License to Muzzle: Taking Offence at Flag Wavers for Hezbollah
It was done for the Viet Cong in numerous countries during the US involvement in Vietnam. It was done for the African National Congress (ANC). It was done for the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA). Across the United States, Europe and Australasia, all three organisations, demonised as terrorist outfits, received tacit, symbolic support from protestors. In some cases, support was genuine and pecuniary. Now, the Lebanese Shia militant and political group Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organisation in a number of Western states, has inspired flag holders to appear at protests against the expanding conflict in Gaza and Lebanon.
In the previous first three instances, all outfits were integrated into the political fold of their countries, revealing the flimsy nature of badging organisations as terrorist entities. War makers and practitioners of violence can become peacemakers and creatures of paper pushing officialdom. Such transformations take time and an acid bath of reality.
That backdrop offers context in understanding, and sternly critiquing, the hysteria of critics keen to press charges against those sporting Hezbollah symbols. At the very least, it should consider the mockery that is free speech in a country such as Australia, awash with authoritarians concerned about the watery concept of social cohesion. Down under, the skimpy protections for free speech are being whittled away year by year. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Prohibited Hate Symbols and Other Measures) Bill 2023, passed in December last year, makes it an offence to publicly display and trade in prohibited symbols, along with the Nazi salute. Prohibited symbols are defined as prohibited Nazi symbols or “a prohibited terrorist organisation symbol.”
The Criminal Code Act 1995 as amended, offers a number of glutinous elements that must be made out in such a charge. They are thickly unclear and, it follows, difficult to apply. To be charged with a prohibited symbol offence, a reasonable person (drafters can never resist this feeble term) would have to consider that any public display would involve dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority, hatred or constitute incitement “to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate.” That same inscrutable reasonable person would also consider the display to involve “advocacy of hatred of a group of persons distinguished by race, religion or nationality or a member of the targeted group” with the incitement element also present. Thirdly, such conduct must be “likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a reasonable person who is a member of a group distinguished by race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion or national or social origin.”
These elements are nonsensical, attempting to impose unmeasurable standards about feelingsthat are rarely reasonable and always almost subjective. Subjectively, people are constantly offended by what they disagree with. The whole field of political opinion is one lengthy record of taking offence. It quickly follows that some might also be intimidated, insulted, or humiliated by an opponent’s contrary view, notably when it comes to discrediting a position. Freedom of speech, axiomatically, requires the exclusion of the offended from consideration. But the concept is fragile in Australia’s regulation-crazed environment.
Arrests have already been made. On October 2, a 19-year-old woman was arrested and charged for publicly displaying the symbol of a prohibited organisation at a Sydney demonstration. The question, however, is whether did so with the requisite intention, absurdly determined by the hypothetical reasonable person, to incite offence, insult, humiliation and intimidation. Ahead of protests scheduled for October 6 and 7, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, not wishing to find himself in a messy quagmire of prosecution and confusion, warned that they should not take place. “It would not advance any cause. It would cause a great deal of distress.” Again, free speech, felled by the concept of hurt feelings.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has created a dedicated taskforce to investigate nine allegations of prohibited symbols being displayed in Victoria, demonstrating how vagueness in legislation is always good for creating work for idle authorities. Operation Ardana will consider the display of such symbols “while potentially inciting or advocating violence, or hatred, based on race and religion.”
AFP Deputy Commissioner Krissy Barrett offers her view about what behaviour would satisfy the test. “The context around the conduct is extremely important … If they’re holding the flag, what are they saying? What are they chanting? What are they wearing? What sort of physical behaviour are they demonstrating?”
The Home Minister Tony Burke is only too grateful to leave it to Barrett and her colleagues, given his own muddle about how such laws are to apply. Instead of offering any clarifications, he has warned mischievous Hezbollah flag wavers that they risk losing their visas. “We don’t know whether they are actually on visas … [but] we do have a higher standard if you’re on a visa.”
Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, all sledgehammer and no grace, senses room for political exploitation, ostensibly calling for legal improvements to an already shabby law. “The laws already exist, and if the laws are inadequate then the Australian Federal Commissioner should advise the minister and the parliament should deal with it as a matter of urgency.”
In addition to the Commonwealth law, states laws also exist to layer the prosecution case. The Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, for instance, is convinced that Victoria police had the relevant powers to deal with those who “may be displaying terrorist flags.”
