None of this passes the pub test - The Shot

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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen when Australia’s Antisemitism Special Envoy released her Special Report. Well not quite a cold day in April, but I’m sure you get the gist.

It’s no coincidence the words of George Orwell’s famous novel on censorship and authoritarianism have been quoted against the recently released Antisemitism Envoy’s report, because Orwellian is exactly what it is. In case Australians haven’t read Jillian Segal’s report, the entire double-spaced, decorative 16 pages of it, let me attempt to give you a brief summary.

It’s largely, insulting dross.

It’s insulting for many reasons, the lesser noticed aspect being that the entire document reads suspiciously like an article written for the Australian newspaper. The usual ‘Leftie’ suspects are trotted out for inspection, while neo-Nazi groups and inflammatory and obviously racist groups like Advance, with Jillian Segal’s husband’s $50,000 donations, are ignored as being drivers of antisemitism. No, it’s the fault of the ABC and SBS, as well as the hackneyed tropes of universities and arts and cultural institutions, all of which are portrayed in Ms Segal’s report as hotbeds of antisemitism. The fact the largest group of Australians holding a negative view of Israel are Australians under 35, might have something to do with the pro-Israel envoy wanting to control university’s funding and bring them to heel, but who are we to know.

Strangely, the report labels itself as a, “policy oriented framework for government and the Australian community”, and yet it is totally devoid of any evidence for said policies and the Australian community. It’s a completely source free, statistics free, citation free document. Ms Segal is a lawyer and yet has attempted to provide a report to Australians and our Australian institutions about how we should live our lives and what we may or may not say and even, how we may say it, without a scintilla of evidence provided to back it up. We just have to take her word for it.

And it’s not just that it lacks evidence, it lacks specifics. It lacks clarity. Take this sweeping motherhood statement for example:

“Antisemitism is evident within schools and universities and has become ingrained and normalised within academia and the cultural space.”

Really? Rampant racism, blatant hatred of Jewish people has become ‘ingrained’ within universities and something called ‘the cultural space’ and is now running loud and totally unchecked across all of these Australian institutions? This racism in the world-according-to-Jillian, is now ‘normalised’ and fully accepted? It’s not that racism in society itself doesn’t exist, it’s the framing and exaggeration of this specific racism in these specific places that is deceptive and misleading. In which university or cultural space is this ‘ingrained’, and where is the evidence to back this up?

Part of the problem stems from information Ms Segal has relied upon to compile her report – information that is highly problematic and often, free of any independent evidence. As the past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Ms Segal has placed her full faith in a report the ECAJ has compiled called, Report Into Anti-Jewish Incidents In Australia 2024. It is this self-compiled, self-edited report by the ECAJ that not only has Ms Segal relied upon for her own special report to government, but that alarmingly, is used, quoted and referenced by governments around Australia and within our media.

In this non-independently assessed ECAJ report, political graffiti saying Free Palestine is yet one more ‘antisemitic incident’. Protest signs held aloft saying, End the Palestinian holocaust, are reported, written down and counted as ‘antisemitic incidents’. From speeches at protests calling for the end to a genocide, to people waving Palestinian flags or wearing a keffiyeh in the suburbs, scarf wearing, flag waving and political criticisms of the state of Israel are documented by the ECAJ and weaponised as examples of racism towards them.

In the ECAJ report, a protest against Israel’s war crimes is re-labelled as an ‘anti-Israel’ protest. It’s a slight slip along the line of meaning – an unnoticed, tiny twist of the narrative.
But those twists become larger problems. Because that anti-war/anti-Israel protest is then conflated in the ECAJ report to mean, ‘anti-Jewish’. See how easily a nation state is conflated with a religion? Right under your gaze.

The next slide along the line comes from turning the newly re-labelled ‘anti-Jewish’ protest into what is now racism – antisemitism – and before you know it, a public protest with protest signs about a nation state killing innocent people in their thousands, slides along the scale of meaning to become a highly personal, bigoted attack on the ethnicity of Jews everywhere.

This is how smoothly and cleanly pro-Israel propaganda manipulates reality. Tiny twists of the narrative, until it becomes something it isn’t and nobody notices or questions the unseen twists along the way.

Another criticism of the envoy’s report is that it is totally context free, which is much the same as Ms Segal’s recent interview on ABC 7.30 where a few minutes in, realising she needs to address the issue, Ms Segal pauses and very quickly adds something about “theissuesinthemiddleeast”.

