Peter Dutton’s opposition to antisemitism is of an unusual kind — it makes him want to silence Jews who speak out against it, while also complaining that they don’t speak out against antisemitism.
In December, Dutton complained that Victorian Labor MP Josh Burns, who is Jewish, hadn’t spoken out enough on antisemitism, despite a long list of speeches by Burns on the issue. Burns attended a joint media conference with Coalition Senator James Paterson where Paterson was to read out a joint statement because Burns had lost his voice. Dutton intervened to prevent Paterson from doing so.
Dutton then mocked Burns, saying “Josh lost his voice long before the weekend”.
In case you thought this behaviour was a one-off — complaining that a Labor MP isn’t opposing antisemitism enough while simultaneously trying to prevent them from saying anything about antisemitism — he repeated it on Monday when he ordered his manager of parliamentary business to take the extraordinary step of trying to gag Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and the great-grandson of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Dreyfus was talking about antisemitism when Dutton tried to have him silenced. The opposition leader’s excuse was that the attorney-general had dared suggest that Dutton had politicised antisemitism. An outrageous slur, Dutton insisted. To top it off, the opposition leader then invented a lie about Dreyfus apologising to the prime minister for his behaviour. Dutton’s opposition to antisemitism must be of a particularly refined quality that it involves both silencing and lying about Jews.
As for the charge of politicising antisemitism, Dutton has gotten up every day since October 2023 and worked hard, and very successfully, to politicise antisemitism, as part of a broader campaign to paint Labor as weak on national security, smear Palestinians as automatic security threats and undermine basic rights of protest and free speech.
Not that Dutton is alone in politicising antisemitism. Claims of antisemitism have long been a tool of the Israeli government and its lobbyists and propagandists in Western countries: to be critical of Israel’s illegal colonisation of Palestinian land, or its apartheid system, or its refusal to countenance a Palestinian state, or its human rights abuses, is to be reflexively accused of antisemitism. Now, even objecting to genocide and industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians is antisemitic.
Much of Australia’s commercial media, and the ABC, have joined in this wilful conflation of legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism. It’s at the heart of the ABC’s sacking of Antoinette Lattouf, with ABC executives blithely asserting to one another that Lattouf was guilty of antisemitism, without evidence of any kind or any due process.
Nor is Labor innocent. Before her departure to the crossbench, WA Senator Fatima Payman was rebuked and leaked against over her support for Palestinians. The government sided with pro-Israel online activists campaigning to destroy the careers of pro-Palestinian activists, to the extent of rushing in laws to protect them. Labor has repeatedly exploited the Greens’ support for Palestinians to demonise them as extremists. In NSW, Premier Chris Minns sacked a frontbencher for criticising NSW police’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests and demanded his MPs refrain from criticising Israel.
No-one, however, has gone remotely near the extraordinary lengths of Dutton to weaponise accusations of antisemitism as a mechanism for attacking opponents, fostering social division and shutting down criticism of Israel. Labor once accused the Greens of exploiting Palestinians in order to harvest votes. The accusation is far more aptly directed at Dutton, for whom the safety of Australian Jews is just another issue to be exploited in order to undermine Labor — even if he has to silence Jews to do it.
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