The real anti-Semitism problem in society is the way ruling institutions keep lumping all Jews in with the abuses of a genocidal apartheid state and the Western empire which supports it.
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By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
A Palestinian-Australian man has been criminally charged for voicing criticisms of Zionism during a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He could spend months in prison.
The Age reports that restaurant owner Hash Tayeh has been charged with four counts of “using insulting words in public” for repeatedly uttering the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne last year.
According the The Age’s Chris Vedelago, the punishment for this crime of political speech is “up to two months in prison for a first offence and six months for three or more offences.”
“It is believed to be the first time that potential political speech has been deemed a criminal offence that breached the ‘insulting’ law,” Vedelago reports, adding, “The charges are normally levied for using abusive or obscene language against police officers.”
You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the authoritarian dystopia that Australia has become than a news report about a man getting criminally charged for normal political speech with a law that is normally used to jail people who speak impolitely to the police.
These charges for speech crimes against Zionism follow a controversial assertion made last year by Australia’s attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus:
“The label Zionist is used, not in any way, accurately. When critics use that word, they actually mean Jew. They’re not really saying Zionist, they’re saying Jew because they know that they cannot say Jew, so they say Zionist or words [such as] Zeo or Zio.”
Dreyfus might want to have a chat with outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who just made headlines by proudly proclaiming “I am a Zionist” at his final press conference on Thursday.
Trudeau is not Jewish, nor is genocidal war criminal Joe Biden, who is on record saying on numerous occasions some variation of “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.”
Not all Jews are Zionists, and most Zionists are not Jewish. Zionism is a political ideology which upholds the western decision to drop an abusive apartheid ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization in historic Palestine and defend it by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary, and the majority of the people you see defending this status quo are westerners with no connection to the Jewish faith.
The cult of Christian Zionism alone outnumbers the world’s Jewish population by about two to one.
It is therefore wildly incorrect to conflate Zionism with Judaism, and it is also highly immoral. People who do this are assigning all Jews the blame for Israel’s abuses, when the blame actually lies with the state of Israel and its Western backers.
As much as Israel apologists shriek and moan about “anti-Semitism” when they really mean supporting Palestinians, the real anti-Semitism problem in our society is the way our ruling institutions keep lumping all Jews in with the abuses of a genocidal apartheid state and the Western empire which supports it.
That’s all the imaginary “anti-Semitism” crisis is, in reality: people conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. If you declare that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and then Zionism starts butchering children by the tens of thousands in a genocidal onslaught, you are naturally going to see a rapid rise in “anti-Semitism” as you have defined it.
It’s a fallacious narrative used to justify the strangulation of political speech we are seeing today.
We’re seeing that strangulation surge ahead in Australia with the McCarthyite witch hunt against pro-Palestinian voices, and in a decision by Australian universities to espouse a definition of “anti-Semitism” which is so speech-suppressing that it has been denounced by Amnesty International.
We are also seeing Zionism strangling free speech throughout the western world. German police are routinely assaulting pro-Palestine demonstrators. Pro-Palestinian journalists are being persecuted with increasing aggression in the U.K. and throughout Europe.
In the U.S., the Trump administration is working to stomp out pro-Palestine protests on university campuses while using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media.
Almost every day we’re seeing some new escalation in the Western empire’s efforts to stomp out speech that is critical of Israel.
Westerners need to understand that we have moved far beyond the point where Israel is a threat only to Middle Eastern lives: it’s a threat to us all, because the Western governments who support it are stomping out our basic freedoms with increasing aggression in order to silence all criticisms of its abuses.
Even if you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel and its western backers because of their genocidal atrocities in the middle east, at this point you need to start opposing them out of sheer self-preservation.
This isn’t just about foreigners overseas anymore: it’s about you. Your rights. Your freedom to voice your political opinions.
Zionism is a threat to civil rights everywhere. Zionism threatens us all.
Supporters of Palestine and Palestinian justice took to the streets of Melbourne in May 2021. (Matt Hrkac/Flickr)
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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Firstly, most of the Australian public would not know the meaning of the word semitic. If we want to defeat the very powerful Zionist Lobby Groups that dominate western countries like Australia; then we have to take the fight right up to them.
Zi0nism is based on racism. Why are we letting a group of racists walk all over us. Let us just get on with the job and call a spade a spade. Let’s tell the Zionist’s how racist they are! And do not be timid of the consequences. We could fill the Courts up for some time making public our reasons for opposing Israel’s racism and extermination of the Palestinian people, which is taking place on a daily basis. It never stops. Yes, we need these discussions, but all theory and no practice is useless. We need an even balance of both.
There is a problem in most western countries. We no longer have a prominent political left in our societies. Most politicians are shades of centre fascism to extreme fascism. Most of the globe seems to be tilting to fascism.
In Australia, the State of Victoria used to be the most militant. It is now the most meek. It has lost its political soul. Students from high schools to universities, together with unions and hundreds of everyday people who had a political grasp of what was happening in our society, had no fear of facing the establishment, and their strong arm of the law – the police, who now we have let become para-military through public political apathy.
