Australia/Israel Review

The End of Pretence

Did you know that “political censorship of the Internet is almost upon us in Australia”? And remember the drastic changes to firearm laws following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre? That was due to “international Zionist conspirators and their political puppets in the Labor”. Just ask the good folk at One Nation.

Although Lunar mostly concentrates on tiny fringe groups from both the extreme right and extreme left, usually with tiny memberships, the latest One Nation newsletter The Nation was just too good to pass up, even given that organisation’s still somewhat larger, if dwindling, number of adherents.

While, as a general rule, One Nation has steered clear of overtly antisemitic material in the past, Carl D. Thompson uses the latest edition The Nation (Vol. 4, No. 10) to unleash a series of anti-Semitic epithets, conspiracy theories, and hatred more commonly associated with neo-Nazi groups. For example, under the headline of “Kiddie porn to be used as net censorship ploy”, Thompson charges that Prime Minister John Howard’s controversial sale of Telstra is only taking place at the order of “Howard’s globalist Zionist masters”, and claims that “it is with good reason that Zionists refer to non-Jews as goyim, which means cattle.”

Not that the barrage of insults is limited to Jews. “The Liberal and National parties have a history of using terrible, often criminal events to take away another slice of our freedom and tighten the globalist noose around the necks of Australians,” writes Thompson. He then lapses into unabashed white supremacy, claiming that Australia’s racial vilification laws “make it a crime for white Australians to say what they think of the government’s agenda to flood Australia with the scum of the third world.”

However, for the most part, the hate-filled invective sticks to attacking Jews and Zionists, and employs classic antisemitic imagery no different from that used to justify horrific crimes against Jews for centuries. Perhaps most bizarre is Thompson’s claim that contends that police action against paedophiles is merely a pretext for greater censorship, a claim followed by Thompson’s muse that “the pornography industry is owned and run almost entirely by Jews.” But I don’t get it: Jews both control the porno industry and are seeking to censor it?

And, of course, no work of antisemitism would be complete without the conspiracy theorists’ favourite, that “throughout the world the Zionists control the news media, all the major political parties, and the entertainment industry. They control everything that people see and read, which as a result, gives them control of what people think.”

One Nation has always argued that their group is a “mainstream” organisation, which abhors and excludes racists, and it has nothing to do with redneck, white-supremacist cults on the far right. Anyone still think so?