With the paranoid authoritarians in charge, the very concept of valid protest has been reduced to a hint, a suggestion. Keep it anodyne and any relevant arguments humbly polite. Avoid the inherent brutality of a broadening bloody conflict hostile to international law. Most of all, make social cohesion a license to muzzle.
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15 comments
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John Hanna -
Paul Callahan -
Roswell -
paul walter -
Canguro -
Roswell -
Fred -
andyfiftysix -
Steve Davis -
Canguro -
Bert -
Steve Davis -
Fred -
JulianP -
Clakka
Return to home pageMost politicians, (especially Peter Dutton) and his minions Hastie and Paterson fail to acknowledge the history associated with the formation of these so called “terrorist” groups. They have forgotten the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and the understandabe resentment they continue to feel about their losses. Yes Hamas and Hezbolla have done bad things but so too did the Stern Gang and others, who were the neo terrorists of the time.
I am offended by politicians who say they want free speech and make it an offence to speak one’s mind. I am also offended that one group can get thirteen pages of support in a weekend newspaper and the the other side who are being decimated and smashed into the ground get no mention at all. Where is the justice and humanity in that?
John and Paul, well said the both of you. I’m with you 100%.
I read this and almost wept.
This phenomenon of labelling certain groups ‘terrorists,’ generally also begetting accompanying proscriptions, sanctions, financial penalties etc., is, of course, nothing more than the bigger guy with the bigger stick whacking the smaller guy who has a smaller stick because, well, just because… it suits the purpose of the BGs to bash up on the SGs, for the BG’s own ends.
There’s nothing socially, ethically, legally, morally or otherwise objective about these processes… in fact, in many if not most cases the Bigger Guys are the real terrorists and the Smaller Guys are simply trying to hold their territory or prevent their annihilation at the hands of the BGs. It’s a tale told throughout generations and centuries, and any careful reading of well-written honest histories attest to these observations as factual.
Manage the narrative, and you’re more than half-way there to being in control. Repeatedly demonise those who are against you, and in time the majority will agree with you. The unfortunate fact that the Bigger Guys generally monopolise assets – information apparatuses, energy supplies, military equipment and so on – means that the bias tends towards them and the Smaller Guys have an uphill battle to even achieve parity let alone winning the fight. Unjust, unfair, cruel and unkind… just don’t call it honest or democratic or humane or any of those other weasel words which comprise the propaganda lexicons.
Canguro, can’t get my head around the headlines yesterday that 8 IDF soldiers were shot by terrorists in Lebanon.
Terrorists?! Huh.
So Lebanese people shooting invaders are terrorists. What?!
Roswell: …and what gives the IDF rights to go and invade yet another country?
Israel has an anti-missile defense system that is the best in the world with very few missiles slipping through, yet it would seem there is a magic number, the original plus interest, of weapons that need to be fired/dropped in “retaliation”. Given the condition of Gaza, almost nothing untouched, it looks like for each missile downed 10 by 2,000-pound bombs are dropped in return.
From October until July, the US has transferred at least 14,000 of the MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs, and other munitions. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_bombing_of_the_Gaza_Strip
what we are witnessing is the very worst in human nature from the country born from its own history. The barbarism and butchery that will only create the next generation of haters. The government is consumed by hatred, revenge and its own sense of entitlement.
In fact, that’s been the history of Israeli engagement with Palestinians. Some people are too stupid to learn from their own lived experience. What else can one say? Give the MFs enough rope.
I no longer wish for a two state solution. One state, NON RELIGIOUS state. A Jewish state is exposed for what it is, just another form religious tyranny.
Yes i feel sorry for the victims of OCT 7. Unfortunately they are also victims of the ongoing suppression of Palestinians.
IT didn’t happen in a vacuum.
If you think things are bad here, it’s worse in Europe.
And Australia is following their lead.
In 2018-2019, during the Yellow Vests protests in France more than 40,000 people were convicted of various offenses and misdemeanors “on the basis of vague laws … used to illegally restrict the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression” according to Amnesty UK.
In the UK the situation is dire.
Under the UK Terrorism Act, you have no right to remain silent, you have no right to a lawyer, you must hand over all devices and passwords, if you refuse to answer a question you can be imprisoned for 2 years, if you express an opinion that could be interpreted as support for a proscribed organisation, there is a 14 year prison sentence, ( plenty of room for interpretation ), and this act includes the phrase ” without cause ” so police can pick up anyone without having to show any reason.
