Is it Islamophobic to Criticise Indonesia’s Occupation of West Papua? 

The Indonesian government has been illegitimately occupying the land of the West Papuan people since a 1969 referendum. What’s occurring to the West Papuans under Indonesian occupation is often referred to as a slow-motion genocide, with an estimated half a million West Papuan civilians killed since the 1960s.

Support for the West Papuan cause has long been widespread in this country. Yet, despite the nation of Indonesia being the world’s most populous Muslim majority state on the planet, no one labels those who actively dispute its oppressive occupation in West Papua as being Islamophobic or prejudiced against those of the Islamic faith.

The United Nations sanctioned the creation of Israel on Palestinian land in 1947, in a resolution that too included that there would be a separate Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. However, in 1967, Israel invaded the Palestinian territories and has occupied them ever since.

Yet, criticising the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories is considered by some authorities to be antisemitic, or religious prejudice against the Jewish people. This conflation of criticism of the political entity of Israel with hatred towards Jews, has too been used to deflect criticism of the Gaza genocide, despite it being arguably the worst mass slaughter since the Holocaust.

This dangerous conflation, which, according to US academic Judith Butler has been purposely propagated by Israel and its supporters since the 1970s, in order to shield criticism of the apartheid system its subjecting Palestinians too, has further been propagated by this nation’s top politicians over the last 16 months, in aid of the same purpose: to deflect political criticism of Israel.

This conflation of religious prejudice with criticism of a government’s illegal actions is now being injected into the Australian psyche during numerous press conferences and reports, but most destructively, official laws that are now being enacted to combat an antisemitism that includes political criticism of Israeli state actions, which is increasingly being classed as prejudice against Jews.

The dangerous conflation

Birchgrove Legal principal solicitor Moustafa Kheir remarked in a 31 January press statement that among the allegations that Liberal opposition leader Peter Dutton has been accused of, as part of a racial discrimination legal action lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission, is that he’s endangered Australian Jewish people through the deliberate conflation of Israel with Jewish identity.

The lawyer adds that this has led to the rise in antisemitism. Indeed, many early acts of vandalism that were cast as antisemitic were accompanied by anti-Israel messaging, yet the authorities cast these as being prejudice towards Jews, and then in December the graffiti began to target Jews specifically, around the time that a synagogue in Naarm-Melbourne was subject to an arson attack.

The odd aspect to the antisemitism narrative is when its pops up on the television screen, there’s never any explanation as to why there is this sudden eruption of antisemitism in the community, and nor does anyone think to deliberate upon that question. However, the Islamophobic envoy Aftab Malik recently pointed out that antisemitism is not the norm in this country.

Returning to Kheir’s point regarding the conflation of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism in the public sphere, this is being promoted by politicians, law enforcement and the mainstream media, as the line is being blurred between criticism of Israel and prejudice towards Jews, in order to deflect attention from the 16-month-long settler colonial mass murder of Palestinian civilians by Israel.

The Australian government has sided with the Israeli state during its commission of mass atrocities, despite what the opposition and Murdoch press are now peddling, and the demonisation of criticism against Israel’s actions as antisemitism is not only inane, but it has served to deflect legitimate concerns about the Netanyahu government’s actions, which are too corroding international law.

Foreign interference

Former Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg hosted the Never Again: The Fight Against Antisemitism documentary, on Sky News last May, which was prior to the escalation in attacks in November, with anti-Israel graffiti and cars set on fire in Woollahra. This was repeated in December, with more anti-Israel messaging in the same suburb, around the time of the Victorian synagogue firebombing.

Following the AFP commissioner’s admission that his agency is looking at whether foreign interference is behind the attacks, NSW police located a caravan stacked full of explosives in the northwestern semirural Sydney suburb of Dural, with a note containing the addresses of synagogues and Jewish buildings, which was so obvious that NSW police were treating it as a potential setup.

NSW police deputy commissioner David Hudson told the ABC at the end of January his law enforcement agency hadn’t “identified any of the individuals of the ten we’ve charged with any specific ideology that would cause them to commit the acts that they’ve committed”.

So, the individuals who have allegedly been graffitiing anti-Israel and antisemitic slurs around the Greater Sydney region haven’t been motivated by their own ideological prejudices but rather have been creating a spectacle, which has been highlighted by the politicians and the media in much the same way as a foreign actor who was coordinating the show might want the local authorities to act.

Orwellian to say the least

After a brief period of administrating West Papua, following the exit of their then colonial rulers the Netherlands, the United Nations handed over administration of the country to Indonesia on the proviso that it allowed the West Papuans to have a referendum on self-determination or whether to remain under Jakarta’s rule. However, the Indonesian government corrupted the vote so it failed.

New Indonesian prime minister Prabowo Subianto is a notorious former general known for the mass atrocities he committed in East Timor and West Papua, and the colonisation of the Melanesian region and the subjugation of its people are now escalating under his rule.

Yet, if an Australian advocate criticises Indonesia for its oppression of the West Papuans, no one condemns them as being Islamophobic.

Zionism is the 19th century European political doctrine that advocated for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, which led to the establishment of the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel. And those who continue to advocate for this doctrine, which continues to be expansionist, are referred to as Zionists.

So, in actuality if people are protesting against the Israeli-perpetrated genocide in Gaza then they’re actually opposing Israel and Zionists, not Jewish people in general. Many non-Zionists Jews have been speaking out against Israel and Zionism in this country and some of them are now being persecuted in the public sphere for this.

When a politician, like Peter Dutton, allegedly propagates the dangerous conflation in the media it leaves those in the public who believe in him understanding harmful ideas as truths, while those droves of constituents who don’t buy this are left with a disturbing understanding of how this political theatre is playing out in this country.

But despite the obvious holes in the overall antisemitic scare narrative both the federal and the NSW governments are going ahead with enacting hate crime laws in response to it.

The federal government passed its new laws last Thursday, which heightened and extended its hate crime regime, yet this legislating act became a rush to the bottom when Labor produced an amendment that comprised of a draconian mandatory minimum sentencing regime that applies to certain hate crimes and terrorism charges, which will ensure much social harm to vulnerable people.

The NSW government introduced its hate crime bill on Tuesday, and it’s framed as legislation that was specifically produced to combat this rise in antisemitism, it has a synagogue-specific offence within it, and while the other laws do have a broader reach for all religions, this legislation was passed to crackdown on an antisemitic crime wave that doesn’t seem that sincere.

The issue with the appearance of these laws as a response to the dubious claims of an antisemitic crimewave sweeping the city is that they’ve been triggered by this dangerous conflation, so as to hide the genociding of a people by another nation, and when governments start passing criminal laws to ensure untruths are understood as legitimate facts, it all gets a little authoritarian.

Of course, the idea that a western liberal democracy, like this one, could suddenly fall into authoritarianism is absurd.