Just Like the War on Terror, That on Antisemitism Is Unjustifiably Curtailing Civil Liberties

Part of the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service announced on 9 April that it will be screening the social media accounts of noncitizens, known as aliens in the States, for activity and content deemed antisemitic, as it will be reason to deny or revoke visas, which is a plan the Australian Liberals want to unleash in this country if elected.

The plan was progressed by an executive order signed by US president Donald Trump. US secretary of state Mark Rubio told the press in March that this process was already underway, and AI was being used to assist in scouring the web for antisemitic content posted by noncitizens, and on 10 April, it was revealed 600 international students have had their visas revoked or status changed as a result.

Antisemitism is hatred specifically against Jewish people, so on face value targeting such prejudice seems a worthy venture. This campaign is also targeting noncitizens who allegedly support Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.

However, how this all translates on the ground is that anyone found to be opposing the Israeli-perpetrated genocide against the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, also known as pro-Palestinians, are being labelled antisemitic.

The emerging war on antisemitism is being waged in the US, as well as in Australia and right across the western world, and it requires that populations hold irrational ideas presented by the authorities as truths, and if individuals don’t, they face expulsion from the group.

Under this post-truth policy, those opposing genocide are revealing Jewish hatred and a desire for Jewish annihilation, along with support for Hamas, which is pure theatre of the absurd, as opposing a genocide against Palestinians becomes calling for the genocide of Jews, and in its heightened form, it’s involved Jews protesting Gaza in Germany being beaten by local police and labelled antisemites.

After this war on antisemitism has been progressed under Labor over the last 18 months, the campaign will continue after the May election, with the Coalition promising to heighten it to Trumpian levels now seen in the US. And regardless of which major takes office, this process will be used to create new laws, just like the war on terror, which will be used on the domestic population.

Akin to the war on terror

The old adage that civil liberties experts have repeated over the last two decades during the roll out of one draconian terrorism law by an Australian parliament after another, is that the real threat of these laws was not due to the governments of the day, but rather the threat lay with the prospect of an authoritarian politician being elected and then using them to crack down on the people.

Think Trump, for instance, or better still, think potential next prime minister Peter Dutton, because the Liberal leader has been playing Trumpian politics since he was first elected to federal parliament in 2001, whereas Trump has only been at it since 2016.

Following the New York 9/11 terror attacks of 2001, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1373, which called on all nations to enact terror offences into their domestic law. Western nations then went to town with this decree. And the bipartisan terror law enacting bonanza the Australian major parties then progressed has seen over 100 national security-counterterrorism bills passed since.

The result has been that when it comes to terrorism offences, most charges and convictions have involved Muslim individuals, and there has only ever been one white Australian convicted in regard to a terror offence, while the plethora of surveillance laws and other measures passed in the name of combatting terror, such as the metadata retention regime, target the entire domestic population.

Calls for laws to combat antisemitism have grown since Israel began the Gaza genocide in late 2023, which culminated here in the staging of February’s Sky News Antisemitism Summit, which was in response to a series of so-called antisemitic arson and graffiti attacks in Sydney, which turned out to be staged crimes that sought to provide criminals with bargaining chips when dealing with police.

The Antisemitism Summit involved the local Israel lobby demanding a national emergency on antisemitism be called, along with specific uniform antisemitism policing laws, antisemitism training at schools and in various sectors, like health, and bans on encampments at universities. However, this campaign lost its momentum once the antisemitic crimewave was exposed a fraud.

Following the summit, but prior to the March AFP announcement that the antisemitic crimewave was a “fabricated terror plot”, the NSW government passed three law-and-order bills in response “to the recent instances of antisemitic behaviour”, although, right now, an investigation is underway into whether NSW premier Chris Minns knew that the crimes might have been staged prior to enactment.

And since the antisemitic “criminal con job” was exposed a hoax, the premier has gone blue in the face, insisting that the criminal offences passed in the name of the war on antisemitism shall stand regardless.

Deporting pro-Palestinians

The one law reform that was suggested during the Antisemitism Summit that rang true in terms of plausible progression was when Dutton told a Sky News reporter that he would be adding antisemitic behaviour to the immigration character test contained in section 501 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), so that antisemitism will be grounds to deny or revoke the visa of a noncitizen, just like US aliens.

During an election campaign press conference in Boorloo-Perth on Wednesday, Dutton reconfirmed that he plans to make this amendment relating to antisemitism and migration, and at the same time, he raised the fact that he would then be reconsidering the thousands of Palestinians in the country on visitor visas, which reveals him being much more clear about the agenda than Trump has been.

As US state secretary Rubio outlined, the US has revoked or changed the status of hundreds of student visas in response to antisemitism. And high-profile cases, involving international students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, as well as Indian lecturer Badar Khan Suri, having been disappeared and slated for deportation, reveal it was their pro-Palestinian stance that led to this.

Under his regular antiimmigration politicking, Dutton began taking aim at international students in May 2024, calling for a reduction in their numbers and citing the bizarre reasons that it would contribute to solving the housing crisis.

But this electioneering promise, which is still being raised today, emerged at the same time as governments in Australia and the United States were undergoing meltdowns over pro-Palestinian university encampments.

When Dutton isn’t smiling or attempting to appear likeable, he quickly reverts back to bragging about the 6,000 noncitizens he deported from Australia a decade ago, when he was in charge of Immigration, and it should further be noted that many of the rights-eroding, all-invasive terror laws passed under the Turnbull and Morrison governments were Dutton’s handywork.

So, as the antisemitism war heats up in the United States, which targets both noncitizens and citizens to produce a number of oppressive outcomes, Australians should ask themselves whether they want to live under such a regime fashioned by a despotic Dutton, or whether they’d prefer a strong crossbench that has the power to prevent Trump pushing Albanese into taking a similar stance.