We have a regular contributor here who is much loved, for good reason, but whose single-minded focus is the danger from fringe dwelling right-wing organisations.
We are in far greater danger from liberal democracies.
It is liberal democracies, those that trumpet liberty and tolerance, that are increasingly displaying intolerance and restrictions of freedoms.
We should be asking why.
Fred, re. your weapons numbers, American citizens in numbers upwards of 3 million or more are equally culpable wrt to the genocidal destruction of Palestinians and their communities, given their employment in weapons manufacturing corporations. It’s kinda hard to get one’s head around the details… mom’s and dad’s trotting off to work each day to play their part in screwing on this bolt or assembling this widget or packing this payload, coming home, play time with the kids, grace before dinner, thanking God for the fact that they’re born in ‘Merika, untroubled by their participation in the Devil’s industries, blind-eyeing the fact of the eventual use of their day’s labour being to kill other humans and destroy infrastructure… deeply weird & dysfunctional and IMHO just another aspect of that country’s deep addiction to death & destruction.
[Linked text downloads a 44 page pdf doc on “The U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” informative in how it details the deep embedment of arms industries throughout America, geographically and socially, along with the enormous amounts of money involved. As the document says in its preface, “The U.S. defense industrial base (DIB) enables the United States to execute national strategy and develop, maintain, and project military power.Since World War II, the U.S. government has devoted considerable resources and attention to ensuring the DIB can meet the requirements of national defense. Congress appropriates hundreds of billions of dollars annually to acquire materials, products, and services from DIB suppliers, and has established and funded a number of programs intended to assess or modify aspects of the DIB as a whole.]
You can see the lie in that quote, can’t you? … {resources and attention to ensuring that DIB can meet the requirements of national defense}.
My OED defines defence as “the action of defending from or resisting attack… military measures or resources for protecting a country… (often defences) a means of protecting something from attack.
America, as far as I know, hasn’t been physically threatened within its continental confines, ever, period.
Hawaii.. Pearl Harbour, a territorial acquisition, somewhat nuanced, as is 9/11, an attack by Mossad with inside help from American conspirators, nonetheless, the Empire does what the Empire believes it must do.
When I view the destruction of Gaza. the displacement of almost 2 million people and over 41,00 killed, almost 100,000 injured in the last year, and that after 76 years of marginalisation, and then gaze across to the West Bank and see the harassment of the Bedouin and Palestinian people there, and now the threat that if Lebanon doesn’t get Hezbollah to leave that nation will be reduced to rubble, just like Gaza, I really do wonder who the terrorists are.
When I see the disproportionate assistance being given, $26 Billion in military assistance to Israel, $1Billion in aid for the Palestinians…. who are the terrorists?
Everyone is asking why it is that most of the news media are presenting a slanted view on the Gaza conflict.
We all ask why is it that protest against an obvious crime against humanity is being stifled by threats of prosecution.
These are good questions but they do not go deep enough.
The essential question to ask is — why are the liberal democracies assisting the slaughter, or in some cases doing nothing substantial to stop it?
Canguro: Technically it is not a lie, as “ensuring that DIB can meet the requirements of national defense” appears valid, but over-done in spades. A serious touch of the Irish “to be sure, to be sure”. It is likely that US carrier fleets and overseas bases (750+ spread over 80 countries) would fall under the “national defense” paradigm. Who needs overseas bases?
A dear mate (and Vietnam vet) sent me this scenario: “Person 1: Look, over there, at those flag-waving, terrorist supporting no-hopers, causing disruption & inconvenience to everyone – its disgusting.
Person 2: Yes, I can see them, but what about all the bombed-out, turfed-out, burnt, shredded people in Gaza, the West Bank and now in Lebanon?
Person 1: Eh! What about them, yes, them over there, all those yelling, rotten un-Australian, socially divisive ignorant fools, ought to be a law against it – ought to deport the lot of ‘em.”
Have to agree with Paul Callahan about the weekend paper – really shows where Murdoch is coming from and it’s not a place of simple justice, balance, respect for common humanity or the conventions and laws that are supposed to govern international behaviour between states.
