Australian state supreme court rejects Israel lobby’s “preposterous” ‘IHRA definition’

An Australian court has rejected the Israel’s ‘IHRA definition‘ of antisemitism as “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from reality”. The New South Wales Supreme Court ruling aligns with the findings of legal experts — and even the creator of the ‘definition’.

Judge Desmond Fagan rejected the state government’s attempt to impose a terrorism supervision order on a Sydney man for vandalism. The attempt mirrors the UK government’s move to treat anti-genocide activists as terrorists. However, unlike the suborned UK court system the NSW court has, at least so far, embraced justice rather than political lawfare.

Fagan’s damning description of the (non) definition was only the start. He went on to describe the so-called IHRA definition as incompatible with Australia’s established meaning, concluding that it is an attempt to “repurpose” the term to repress criticism of Israel.

IHRA — Israel lobby tactics

As in the UK, Australia’s Israel lobby — well entrenched in government — is trying to force the ‘IHRA’ onto all areas of government, education and media. Again mirroring the UK, ‘Labor’ PM Anthony Albanese has used the Bondi massacre – whose perpetrators were not linked to Palestine and which was stopped by a Muslim man — to wage war on anti-genocide protest.

But Fagan threw a spanner in the works when he ruled that the IHRA is “preposterous” if it is used to demonise opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza:

the IHRA proposal is detached from the reality of the common usage and understanding of antisemitism in this country…

…it would be preposterous to suggest that 79% of Australians are antisemitic because they disapprove of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism

The judge also turned his fire to the lobby’s tactic of trying to equate opposition to the racist political ideology of Zionism with antisemitism:

As an ideology of Jewish nationalism, Zionism is open to political discussion and criticism, notably on grounds concerning the rights of the Palestinians.

This is a blow for the so-called ‘antisemitism plan’ of Australia’s Zionist ‘antisemitism tsar’ Jillian Segal, who frequently treats the two as interchangeable and used this to push for the blanket adoption of the IHRA. Fagan was having none of that, pointing out that being Jewish is not the same as being Zionist:

It may well be correct that ‘most, but not all Jewish Australians’ regard Zionism as ‘a core part of their Jewish identity’. That does not mean that anti-Zionists are hostile to that majority of Jews on account of their Jewishness; only that they hold a negative view of a political ideology with which the majority of Jews have chosen to identify.

And he correctly identified the fact that Israel’s supporters push the ‘IHRA’ specifically to conflate Jews and Israel:

Its tendency, and the apparent purpose of promoting it, is to graft onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism, understood as hostility to Jews for their Jewishness, a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel.

Fagan warned the federal government that it couldn’t change the real meaning of a word by means of a definition that “fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite”. He said that courts had to work with real meanings and added a rebuke for the government’s lawyer:

You are treating all Jews as monolithic. It’s quite wrong to treat all Jews as supporting Israel, because they don’t.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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