Sorry? What was that? Theissuesinthemiddleeast? Oh, you mean Israel’s deliberate starvation of children? You mean Israel’s shooting of kids as they queue for hours for water? You mean Israel incinerating innocent animals, families bombed by Israel as they flee? You mean Israel burning families alive in their refugee camp tents? The Israeli forces bashing elderly people, ransacking their homes, blasting hospitals to the ground, killing, looting, raping, trying to obliterate an entire nation of people. You mean those teeny tiny issuesinthemiddleeast?

Similarly, in her report, Ms Segal makes mention of the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7, but simply ends her sentence there. “However, since 7 October 2023, antisemitism has risen to deeply troubling levels in Australia.” That’s it. There’s no mention of Israel’s relentless onslaught against the Palestinian people, no mention of Israel’s decades of persecution against the Palestinian people, no mention of anything untoward about Israel. In Ms Segal’s world, this pushback against Israel just seems to have, well …. started out of nowhere.

Pro-Israelis seem unable to acknowledge the basics of cause and consequence. Goodness, what on earth are these Australians angry about? What could it be? Where is this anger at Israel coming from? What is causing it? Why are people being so unkind about Israel slaughtering Palestinians and starving them and bombing their refugee camps and burning children alive and stealing their homes for the past 70 years? Who on earth knows what this mysterious pushback against us is about, they shrug as they take turns to count people wearing keffiyehs in downtown Lithgow.

The problem with the envoy’s report is not just its simplistic, unsubstantiated view of the world, it’s that it also lacks diverse Australian voices. Ironically, in her ABC 730 interview Ms Segal claimed to be looking for balance and a multiplicity of views. Did Ms Segal speak to all of Australia’s Jewish bodies? All of them? Did Ms Segal speak to mine workers in Broken Hill? Did she consult with Muslim communities in western Sydney? Did she speak to Indigenous elders in Arnhem land, or did she simply turn to the people who co-exist with her in her world, ask their opinion, and find herself chuffed they all agreed?

Perhaps a small insight into this insulated, self-fulfilling paranoia is revealed early on in Ms Segal’s report. It is both a sad and a very telling paragraph.

“Once unthinkable discussions among Jewish Australians about having a ‘Plan B’ – i.e. emigrating elsewhere in the event that Australia becomes an intolerably hostile environment – reflect the insecurity many of them now feel.”

This is probably a tragically skewed, extreme position to harbour in modern day Australia. How many other minorities in Australia have an ongoing and openly discussed emergency “Plan B” about escaping en masse from their own nation? Ms Segal’s words are an instructive insight into this mindset. This is what former Israeli psychotherapist Avigail Abrbanel refers to as, “trauma-induced Jewish paranoia”. We understand that this is driven by inherited trauma, but it is absent of any rational perspective.

Within the bubble-like confines of Ms Segal’s report, pro-Israel Australians live in a world where enemies lurk around every corner, and the walls have ears, and a protest sign equates to being killed in their beds, and the only people to listen to or trust are themselves. This complex, inherited trauma is why their perspective on Israel is so out-of-step with sensible Australia. It is also why they’re so resistant to any rational arguments against Israel’s barbarity – they simply never allow themselves to get any fresh air.

The problem is, psychologies like this have a nasty habit of getting worse if left untreated and unchallenged. It’s a skewed reality which our own governments are now attempting to present to us as fact via Ms Segal’s report. This insulated, trauma induced view of the world is being thrust upon the rest of Australia as we as a society, are told to live our lives through this twisted lens.
Free Palestine, is a political statement. Israel is committing genocide, is a political statement. From the river to the sea, is a political statement. Yet at every turn, the pro-Israel lobby reject rational thought, tightening the boundaries and continually herding any challenge or political pushback into an ever smaller circle until, as Orwell wrote in 1984, “Don’t you see the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

The purpose of the Special Envoy’s report is to restrict the words you use and restrict the palette you may think from until in the end, you are herded into a thought corner where a tiny minority with a persecution and an exceptionalism complex decide what you can say, and what your actions mean until in the end, Israel’s barbarism against the world will remain unchallenged. That’s the chilling sub-text of this shallow document. It’s not the nonsense that it spouts, it’s that it was ever given any credibility in the first place.

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