Clover Moore capitulates to Murdoch media and Minns, cancels today’s Sydney debate on ‘Globalise the Intifada’. Andrew Brown writes on the impact of cancel culture.

There is a particular kind of cowardice that wears the mask of governance. It does not arrive announcing itself. It arrives incrementally, each step dressed in the language of safety, of balance, of community cohesion, of protecting the vulnerable. 

Clover Moore capitulates, cancels ‘Globalise the Intifada’ debate

by Andrew Brown

By the time the architecture is visible, it is nearly complete. Australia is very nearly there.

Clover Moore did not cancel a riot. She cancelled a conversation. 

A ticketed talk in a city-owned venue, advertised as a debate about whether a phrase is right or wrong to say. No weapons. No march. No named threat in her statement, no police advice cited, no legal basis offered. 

Words, and the prospect of Australians hearing them, were enough. 

The Lord Mayor of Australia’s most populous city cancelled a public discussion because a tabloid campaign demanded it. She then published a statement condemning the tabloid campaign. 

This is what capitulation looks like when it needs to feel like principle.

But Moore’s cancellation is not the story. It is a symptom. To understand the story, you need to read the list.

Grace Tame, former Australian of the Year, said “globalise the intifada” at a public rally. Mary Kostakidis, one of this country’s most decorated journalists, retweeted a tweet. Antoinette Lattouf reposted a Human Rights Watch report documenting Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian author, was invited to speak at Adelaide Writers’ Week about literature. I wore a t-shirt.

Each of these acts triggered a coordinated campaign of pressure, complaint and punishment. None were unlawful. None threatened a single person. 

What they shared was a thread so thin it should embarrass the institutions that treated it as a crisis: each person, in some way, expressed solidarity with Palestinian people or dissent toward the conduct of the Israeli state. 

That was sufficient. That has always been sufficient.

A Federal Court found Lattouf’s termination from the ABC unlawful. The complaint that produced it did not come from editorial management acting on journalistic grounds. 

It came from an organised campaign run through the same lobby networks that have spent years cultivating relationships inside Australian newsrooms, university administrations and the offices of federal and state ministers. 

The lesson the ABC’s capitulation sent to every journalist in this country was not subtle. 

Cover this war carefully. 

Cover it the approved way. Do not stray from the approved framing. Or we will make the call, and your employer will answer it.

Abdel-Fattah was disinvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli publicly recommended other writers’ festivals ban her too. He was not embarrassed to say so. 

He said it as though it were a reasonable position for a democratically elected leader to hold: that a Palestinian Australian author should be made unwelcome at literary festivals across her own country because she writes about what has been done to her people. Nobody in federal parliament thought this warranted serious scrutiny.

I have worn my t-shirt at Bondi Beach twice now. It says what I believe about Israel and Zionism, clearly and without ambiguity. 

On Easter Monday, eighteen police officers surrounded me. I was detained and arrested, charged with causing offence. Not incitement. Not threat. Offence.

https://michaelwest.com.au/clover-moore-capitulates-cancels-globalise-the-intifada-debate/

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GUSNOTE: THE MAYOR OF SYDNEY, CLOVER MOORE, HAS BEEN WELL-KNOWN FOR RIDING A BIKE TO WORK... I DON'T KNOW IF SHE STILL DOES...