Questions for Nike over Grace Tame’s attacks on Jews and Israel

Former Australian of the year Grace Tame. Picture: Getty Images

Sportswear giant Nike announced earlier this year that it had signed Grace Tame as one of its brand ambassadors, a decision it must be regretting now given her increasing fondness for batshit public commentary about Jews and Israel.

In the last week, Tame has posted a series of hostile remarks concerning both to her Instagram account, including a claim that supporters of Israel are participating in a “legitimisation of Jewish supremacist ethnonationalism”, which is demonstrably false. Roughly one in five Israelis is ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim. They occupy seats in parliament, in the judiciary, serve in the army, run hospitals … but, nevermind, yes, Jewish supremacy, as always.

Ghassan Hage. Picture: X

These weren’t her words but those of Lebanese-Australian scholar Ghassan Hage. He was sacked earlier this year from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for publishing laudatory comments online about the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

“The Palestinians, like all colonized peoples, continue to demonstrate that their capacity for resistance is endless. They don’t just dig tunnels. They can fly over walls,” wrote Hage, and judging by her litany of published views on the conflict, Tame, whether she knew of Hage’s remarks or not, appears to feel more or less the same way.

Much worse, however, was the former Australian of the Year’s endorsement of Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd and a message he published last week that appears to condone the murder of two Israeli Embassy officials in Washington.

“The media class is scrambling to reframe the shooting that targeted two Israeli state officials as a random antisemitic attack,” Tame reposted to her 260,000 followers, “even though it was undeniably, and by the alleged shooter’s own admission, a response to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN Palestinians in the last 24 hours ALONE.”

Nike should be troubled by Tame’s amplification of this sentiment, bizarre as it is by cavilling over the shooter’s intent and veiled as it was with a moral justification for the slaying of two innocent people.

Grace Tame, second from left, sharing a stage with Randa Abdel-Fattah, second from right, at the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network event.

Or perhaps Nike officials might also bristle at Tame’s support for what el-Kurd said about journalists reporting on the incident: that those who called the murders “antisemitic” were “complicit in this genocide and should be held to account”. Like, what, put to the sword? Well, he certainly wasn’t talking about a complaint to the Press Council.

Venting outrage over the war in Gaza, or the Netanyahu government, is not controversial or unwarranted. Some of the most rabid criticism of both comes from within Israel itself.

In Tel Aviv, the highways are clogged with demonstrators seeking an end to the fighting in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.

Tame, paragon of humanism that she claims to be, never talks about the hostages, or Hamas, or displays even a fleeting interest in ongoing civil conflicts happening elsewhere in the region, like Sudan or Yemen.

Instead, she’s become obsessed with Israel, sitting on Instagram and promulgating claims of Jewish supremacy, or signal-boosting assholes who search for moral equivalency in the murder of a young Jewish couple out for the night at a Jewish museum. There is little daylight between that derangement and the lunatics who now support the execrable Luigi Mangione, yet another “resistance” figure who murdered a healthcare executive.

Is this the brand ambassador Nike wants promoting its products, a person who’s swallowed too many Noam Chomsky books and now aligns herself with people who celebrate terrorist attacks?

Who, as a professed feminist, has absolutely nothing to say about the genocidal Islamic autocracy in Gaza and its immiseration of women and gay people but who instead claims, stupendously, that the “feeble” ABC is serving the “military industrial complex” through its reporting of the conflict, as she wrote on Instagram recently.

Tame published those remarks following an event hosted by the Australia Palestine Action Network, where she warmly shared a stage with academic imposter Randa Abdel-Fattah, who’s notable only for celebrating the October 7 attacks on Israel and for saying that supporters of Israel had “no claim or right to cultural safety”.

Nike once felt strongly enough about antisemitism and hate speech that it ended its relationship with former Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving. That was in 2022, after he tweeted a link to a film containing Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories about Jews.

Let’s see if they draw the line on Tame’s equally pitiful, dangerous sentiments.