Jewish lives more important than freedom of speech

The famous line that “loose lips sink ships” meant what it said. Speech contrary to the prosecution of a just war was not a social lapse, but a national threat.

Just sometimes, words speak as loudly as actions. Sometimes, they hiss with promised evil.

This is the reality of the homicidal, chilling, anti-Semitic threats of two nurses at Bankstown Hospital.

They threatened that they would not treat Israeli patients. For “Israeli”, read Jewish.

What is truly horrific about this malice is it was uttered by nurses. Nurses are not merely “heath workers”. They are members of a profession of care, and throughout their education and training are positively programmed to do nothing but good.

Yet in the case of the Bankstown two, Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, all that ethical bedrock of compassion has been dynamited so long as a patient is deemed a perfidious Jew. The reason for this horror is clear, but we are deathly afraid of admitting it.

One of the defining features of a war is that ­people are killed. We seem to be approaching something like this reality. Between the Bankstown utterances and the caravan of explosives at Dural, it now seems clear people will be killed in anti-Semitic attacks in Australia.

NSW government officials are investigating after a Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh wearing their NSW Health uniforms were filmed declaring they refuse to treat Israeli people and would “kill them” if they present to their ward.

Most of the victims will be Jews, but the high likelihood is that some non-Jewish bystanders, or Jewish sympathisers, will perish as well.

This domestic campaign of terror is part of a much larger conflict, with Israel and the Jewish people merely the unwilling front rank in a global struggle. Russia, China, Iran and Korea detest the very notion of Western Civilisation. They detest even the notion of “the West”.

Anti-Semitism is a natural weapon in this struggle. It threatens the geographically isolated Western society of Israel, the Jewish running dog of the US. It disrupts the whole Western liberal project.

But most of all, it taps deep and ancient springs of raw hatred. Russia had its pogroms. Iran has its gallows. Jews are hated not just as Jews, but as the soon to be lost tribes of the West.

All this has grave implications for Australia.

Of course we need to place ourselves in a posture of defence. Of course we should be spending big on the apparatus of security and intelligence. Of course we should be identifying obvious targets and protecting them – if necessary – not only with police, but armed members of the Australian Defence Force.

At the same time there are ­policy debates that should now be closed in light of these horrible events. The most obvious is the furore over the criminalisation of hate speech.

No sane person welcomes limitations on freedom of expression; being able to say what you think is one of the principal hallmarks of democracy.

Libertarians, in particular, use this value to contest the proposed laws against hate speech. Apparently they’d prefer the vilification of Jews and all its potential con­sequences to the limitation of speech.

As a principled position, absolute freedom of expression has great attractions – but not when you are at war against not only a host of external foes, but an insidious, vaporous ideology swirling through our society like mustard gas.

There is nothing new in these types of protective measures. ­Nations at war typically have temporarily limited freedom of speech to safeguard the polity ­itself.

Take World War II. Freedom of expression was limited by a battery of restrictions ranging across the disclosure of military secrets, sedition, open support of the enemy and speech designed to undermine national morale and security.

The same thing happened in Britain and the United States. These are the nations where free speech originated and continues to thrive.

It is a fair bet that without reasonably restricted expression of opinion during the time of world war, their survival and that of free speech itself would have been gravely compromised.

Remember that those wartime restrictions were vastly stricter than those currently proposed.

In our own war against anti-Semitism, only those uttering intimidatory expressions of hatred will be caught. During 1939, anything deemed detrimental to the war effort could land you before the courts.

The famous line that “loose lips sink ships” meant what it said. Speech contrary to the prosecution of a just war was not a social lapse, but a national threat.

No one proposes such draconian measures now. What is proposed is placing restrictions on speech calculated to incite hatred and harm from a small but vicious fifth column.

Yes, this hurts. But a lot less than murder.

Greg Craven is a former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.