This week’s demonstration outside the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in an attempt to close down the Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition illustrates the point. The biennial event provides an opportunity for Australian companies engaged in the business of land defence to market their products to contractors from the US and Europe.
The expo would have taken place whether or not terrorist group Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7 – thus starting the Israel-Hamas war. However, as was widely anticipated, this became an occasion for demonstration by various extreme-left groups. What was perhaps unexpected was that many protesters came equipped to take on Victoria Police on the street rather than protest against those attending the expo.
On Wednesday night, Victoria Police Commissioner Shane Patton described what happened: “They (policemen and policewomen) were shoved. They had bottles thrown at them … balloons thrown at them that had different liquids in them. We’ve had analysis that shows some type of low-level acid that caused irritants … was used.” Not content with taking on the men and women of Victoria Police – some protesters attacked the police horses.
It so happened that the demonstration was dominated by groups hostile to Israel’s defensive war in Gaza, which has continued due to Hamas’s refusal to surrender and release the surviving hostages along with the bodies of the dead (some of whom were murdered).
Jasmine Duff, a spokeswoman for the Disrupt Land Forces protest, was reported in The Australian as having said the demonstration was triggered by the Albanese government’s stance on the conflict in the Middle East. This despite the fact that, realistically, there is nothing any Australian government could do to end the war.
Renee Nayef, a Students for Palestine organiser, found time to speak with Tom Elliott on Melbourne radio 3AW. She defended her call of “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free” – an evocation that would see the Jewish state obliterated from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Asked by Elliott to reveal which river and what sea, Nayef replied: “The Jordan River to the Red Sea.” The Red Sea is not part of Israel.
Right now, Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is the fashionable target for left-wing protesters who have the support of the Greens political party. Indeed, Ellen Sandell, parliamentary leader of the Victorian Greens, attended the demonstration. While rejecting the violence she criticised Victoria Police, accusing it of using excessive force.
It is all very well for a Greens politician to attack Victoria Police in this instance. After all, she went to the demonstration on a bike – not on a horse that was violently attacked.
Moreover, the Greens were silent when, on occasions, Victoria Police acted with unnecessary force against citizens protesting Victoria’s excessively harsh lockdowns during the pandemic. There was, after all, a difference. The anti-lockdown demonstrations did not specifically target police.
Writing in the left-of-centre Crikey newsletter on September 11, 2020, Guy Rundle looked back in happiness at the violent demonstration against the World Economic Forum meeting held in Melbourne 20 years earlier. He recalled that the protesters included “trade unionists with big CFMEU and maritime union contingents, Vietnam (protest) vets, left academics and teachers”, along with anarchists.
Some of those attending the WEF in September 2000 were locked in buses “for a couple of hours before being taken back to their hotels”. According to the editor of the leftist Arena Quarterly “it was a time to be alive, it was Melbourne as a rebel city”. Maybe for Rundle, but not if you were being held against your will in a bus.
Appearing on Sky News’ Sharri program on Wednesday, Victorian businessman and Liberal Party operative Michael Kroger said: “People around Australia have to understand in Victoria we have about 5000 professional demonstrators.”
He added that “Victoria has a mixture of Palestinian extremists, left-wing fascists, neo-Nazis, Aboriginal extremists, Antifa supporters and anarchists … along with a few global warming extremists”, commenting: “the Victorian Labor government has for 10 years let these extremists run amok.”
Melbourne may be, in Rundle’s terminology, a “rebel city”. But this is just the street story in Melbourne of what’s going on in tertiary and secondary institutions throughout the nation – which makes it possible for articulate and intelligent students to protest against Israel without knowing precisely where the nation is located.
In her recent report to the Senate committee, Jillian Segal (the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism) tabled an analysis of Jewish Australian university students and academic staff. It revealed that several students felt they were penalised for being Jewish or Israeli by being marked down for not adopting the same position as their lecturer or tutor had publicly taken on an issue concerning Israel.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, politically conservative students in the social sciences were marked down or otherwise discriminated against for being anti-communist supporters of Australia’s military commitment in Vietnam. Others wrote or said what they believed would suit their left-wing lecturers/tutors.
This remains the case today. Many an astute conservative high school or tertiary student will admit in private that they fudge their political views to get higher marks from left-wing teachers. This is a manifestation of the fact that these days the left is much more intolerant of opposing views than the right. Indeed, it is the left that has adopted the old religious view that error has no rights. Much more so than conservatives.
It’s all but impossible for a conservative to support Israel on a university campus without the threat of being silenced. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold an event such as Land Forces 2024 without violent protests from opponents of Israel along with the injuring of police and their horses. The intolerant left is dominant – for the moment at least.
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In Western societies, ideologues of the extreme left or extreme right are invariably intolerant and sometimes dangerous. It’s just that, in recent times, left-wing intolerance and violence is more prevalent than the right-wing alternative.