En Passant

In Independent Australia I discuss freedom of speech amid calls from right-wing politicians and the Murdoch media for the Turnbull Government to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. I float a few other ideas as well, including the possibility that the new ‘anti-Semitism’ for the ruling class is Islamophobia.

Plus ca change. From the UK’s Daily Mail in the 1930s. Sound familiar?  

These latest Zionist untruths are a backhanded compliment to Socialist Alternative because fake leftists and Labor apparatchiks like Peter Baldwin know in the long run such revolutionary groups are attracting young idealists who want to change the world and who see through the lies of Zionism. This is very different to the Labor Party which attracts at best a few young careerists and hacks or turns the few idealists the Party does attract into careerists and hacks in a short period of time. Being rabidly pro-Zionist is almost a right of passage to greater things in the ALP.

As Omar Hassan in an article in Red Flag called Zionist students use lies, abuse to silence Palestinian solidarity activists wrote in August 2014:

There is evidence to indicate that this behaviour is a conscious strategy to undermine [Palestinian] solidarity activism on campuses.

Exactly, and the lie that Socialist Alternative organised this 11 March Sydney University ‘riot’, ‘violent protest’, in other words peaceful demonstration by the protestors, is just another untruth for that purpose.

Jeff Sparrow in Overland: It’s shameful to use bogus allegations of anti-Semitism to shut your opponents down.

If you support Palestine, and if you support free speech, I call on you to support Socialist Alternative at Monash University and across Australia in defence of Palestine, in opposition to Pyne’s higher education armaggedon and to join the fight against political repression.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne labels Socialist Alternative, with no evidence whatsoever, anti-Semitic. This calumny is the last refugee of Zionist scoundrels who cannot rebut the evidence of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. In fact recent analysis shows that there has not been a global increase in anti-Semitism but rather in anti-Israeli sentiment, based on the reality of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. To conflate the two is a crude attempt by Zionists to bury the crimes of Israel alongside the bodies of the hundreds of murdered children in Gaza.

Here is a short snippet from a good article about Islamophobia. Is European antipathy towards Muslims comparable to that first stage of hatred towards Jews, a hatred that culminated in one of the darkest pages of human history? Here is a link to the full article, On anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe, by Sara R Farris in […]

Me in the ANU student newspaper Woroni online today.

‘It is not every day you get labelled a violent anti-Semite. But that is effectively what Woroni called me and other socialists when it published a piece called Anti-Semitism at the ANU on 11 March this year.’

Click here for my article.

Sol Salbe has posted on facebook the following introduction and link to his article on allegations of antisemitism against the Left, in particular against Socialist Alternative. The article includes a discussion of the evidence involved in the allegations of antisemitism against Socialist Alternative at the ANU.

I am reposting this with his permission.

This is an updated version of an article I sent to to the editors of Woroni, the student newspaper of the Australian National University. They refused to publish an earlier version of what is written below. I have submitted a cut down version of this to the Canberra Times for their consideration.