The attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach near Sydney (the capital of New South Wales), was horrific: fifteen people were killed (not including the perps) and 40 injured. It was clearly a terrorist attack designed to kill Jews, putting the lie that this kind of violence is “anti-Zionist” rather than antisemitic.
Australian Jews have been warning for a while that something like this could happen, as antisemitism is not rare in the country and there have been plenty of anti-Israel demonstrations. Further, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been criticized for not doing enough to combat the growing antisemitism in his country.
Now the PM and the state of New South Wakes are trying to do something, by banning certain forms of “hate speech”. But it’s too little and too late, and banning “hate speech” that doesn’t threaten to create imminent and predictable violence won’t work. (This kind of “hate speech” is, in my view, properly permitted under the U.S.’s First Amendment.)
Click below to read the story from the Times of Israel:
Excerpts:
The Australian state of New South Wales is planning to ban “Globalize the intifada” chants, according to a Saturday BBC report, amid a crackdown on “hateful” rhetoric and slogans in the wake of Sunday’s devastating terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah event.
New South Wales is home to Sydney and its iconic Bondi Beach, where 15 people were killed and dozens wounded by two gunmen who opened fire on a crowd celebrating the Jewish holiday.
. . . .The mass shooting was Australia’s worst in nearly 30 years and is being investigated as an act of terrorism targeting Jews. Authorities have ramped up patrols and policing across the country to prevent further antisemitic violence.
Since the attack, New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has said he plans to convene the state’s parliament and pass stricter hate speech and incitement laws.
According to the BBC, Minns is looking to classify the “Globalize the intifada” chant, popular among anti-Israel activists, as illegal hate speech, and aims to encourage a “summer of calm,” without mass anti-Israel demonstrations.
Critics point in particular to a now-infamous protest in Sydney held a few days after October 7, 2023, where video footage appeared to show demonstrators celebrating the attack and chanting “gas the Jews” and “f— the Jews,” rhetoric they say foreshadowed later acts of violence.
However, New South Wales police later claimed there was no evidence of the chant. The pro-Palestinian rally, which gathered over 1,000 people, also included the burning of an Israeli flag and the firing of several flares.
“Foreshadowing” apparently means that the chants occurred before the violence, and presumably quite a while before. Under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, such chants would be legal. They’re prohibited only if they are likely to involve either “fighting words” or to create “imminent and predictable violence”. As Wikipedia says in its article on exceptions to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech:
Hate speech is not a general exception to First Amendment protection. Per Wisconsin v. Mitchell, hate crime sentence enhancements do not violate First Amendment protections because they do not criminalize speech itself, but rather use speech as evidence of motivation, which is constitutionally permissible.
. . . The Supreme Court has held that “advocacy of the use of force” is unprotected when it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action”.
A bit more from the TOI:
Under pressure from critics who say his center-left government has not done enough to curb a surge in antisemitism, the prime minister has vowed to strengthen hate laws in the wake of the massacre.
“We can’t be in a position where we see a repeat of Sunday. We need to do everything within our power to make that change,” Minns told reporters.
As I implied, banning “hate speech”, which is a slippery slope if ever there was one, is not the way to go in this case—not if Australia wants to have free speech like the U.S. does. Now you can argue that the U.S. is too permissive, or that Australia, with its particular situation, needs hate speech laws that America doesn’t have.
That said, I don’t think banning “globalize the intifada”—or perhaps “From the river to the sea. . . “, which could be construed as hate speech, and certainly “Gas the Jews—will reduce the amount of antisemitism, or the frequency of antisemitic acts, in Australia. All that will do is drive the antisemitism underground, but also prevent us from knowing who holds those views since they can’t espouse them publicly. And yes, I would even favor the already-conferred right of people to stand in the middle of a public park (or the quad at the University of Chicago as well as at public universities) and shout “Gas the Jews.” That isn’t liable to lead to imminent lawless action on the part of the targets.
And, of course, “hate speech” is very often subjective. Criticism of the tenets of Islam, for example, can be deemed “Islamophobic hate speech.” Calls for banning trans-identified males from competing in women’s sports can be deemed “transphobic”. But in both cases there can be no palpable hate, but simply the desire to discuss rights and harms.