If we believe in what we are doing is just and right. Then surely we must show we are not timid in publicly fronting the powerful Zionist Lobby of Australia and their political mates in the State and Federal Parliaments. Nor should we be frightened of being dragged to Court by Zionists’ false accusations. “United We Stand, Divided We Fall”.
Look what the Palestinian people are enduring! Surely we can make it even harder for the Zionists’ and the Establishment to silence us.
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That our very right to free speech is under threat should be made a foremost issue at the forthcoming Australian federal election. With, so far, around 1/3 of voters opposed to both major parties, we stand a very good chance of electing to both the House of Representatives and the Senate a sizeable number who will use their votes and voices on the floors of our Parliament to oppose outrages such as the prosecution of Hash Tayeh and other attacks on free speech.
Note well that Palestinians are Semites, too. Trying to exterminate them is Anti-Semitism if anything is!
“Note well that Palestinians are Semites, too.”
Yes, an oft-neglected reality. In fact, most Israelis would appear more European than their Palestinian Semite neighbors. And so, by a strange twist, it would appear that slaughtering Palestinians is actually anti-Semitic.
It seems to me that Israel and Zionism are handy geopolitical tools, primarily in the Middle East power struggles, but are also, more importantly, proxies for the larger development of control strategies and expectations to respond to increasing human unrest generally. Climate migration, economic displacements, conflicts over primary needs (food, water and living space) and the class war conflicts of the various inequalities are all poised to endanger the present power structures. The depth of hypocrisy and virulence of response to the simple recognition of the crimes against the Palestinian people by so many power centers can be made better sense of if that response is also serving the purpose of preparations for controlling protests more generally.
The cult of aggressive, arrogant and militant zionism has resulted in a community-based renewable energy provider have a grant withdrawn thanks to the fundamentalist activism of a local rep, who happened to be voted into the local council.
hxxps://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-04/ballarat-environmental-breaze-funding-cut-alleged-antisemitism/104973914?fbclid=IwY2xjawI_SiRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHckW1l9Jw9tzSjAQtoBPTgzfLlC7xfLOorXzlGppR_cls7_NS5Alik5hCA_aem_UCD03dFmgJggpDBk-kplPQhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-04/ballarat-environmental-breaze-funding-cut-alleged-antisemitism/104973914?fbclid=IwY2xjawI_SiRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHckW1l9Jw9tzSjAQtoBPTgzfLlC7xfLOorXzlGppR_cls7_NS5Alik5hCA_aem_UCD03dFmgJggpDBk-kplPQ
Benjmin H Freedman a wealthy well known US Jewish & anti Zionist opponent name has been written out of contemporaty US history.
His political involvement and inside knowledge as to how Zionism operates and his opposition makes fascinating reading.Worth researching.
Also ‘The Appollo Affair’ 1960’s where up to 600 lbs of highly enriched Uranium
went missing from US private refining company NUMEC & run by Zalman Shipirio, a well known a Zionist is worth a read.
American citizens will eventually be jailed for merely uttering a few critical remarks about the sadistic and creepy Jewish supremacist state of Israel. Soon.
The Zionist Power Configuration is overreaching and there will ultimately be a backlash against this over-the-top power grabbing violation of the First Amendment by the ADL, AIPAC, CPMAJO, JINSA, et. al.
Just about anyone in any position of power in the United States who’s ignoring this odious and dangerous suppression of free-speech, or actually supports it, is the enemy. Period.
That every law school in the country isn’t vociferously screaming from the rooftops about all of this is very telling.
“By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these #$@#$ @#$@#ers who don’t give a &*&( about you….they don’t give a &*&( about you… they don’t give a &*&( about you.” (the last bleep is all capitals in the transcript)
— George Carlin, “The American Dream”, so old I forget how old it is.
—–
You always did have to be asleep to believe it. And, we got that from the English. So, we can bet that the nation that never had the @#%^ to throw the English out is sure gonna have it bad. Which means that “free speech” has been strangled, and always was in a land where you can’t say @%#% you to the @%^% #$%#$% ^$$^@#$^ King.
Zionism is a racist ideology. If you are not Jewish and you support segregating Jews onto their own piece of land, then you are basically saying, “Yes, I agree that Jewish people are different than other human beings and should be removed from my society.” If you are Jewish and you support being segregated from the rest of the human population, then you are basically saying, “Yes, I am different from other human beings and I do not want to live among them.” It is no different than Nazism or any other political philosophy that espouses the idea of creating a racially pure society. If you are a Zionist, you are a racist.
I’ve gotten used to the fact that in America I have a different definition of “racism” from my fellow Americans. My definition is very simple. If you draw differences between people because of what you define as race, then you are a racist. If you hate people because of their race, you are a racist. If you decide you are superior because of your race, that by definition means that you consider others to be inferior because of their race. That makes you a racist.
If you call yourself a human being, and don’t pre-judge other human beings based on the shape of their nose or the color of their skin or the curliness of their hair or how close or how far apart their eyes are, or anything else including who was their daddy, if you just shake the hand of your fellow human and kindly say “How do you do?” …. that’s what not being a racist looks like.
Excellent! I guess i would add that if you believe there are separate races – you are a racist …
But racism, as in drawing differences between people based on their ethnic background, but without negative intent, is not harmful per se.
We need to focus on intent rather than linguistics or semantics.