Peter Dutton’s shrill endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the Albanese government was to blame for an arson attack on a synagogue in Melbourne is part of an emerging pattern of the Coalition’s willingness to place cheerleading for the Netanyahu government over Australia’s national interests — especially when it comes to Australia’s social cohesion.
The pattern began in April, when the Coalition effectively endorsed Israel’s position on the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberate incineration of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, along with six of her colleagues, in Gaza. Rather than stand up for an Australian woman killed intentionally — Penny Wong’s word — by a foreign government, and her grieving family, Dutton and his shadow ministers acted as chief apologists for the IDF, with Dutton trying to pin the blame for Frankcom’s killing on Hamas.
The Coalition has also repeatedly called for Australian foreign policy to be made compliant with Netanyahu’s demands, railing at the Albanese government for joining most of the world in calling for a Palestinian state. According to Dutton and his frontbenchers, this was not merely an abandonment of Israel but an attack on civilisation itself.
Dutton’s home affairs shadow minister James Paterson also criticised the government’s refusal to permit extremist former Israel politician Ayelet Shaked to enter the country, in the face of Israeli demands that she be allowed in. Shaked has endorsed the murder of Palestinian mothers (who raise “little snakes”) and called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.
Paterson expressed outrage that Shaked wasn’t allowed into Australia to peddle such hate, as if Australia’s immigration laws should be suspended for figures linked to the Israeli government. If John Howard said that we would decide who comes to the country and the circumstances in which they come, it seems that for the Coalition it is now Benjamin Netanyahu who will decide who comes to Australia. No Palestinians would be permitted to enter, being automatic security threats, according to Dutton, but those who want to see Palestinians murdered and ethnically cleansed are perfectly welcome.
Allowing in a hateful figure like Shaked would have been clearly damaging to Australia’s social cohesion, but that’s seemingly irrelevant to the Coalition. In addition to denouncing any protests against Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing as antisemitic and calling for the banning of Palestinians from entering Australia, Dutton — who has a history of vilifying Muslims — has now effectively accused the government of inciting terrorist attacks on synagogues.
Yesterday, however, the Coalition took a further step. NSW Senator Dave Sharma — who has a history of trying to play down Islamophobia (as Josh Frydenberg sought to do on Saturday) — moved to open denial of the existence of Islamophobia in Australia. It’s “fictitious”, Sharma insists.
Sharma presumably thinks Islamophobic vandalism never happened, death threats against Muslims are an invention, that Australian Muslims are lying when they say they’ve been targeted for abuse, that the arson attack on an Islamic school bus just hours before Sharma’s comments was some sort of false flag operation. What next — claims of a Muslim conspiracy to create a false equivalence with antisemitism?
That a major party politician blatantly denied the existence of Islamophobia even as an Islamic school was dealing with an arson attack should have been widely reported. Instead, the ABC was the only major outlet to report Sharma’s shocking comments — illustrating the profound racism and hostility to Muslim Australians that pervade our commercial media. Apparently the prime minister playing tennis is a more worthy subject for outraged journalists.
For the Coalition under Dutton, there are evidently two classes of Australians: ordinary people, and Muslims. The latter are automatically security threats, should not be allowed to enter the country, and should be deported if they criticise Israel. The attacks on their schools and their claims of being threatened, abused and vilified should be dismissed as fabricated.
These are the sentiments of people who place Australia’s social cohesion a distant second to enthusiastically endorsing a government engaged in — according to the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch — war crimes, crimes against humanity and — according to Amnesty International — genocide.
For the Coalition and commercial media, Muslim Australians are second-class citizens. Their pain is mocked as fabricated. Their grief is derided as innately racist. Their fears are denied as fictitious. Their protests are automatically illegitimate. They matter less than the rest of us, because they’re not really us at all. They’re foreign, Others, to be kept out, kicked out and kept in line.
In that, we’re different in degree, but not in kind, from Netanyahu’s Israel.
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