Crimes against reality.

You’ve probably noticed that I don’t write much about Israel or Palestine. I’ll confess that I’ve always found it hard to write anything about that septic mess that I’d be happy to publish.

But this week I’m breaking my own quarantine because, tell me if I’m wrong, but there’s something suss and off about this Jillian Segal thing. About her, the report she delivered, and why it was even necessary.

Not because there’s not a heap of anti-Semitism in Australia. We’ve got all the bigotry you could want here, and anti-Semitism is just one of our 47 fabulous flavours.

But blessed as we are by having such an elegant sufficiency of racist shitheads, we also have a robust machinery for dealing with them. Just ask any random columnist for the Murdoch press. They’re forever getting their dicks caught in the gears of this or that anti-discrimination law. Segal’s appointment wasn’t about taking extraordinary measures to deal with a problem we had no other way of addressing. It was about a PM wanting to look like he was taking extraordinary measures because… I dunno… mean stories in The Australian?

Besides never writing about this stuff, I’ll also confess to rarely reading about it.

But in this case, I dunno, I couldn’t help myself.

I started paying attention when stories surfaced of Segal’s husband donating fifty grand to Advance Australia around the time they’d have been spending that money campaigning against the Voice to Parliament.

Segal denies knowing anything about it. Trust her, says Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke. Okay, sure, cool story, bro. But it still seems a bit fucking weird, doesn’t it? Paying hundreds of thousands for a How-To Guide to deal with your country’s little racism problem when your How-To expert’s husband is giving tens of thousands of dollars to a bunch of cunts who are arguably part of that problem.

As I say, I don’t read much in this area, so I could be wrong.

But Segal’s key recommendation—that Australia adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “working definition” of anti-Semitism—also seems like, I dunno… bullshit?

Is that the right word?

Not because you don’t need a definition of anti-Semitism if you want to bring state power to bear against it, but because Segal’s preferred definition stretches so far beyond existing law that it gathers up legitimate political dissent and tosses it into the racial hatred bucket.

It is possible, under this framework, to be labeled an anti-Semite for simply condemning a government. Not a race. Not a people. Not an individual member of another race or culture. But a fucking government, which, last time I checked, was desperately in need of some fucking condemnation. It’s almost as though suppressing dissent is the point. Israeli citizens in Israel protesting their government’s actions in Gaza would be caught up in Segal’s net if they tried that on here.

This is why this whole thing feels off to me, a guy who doesn’t normally like to think about this stuff.

Because now that I do think about it, perhaps the reason there’s been a measurable increase in attacks on the Jewish community in Australia may be due in part to a supermassive increase in genocidal attacks on the Palestinian community in Gaza by the Israeli state.

I mean… could be? Right?

I mean, it could be that some people are so fucking ticked off about an actual fucking genocide that they lose their rag and do something about it. Something illegal, no doubt. Because no matter how angry you get, and no matter how righteous you feel your anger to be, you’re not actually allowed to go tearing up synagogues or restaurants.

It’s a crime, bro.

But, so is fucking genocide, and I don’t see a lot of urgency anywhere in Canberra to address that. What I see is a trickle of stories, mostly outside the mainstream media, about sneaky Australian military aid to the IDF, which is the instrument of this genocide.

But, you know, as someone who decided long ago that his mental health was best preserved by not dwelling on this shit, I can say that, having now thought about it, I feel pretty confident that what the Netanyahu government is prosecuting in Gaza isn’t a war. It’s a genocide, using the machinery of war.

Smarter guys than me agree. Dr. Omar Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote in the New York Times earlier this week (free link)…

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

Now, sure, it’s a genocide being perpetrated in response to the world historical atrocity of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines crimes against humanity as a category of serious violations under international law involving specified acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against any civilian population.

The acts can involve murder, rape, torture, imprisonment or forced deportation.

So, yes, October 7 ticked all of the crime against humanity boxes.

But just as a random nutjob can’t attack a synagogue because he’s angry about Gaza, Israel doesn’t get a fucking gimme putt to lay waste to entire cities, and kill tens of thousands of civilians, half of them defenceless women and children because Hamas committed an atrocity.

Gaza is not an overreaction or ill-considered policy.

It’s genocide.

Like with the definition of crimes against humanity, the language is pretty clear.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. These acts include:

• Killing members of the group

• Causing them serious bodily or mental harm

• Deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births

• Forcibly transferring children to another group

The only act I can’t see evidenced in Gaza is the last, presumably because the IDF is not forcibly transferring Palestinian children into Israel, as the Russians have done with thousands of Ukrainian children.

The IDF’s just killing them.

And anyway, look, I don’t know. Could be that’s got something to do with this increase in anti-Semitism. Maybe Jillian Segal could look into it.