Jillian Segal’s critics disqualified by ignorance and rage

Author Richard Flanagan speaks at a No Stadium rally in Hobart. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

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Were outrage a winning card, the left would by now have comprehensively defeated Jillian Segal’s recommendations for addressing anti-Semitism. But while it may come as news to Robert Manne and Richard Flanagan, outrage is an emotion, not an argument.

And the fact that their criticisms of the Segal report – published in Inside Story and The Sydney Morning Herald respectively – are littered with errors makes it all the more surprising that anyone would take them seriously.

Just listing the errors would require too much space. It is, however, obvious that Manne doesn’t know what he is talking about when he claims that “there has not been even one case of a physical attack on a Jew”. There were, on the contrary, 65 in 2024 alone, compared with an annual average of six in the preceding years.

Nor is Manne on surer ground in contending that Segal presents anti-Semitism as “the most dangerous form of racism in contemporary Australia”, thereby brushing aside the plight of Indigenous Australians.

She does no such thing, either explicitly or by inference – and rightly so. For what is at issue is not a competition in victimhood, with only the worst-treated being entitled to relief from harassment, intimidation and violence. Rather, the bedrock principle, from which Segal’s recommendations flow, is the right of all Australians, regardless of their race or religion, to the equal protection of the laws – and that includes Jews.

Special Envoy to Combat anti-Semitism Jillian Segal speaks during a press conference on Thursday. Picture: Nikki Short / NewsWire

That neither Manne nor Flanagan grasps so fundamental a point is bad enough. But it pales compared with their misrepresentations of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Statement on the Definition of anti-Semitism.

It is, for example, simply incorrect to call Kenneth Stern – now a strident critic of using the IHRA’s definition as an instrument of public policy – the definition’s “lead drafter”. As the voluminous literature on the definition’s genesis shows, he was merely one member among others of the drafting committees, and by no means the definition’s principal author.

At the same time, Manne and Flanagan completely misunderstand what the IHRA meant when, at its meeting in Bucharest on May 26, 2016, it described the definition it was adopting as “non-legally binding”.

That, they seem to believe, implies the Alliance neither expected the definition to have, nor designed it to have, any legal effect. In reality, the stock phrase merely meant that approving the definition did not in itself impose any enforceable obligations on the Alliance’s members. It could not have been otherwise, because the IHRA is a non-treaty organisation that is not authorised to legally bind its members.

However, exactly as is the case with decisions reached in other non-treaty bodies, it was always intended that participating states could give the definition binding force by incorporating it into domestic law, as many subsequently have.

Having gotten the definition’s background and significance wrong, Manne and Flanagan then distort its substance. It is, for instance, utterly incorrect to say, as Manne does, that the definition “asserts that it is anti-Semitic to claim that Israel invents or exaggerates the Holocaust”. What it plainly states – in this instance and with respect to every one of the examples it cites – is that the claim can be, but need not be, anti-Semitic, depending on its context and precise formulation.

Manne should have known that from a recent UK case, Husain v SRA (2025), in which Sir Martin Chamberlain, a High Court judge, painstakingly works through the steps applying the IHRA definition involves – and he would also have seen how careful the High Court was to protect freedom of expression. If there is a lesson in that case, as in the other cases that have relied on the definition, it is that the definition may be unduly lenient on anti-Semitic statements, rather than unduly harsh.

Robert Manne at La Trobe University, Bundoora. Picture: Aaron Francis / The Australian

But misstating the definition and ignoring the case law are not incidental features of Manne and Flanagan’s argument. They underpin their central contention, which is that adopting the definition would be an appalling attack on free speech and academic freedom. Indeed, it would, says Manne, be “totalitarian”, depriving Australians of the right “to decide for ourselves our own definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism”.

But Segal nowhere recommends forcing all and sundry to adopt the IHRA definition. If Manne, Humpty Dumpty-like, wants to define “anti-Semitism” as eating blue cheese, he would be every bit as free to do so tomorrow as he is today. What Segal contends is that the definition should be used by governments, and most notably the commonwealth government, to assist in identifying anti-Semitism and assessing whether publicly funded institutions are responding to it appropriately.

Here, too, Manne and Flanagan’s ignorance comes into play. They don’t seem to realise that the commonwealth already imposes a vast array of requirements, for instance about diversity, on the institutions it funds.

Nor do they realise that making those requirements explicit, and codifying them as the IHRA definition would help do, is the exact opposite of totalitarianism, with its inherent arbitrariness. It would ensure assessments were carried out on a predictable basis, thus strengthening the foreseeability, transparency and reviewability pillars of the rule of law, rather than the current reliance on a jumble of case-by-case approaches.

But it is precisely the effectiveness that would bring to combating anti-Semitism that underpins their complaint. For what Manne and Flanagan really object to is not the IHRA definition; it is properly holding universities, arts bodies and the ABC to account for the vilification of Jews that has marred our public life since October 7, 2023. Receiving taxpayer funds, they believe, is an entitlement, not a privilege, and never is it more of an entitlement than for the institutions they like.

It is consequently unsurprising that in yet another bewildering display of ignorance they call reviewing those institutions’ funding a “Trumpian” attack on freedom of speech – as if the US Supreme Court had not, since at least 1983, consistently upheld the government’s right to defund institutions that breach the race discrimination laws, for instance by tolerating or promoting anti-Semitism.

And it is unsurprising too that they don’t note that Harvard, and the other institutions challenging the Trump administration’s funding cuts, are not contesting the administration’s right, or even duty, to withdraw funding from institutions that are non-compliant. Rather, they deny that the administration’s motives and procedures (which should have involved applying the IHRA definition) were consistent with the case law and the relevant statutes.

In the end, Manne and Flanagan descend to ad hominem attacks against Segal, which, as John Stuart Mill argued long ago, both debase “the morality of public discussion” and disqualify the assailant from the respect of decent people.

Substituting hand-me-down reactions for knowledge, and off-the-cuff judgments for the hard work of informed analysis, their response exemplifies the intellectual arrogance, cheap moralising, and intemperate sciolism of the class that dominates our taxpayer-funded cultural, broadcasting and educational institutions. With those institutions turning into breeding grounds for intolerance, division and hatred, the sooner they are held to account, the greater the chance reason’s weak voice will prevail over the champions of smouldering rage.