How do you stop antisemitism in Australia without banning “hate speech,” then? Counter speech is a good way, though it’s not guaranteed to work. But for sure banning “hate speech” is not going to reduce antisemitism in Australia. What it will do is reduce the frequency of publicly expressed antisemitic sentiments. That is not the same thing.
h/t: Peggy
Here is the Premier of New South Wales saying: “We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the U.S., and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”
The counter would be that not allowing groups to criticise each other means that tensions build up and cannot be resolved. Plus, of course, the police always play favourites and different groups are inevitably treated differently.
And it’s not as if the U.S. isn’t multicultural, either.
I am really not sure what is the correct path on this issue. Public hate speech has a long history of whipping up dangerous movements and acts. When you have potentially billions of people on one side and at most 15 millions on the other the question of volume becomes apparent. Sometimes practicality is more important than high horse ideals…
Is there any evidence that the father-son terrorist pair expressed their hatred before shooting all those people? Or that they were influenced by antisemitic speech produced in Australia? The crimes were horrible, but the connection to hate speech expressed in Australia isn’t obvious.
Here in Canadaland the usual suspects are using “Globalize the intifada” in its purest form: not to inspire their violent comrades, but to intimidate their opponents (in this case, journalists). It’s just a game to these people.
https://x.com/jonkay/status/2002267955174814006
It’s a game to which people? Jews or Islamists? As for shouts of “Globalize the intifida”, we’d do well to believe people mean this when they say it.
Feckless Canadian journalists in Canada use “globalize the intifada” against their enemies in Canadian journalism. Pure intramural conflict. You can tell it’s not serious because when caught out they retreat from the bailey to the motte.
https://x.com/NoLore/status/2002434674229194923
I think this is right on track with the objectives of destabilization.
The resultant crisis precipitates drastic measures.
Those measures clearly will trample on human rights but only as far as they will promote the “Common Good” – defined by an Elect leadership, tasked with repair of the world.
IMHO freedom and the right to change one’s mind necessitates unfettered speech (correcting for time and place), in particular parrhesia.
The best-known intifada, of 2000-2003, emphasized murder attacks on public venues and public transportation. Its later globalized examples include lethal attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2006). Enthusiasts will perhaps do more globalization in bus and subway systems of
NYC, Chicago, Wash. D.C., and elsewhere.
I think what David Frum recommends is sound, which is to enforce laws equally. He tells a story of a person galloping a horse down Bondi beach with a Palestinian flag and how that person was not fined where if you walked a small dog down the beach you would be immediately fined. His description of the protestors that may not be violent existing within a circle of influence where someone knows someone who has violent ideas, is a good one: https://youtu.be/DUd8vb9eUEk?si=VzIXb2b_q1ZWO8pa&t=929
Agreed. If there are laws existing, then they should at least be enforced equally. Not sure I agree on the second bit though.
The goal of any ordinance should be to prevent such an attack from occurring in the future. Would the New South Wales speech ban have prevented the Bondi Beach massacre? I don’t think so. Consequently, the “solution” won’t solve the problem. The new law might have an outside chance at preventing someone from acting on potentially inflammatory rhetoric expressed by someone else—if the law prevented the rhetoric from being expressed in public and the nascent perpetrator therefore didn’t hear it—but the law seems to be very unlikely to have a substantive impact.
You’ll note that I didn’t even mention free speech. The new law as it stands doesn’t seem up to the task at hand.
The questions I would ask are these, in order:
1) What kind of action will prevent such incidents in the future?
2) Is the action practicable, meaning is it legal and enforceable?
I don’t think that the leadership has thought this through properly.
The only real solution is a society that unequivocally respects Jews as full members—where killing Jews would be as unthinkable as killing anyone else. That is where the leadership should focus.
The UK has just gone down the route of banning phrases such as “Globalise the Intafada”: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde65de81jgo
I don’t think it’s going to have the desired effect because they have been arresting hundreds of people for supporting the proscribed terrorist organisation Palestine Action and it has been utterly ineffective.