by Geoff Vasil
The Jerusalem Post reported last week the Australian Government under the Labor Party prime minister Anthony Albanese had sent legislation to parliament “to combat hate crimes and doxxing, with severe penalties for offenders. The move comes in response to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents.”
A casual look at Australian news and politics over the past year shows clearly the legislative package isn’t aimed at fighting anti-Semitism but is intended to add legal teeth to the Albanese Government’s attempts to control both facebook and twitter content.
On October 9, Australian time, before the IDF had even completely quelled Hamas’s invasion into “mainland” Israel, pro-Hamas activists stormed the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews.” A single Israel supporter was stopped there by police before he could unfurl his Israeli flag and was detained by New South Wales police for the crime of supporting Israel. A later investigation by NSW police claimed the bloodthirsty mob had actually chanted “Where’s the Jews?” despite fairly clear audio to the contrary. As if “Where’s the Jews?” were some sort of attempt at Borat-like Judaeophobic humor rather than yet another, not much different call to genocide.
This incident set the tone for what the Albanese Government has done since then to the present time. A Jewish couple was arrested in Melbourne trying to attend a city council meeting on the topic of anti-Semitism because Victoria state police felt they were inciting another bloodthirsty mob of Hamas supporters blocking city hall. Inciting them by being Jewish in public.
Albanese’s foreign minister Penny Wong, born in Malaysia, a Muslim country which is very pro-Palestinian, although part of the ethnic Chinese minority there, has tried to walk a very strange path since October 7, visiting Israel but also the West Bank, decrying Israeli “war crimes” at home, almost recognizing Palestine as a state and generally blaming Israel instead of Hamas for the war.
The rise in anti-Semitism in Australia wasn’t addressed for months by Albanese, although Jewish families were forced to keep their children home from school and avoid public places. A New York Times correspondent in Melbourne “doxxed” the chat of a Jewish “creatives” internet group and leaked it to the pro-Hamas activists, creating a hit-list of over 600 Jews, some of whom where forced to close their businesses, move and hide. One employee of a Jewish business was kidnapped and tortured by pro-Hamas Australians because of this hit-list. When Albanese finally got around to broaching the topic, he had to include “Islamophobia” alongside, as if it were some sort of balanced equation in the Australian landscape. In point of fact his party was trying to court or at least not alienate Muslim voters in western Sydney, while the Australian Greens went all out in their attacks on Israel, stooping to old stereotypes and even talking about “Jewish tentacles” infesting all areas of life, in the Australian Parliament no less.
Following a disastrous administration the Australian Labor Party’s only real minority-government coalition partner is now the Greens.
The reason for Labor’s downfall is the failed promise of having a plan to deal with inflation, but also a real urge towards censorship and a total ignoring of the Australian public’s natural sympathy towards Israel and antipathy towards terrorism. The urge towards censoring all opposition was apparent in Albanese’s fiasco of the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament referendum, where the Yes campaign acting from within the Government called on facebook and Twitter (X) to censor and put false claims notices on posts with true information about the Voice. By censoring the opposition and calling his opponents racists, Albanese managed to turn a 60-40 vote in favor to an actual 60-40 against on the ground throughout the Australian states and territories.
Meanwhile opposition leader Peter Dutton of the Australian Liberals and Nationals Party (Liberal Party means conservative in Australia) decried the rise in anti-Semitic attacks and sentiments at every stop along the way since October 7.
Muslim violence spilled over into the Christian community as well, with a knife attack on Syriac Orthodox bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church of the Assyrian Orthodox Church in the Sydney suburb of Wakely. The bishop and his church have a huge following on the internet and in real life. The Albanese Government was quick to respond by sending police to protect mosques in anticipation of a Christian backlash. Not synagogues, not churches.
Australia already has hate-crimes laws to combat violent street mobs out for Jewish blood. They have laws against “vilification” and the rest of it. They are party to the UN convention for the prevention of the crime of genocide, which makes chanting “gas the Jews” a crime of genocide. The new legislation has a more sinister story aimed not at combating anti-Semitism but at settling personal scores with Elon Musk and perhaps to a lesser extent with Mark Zuckerberg.
The fight began when Australia’s unelected e-safety or online safety commissioner Julie Grant, who has an American accent for some reason, couldn’t get satisfaction from facebook or Twitter. In other words, they didn’t agree to go along with the Australian Government’s arbitrary decisions to censor this or that user for whatever reason. Furthermore, Albanese failed in his attempt to extort facebook with the much-tried but rarely successful “save our media” ploy. That scheme is where a national government demands facebook for reposting news headlines from national and local media. In the dispute with Canada’s Trudeau, facbook said OK, we won’t post your Canadian news, after which politicians in Ottawa and British Columbia blamed facebook for not reporting on dangerous and out-of-control wildfires. In other words, they want facebook to post their content but to pay them for the privilege. Zuckerberg rightly refused to pay Australian media as he did in Canada.
In Australia this extortion scheme turned personal. In the knifing and attempted public assassination of the Syriac Orthodox priest by an angry Muslim, Elon Musk declined to remove the video from X/Twitter, video which had been live-streamed as most of that church’s sermons are and already seen by the vast congregation. Albanese cited a threat to public order, fearing anti-Muslim violence, but previously had done nothing to protect Christians and Jews from Muslim violence. Albo, as he is nicknamed in Australia, was apparently so upset by Musk’s disobedience he went on air to denounce him as an “arrogant billionaire” among other things, generally lowering the tone of public discourse leading to name-calling by MPs in parliament–Labor MPs calling Liberals “sooks,” which is Australian for cry-babies. Musk more recently called Albanese and his Government “fascists.”
Between then and now Labor has been pushing all sorts of measures to censor facebook and X. Last week the premier of South Australia, ethnic Lithuanian and Labor Party diehard Peter Malinauskas, pushed legislation to ban all minors from all social media, and said he was blazing the path for the federal government to do the same by showing them it was possible.
The Albanese Government did nothing to make Jewish Australians safe for 11 months now and is pretending their new internet censorship laws are meant to protect Jews, or the largely non-existent local and regional newspapers and television stations, or the children, or everyone equally, including Hamas. Take your pick. The laws already exist to protect Jews but were intentionally unenforced to appease a small voter block in western Sydney and Hamas supporters at the fringe of the Labor Party. Then again, Albanese and foreign minister Wong have been pro-Palestinian activists for decades and have a kind of instinctive need or knee-jerk reaction in favor of anything Palestinian and against all things Jewish and Israeli.
It’s a hell of a way to run a country and foreign policy. Meanwhile the Muslim faction in Labor have broken ranks in parliament and as a voting block and will either vote Green or go with a new slate of independent Muslim candidates now forming at the national level.
This text consists purely of the opinions of the author and does not neccesarily represent the beliefs, thoughts or feelings of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Peter Dutton, Elon Musk or the Assyrian Orthodox Church in Australia.
Jerusalem Post story on new Australian legislation here.