On more important matters, I have just watched an absorbing YouTube video with professors Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff on the “Dialogue Works” channel. If you have an hour or so to spare, it’s worth watching, especially for those who might still be trying to find a navigable path through the accumulating madness that threatens to engulf us all.
I can guarantee you, you won’t be bored.
The video link is: https://youtu.be/LXDz1PdMWao or the link below.
If you would like a transcript (which I can recommend – to study later), then use this link: [ https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/08/michael-hudson-and-richard-wolff-middle-east-exploding-ukraine-crumbling-us-take-action/ ]
Listening to an interview, I heard “Oz, like most of the world, was egalitarian between the end of WWII and say, the late 70s.”
I thought, hmmm, yeah maybe because the ‘allies’ prevailed and then doubled down on financial ‘magic’ rebuilding the ‘West’ (including Germany etc) in the image of their dreams of domination. And what’s not said, is that the ‘others’, particularly of the Soviet States, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, central and South Asia and SE Asia were left to their own devices, with their labour flooding to the ‘West’ working to rebuild the ‘West’ for pennies. Whilst the elderly and women and children of the ‘others’ remained behind in the imposed wreckage of their states in abject poverty.
That the ‘West’ in their rebuilding and modernization, were realizing their long desired ‘paradise on Earth’, but it seems it was far from a global egalitarianism. Instead it seemed to be ‘selective’, based on ethno-religious division as it had been for millennia. With politicians, financiers, corporations and the popular media peddling the propaganda, whilst omitting stories of the wiles of expansionism, embedded slavery, cyclical debt, theft, and the plight of ‘others’.
Of course, once the ordinary folk of the ‘West’ had attained comfort by consuming the kool-aid propaganda, the financial crutch of endless debt, consumerism and extraction, from the shadows, came the mega-financiers and their mighty and immune corporations, at the behest of the web of controlling royals and aristocrats, to plunge their fangs and draw the juice from the ‘state’, the ‘assets’ built by the hard labour of the ordinary.
After the papal bulls of discovery and dominion, the endless centuries of standing armies became more and more disguised as corporations giving cover for royals to pretend noblesse oblige – for example the United East India Company of the Burgundians, Habsburgs and the House of Orange, and the East India Company of Britain’s Victoria – vicious and armed to the hilt. The corporations of the 1970s came from the shadows not in uniforms as fast killing machines, but in dark suits with the intention of a slow burn.
And so came ‘privatization’ by the same ‘royal’ profiteers, with their lies of efficiency, disguising resumption of the fruits of hard toil, extortion, depletion of services, and ultimately complete capture and control of ordinary folk and their elected governments. America now, like the City of London, is almost completely ‘America Inc.’ – not beholden to anyone else. But crumbling, hoist by its own petard, because it can’t do projects without govts and ordinary folk.
As ordinary folk become increasingly aware of the wiles of such projects, subject to the resultant depletions, and losing hope and trust for cooperative benevolence, so they tend more towards individualism, with a heading towards anarchy. Now it is commonly seen to be a reactionary, almost inextricable mess, accompanied by nihilism.
Israel, that calls itself a ‘state’ ‘democracy’, is a product of the aforementioned ‘royal’ and ‘aristocratic’ projects of the ‘West’. It screeches its righteousness, yet it has refused to establish a Constitution, and to demarcate and declare its ‘state’ borders, seemingly preferring a Zionist doctrine of ‘quest’ capturing all, most recently amended to include via corporations and other associations. Despite international law, and the ‘rules based order’, it seems this ‘quest’ has been tacitly accepted by the ‘West’, and so by that acceptance are being held to ransom.
The web of ‘royals’ and ‘aristocrats’ would have it that they are the ‘civilizers’, when actually they are mere props for their greed, self-aggrandizement and commercial ventures. It seems likely that ordinary folk are actually the ‘civilizers’, and constitute civilization.
In all this who is doing the muzzling, and why?
Given no omission or concealment of fact, what is ‘reasonable’?
Who are the ‘terrorists’, and who are the ‘freedom fighters’?
Indeed now, the Schultz defense seems to be predominant – “I know nothing.”
When hurtling toward the unknown absolute, it’s absurd when faced with tipping points, many seek to obliterate the see-saw, and work within the spin of Foucault’s pendulum (whether by Umberto or not), when all along the diabolical and godly are by design, inseparable familiars.