Last week we had a look at the politics of Australia’s new hate speech law, and particularly the fact that it was impossible for it to meet the competing demands of the politicians on the right who had first set the ball rolling, who wanted to protect Jews against vilification but also wanted to licence vilification of Muslims. A further week’s experience has just reinforced the point.
On Monday it was announced that home affairs minister Tony Burke had cancelled the visa of an Israeli “influencer” and professional bigot, Sammy Yahood, who was booked for several speaking engagements in Australia. Yahood has a long record of incendiary remarks about Islam and Muslims; if you look through the tangle of new provisions that have just been added to the Migration Act, there’s no doubt that they contain ample grounds on which his visa could be cancelled for “hate crime”.
But in fact that’s not what happened. Burke didn’t need the new legislation, because the existing provisions of the act give him almost complete power to cancel visas. Among numerous avenues, there is section 508, which provides that the minister may “cancel a visa that has been granted to a person if the Minister reasonably suspects that … in the event the person were allowed to enter or to remain in Australia, there is a risk that the person would vilify a segment of the Australian community or incite discord in the Australian community or in a segment of that community,” as long as the minister is also satisfied that the “cancellation is in the national interest.”
I’ve been arguing for many years against the breadth of these provisions and the way in which they’ve been used to exclude visitors whose views have upset the government of the day. The earliest story I can find is this one from 2005 on the Howard government’s banning of Gerd Finkenwirth, an obscure German far-right politician, but there have been numerous cases since from both sides of politics. This discussion of the case of Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi from 2017 is particularly relevant.
Barring exceptional cases, freedom of speech should not distinguish between those who happen to be already in the country and those who travel here on a visa to which they are otherwise entitled. Russell Blackford put this well back in 2015:
[E]ntry into a foreign country could be considered a privilege, rather than a right. However, … that distinction is simplistic. Generally speaking, we all have the legitimate expectation that we will be allowed to travel from one country to another for peaceful purposes such as tours involving lectures and media appearances.
With all that said, there is a certain schadenfreude in seeing the Coalition’s Islamophobes and the pro-Israel lobby, having campaigned for the banning of hate preachers as a magic bullet that would stop terrorism in its tracks, find that the same standards can be applied to one of their own. Nor is this the first such occasion: last year a far-right Israeli MP was also forced to cancel a speaking tour after being denied a visa.
If the standards are to be applied consistently, then of course vilification of Muslims should be grounds for exclusion just as much as antisemitism. But the reality is that consistent application is a pipedream: the standards are inherently subjective, and while I’m sure Burke is doing his best, no minister should hold the sort of indefinite discretionary authority that he holds. The last thing we should be doing is expanding it.
Letting in visitors who are going to peddle hateful messages, however, does not mean that we should roll out the red carpet for them. Yet that, in an extraordinary piece of mixed-messaging, is what the government is simultaneously doing, having invited Israeli president Isaac Herzog for a state visit. He arrives on 8 February.
It’s fair to say that Herzog is not the guiltiest man in the Israeli government; his views are not as extreme as, for example, Yahood’s. But those are low bars. It is undeniable that he represents a government that is, at the very least, guilty of war crimes on a massive scale, and that he has provided rhetorical support to policies that most authorities describe as genocidal. The idea that welcoming him to Australia would contribute to “social cohesion” is like something out of a black comedy.
It makes sense only on the assumption that support for Australia’s Jewish community entails support for Israel – that the two causes are practically identical. And that, in turn, is exactly the message that the terrorists at Bondi were trying to send.
The World is Not Enough 
Islamophobia implies that Islam is inherent as with being gay (homophobia) or being a spider (arachnophobia). That’s a dangerous turn in linguistics that the western left has brought about. You should not have to risk losing your life for choosing to leave Islam or saying that you never believed in it _or_ the Arabian warlord who purportedly founded it (for, as with Jesus, he may never have existed).
LikeLike
Thanks PK! But if spiders could choose whether or not to be spiders, would that change how we thought about arachnophobia? I can’t really see how. And in practice most Muslims (or members of any of the big mainstream religions) don’t really have a choice about it. Religion is just something people most grow up with; they never really question the identification. They might cease to believe in god, but in a cultural sense they remain Muslims (or Jews, or Catholics, or whatever), and they remain a target for people who hate Muslims (etc.).
That said, I don’t claim “Islamophobia” is the ideal term; I use it just because it’s pretty standard & it’s easier than writing “hatred of Muslims” every time. I certainly don’t think it should prevent us criticising any religion, or indeed saying that all religion is a harmful thing.
LikeLike