Uni anti-Semitism inquiry no place for Faruqi’s grandstanding

Senator Mehreen Faruqi

A Senate committee has been given the task of determining whether a royal commission or some form of judicial inquiry should be established to examine anti-Semitism in Australia’s universities. And, true to form, the Greens have shoe-horned its deputy leader in the Senate, Mehreen Faruqi, on to the committee.

The committee’s hearings will involve Jewish students telling their stories of vilification, abuse and fear. If this farce by the Greens is allowed to continue, students will be subject to questions from Faruqi, whose own words indicate she believes the only Jewish state on the planet should not exist.

Self-awareness is not the senator’s strong suit. Faruqi was so distressed at being rendered into caricature by The Australian’s Johannes Leak she called the lawyers in.

In correspondence, her lawyers claim the ’toon “has the potential to harm Senator Faruqi’s reputation by causing Australians not to vote in her favour in the next Senate election because they think that she is affiliated with a terrorist organisation”.

With the greatest respect to Johannes, if cartoons were powerful voting determinants then the depictions by his father, Bill Leak, of John Howard would have consigned the 25th prime minister to political oblivion.

Faruqi babbles about “settler colonial violence against Palestinians”, recklessly hurls around the term genocide and has not once called for Hamas, a designated terrorist group, to be disarmed and dismantled. She also routinely makes implicit references that the state of Israel should not exist.

Faruqi and her wilful blind spots have led the Australian Greens into a position where anti-Zionism now blends with anti-Semitism. Three years before the Hamas attacks on October 7 last year, the Greens senator got to her feet and addressed the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and said, in part, “This week we commemorate the Nakba when, on 15 May 1948, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed and over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and made refugees.”

Nakba is an Arabic term meaning catastrophe. On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel was created. The following day, the Arab world attacked Israel and lost, leading to an armistice in 1949 and the establishment of the Green Line borders. It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that Israel took control of Gaza and the West Bank. One could be an anti-Zionist and refer to 57 years of occupation but Faruqi’s ire goes all the way back to the creation of the Jewish state.

Senator Mehreen Faruqi

She mentioned Nakba again in a speech in the Senate just nine days after the Hamas attacks, referring specifically to “75 years of Israeli oppression”, and suggested that Israel’s response to the terrorist organisation’s outrages would be “Nakba again”. If we were to erase those 75 years of oppression, what on earth would happen to the ten million Jews who call Israel home?

The Greens released a policy statement on anti-Semitism in 2021. In a feast of disingenuousness, it pointed at the far right and neo-Nazis as the sole source of anti-Semitism, while having the temerity to denounce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of it.

Compare this with the German Greens who, it must be said, have enjoyed greater electoral success than their Australian counterparts. In November last year the most senior Green in Germany, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, condemned the far right, too, but also turned his attention to Islamists and “parts of the political left” for the rise of anti-Semitism across the world following October 7. Habeck said some Muslim groups in Germany had been “too slow” in distancing themselves from Hamas and anti-Semitism. He specifically addressed concerns about young activists on the left referring to Israel as a colonial oppressor.

At about the same time, Faruqi was posing in front of a group of young activists holding up handmade placards, one of which showed the Israeli flag being hurled into the bin with the words “Keep the world clean”. The senator quietly removed the post from her Instagram.

Now Faruqi wants to grill Jewish students on their experiences of anti-Semitism in Australian campuses. Those who have paid close attention to the Greens senator have seen this movie before.

Robert Habeck

In an estimates hearing in the Senate in June, the Education and Employment Legislation Committee questioned four professors from the Australian National University on what measures were being taken to ensure the safety of Jewish students. Stories were rife of Jewish students being targets of abuse from pro-Palestinian protesters on campus, and at an extraordinary general meeting of the university’s students association a student reportedly had performed the Nazi salute and another put her finger below her nose in a way that made it look like Hitler’s moustache.

Questions were asked by Labor and Liberal senators. Then came questions from Faruqi, who turned her attention not to the plight of Jewish students but, in a stunning piece of whataboutery and false equivalence, grilled the professors on Islamophobia on the basis of vague hearsay. Had the professors heard of this outrage, she asked, and if not, why not? As it turned out they had not.

If left to fester in our universities, anti-Semitism can quickly become systemic and stretch across several generations. Senator Faruqi is entitled to her views but she is not entitled to pick and choose which oppressed voices she wants us to hear.