men …

… and the best women, like Mary.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.