Society punishes one form of Jew hate while applauding another. By Brendan O’Neill in The Australian.

What an idiot Brandan Koschel is. “Jews are the greatest enemy to this nation,” he told the mob at the March for Australia in Sydney on Monday. And now he finds himself behind bars, suspected of publicly inciting hatred.

 

Brandan Koschel punished

 

Doesn’t he know you’re meant to say “Zionist”, not “Jew”? That if you really want to let rip against Those People, then the Z-word is your safest bet?

You can rage and splutter all day long about how Zionists are the enemy of Australia — of the entire West, in fact — and the police won’t lay a finger on you. You can say Zionists are a stain on humanity and no prison cell will await you.

You can call Zionists “terrorists”, a “cancer” and “genocidal maniacs” and, far from being banged up, you’ll win a hearty round of applause at every Guardianista soiree in the land.

The very people who said “That’s a bit much” about Koschel’s comment on Jews would say “Well said, sir” if he’d used the Z-word instead.

 

Academic Randa-Abdel-Fattah rewarded (by the Adelaide Book Festival)

 

The arrest of Koschel has really brought home the hypocrisy and futility of speech-punishing laws.

For here we have the state making an example of a man with poisonous beliefs while doing precisely nothing to challenge the sneakier antisemitism that runs riot among the activist class, in digital spaces and even in institutions. …

We all know who the Z-word refers to – Jews who support the existence of a Jewish homeland. Which is the vast majority of them. Polls consistently find that close to 80 per cent of Aussie Jews identify as Zionists. …

Same-same:

To some of us, these two camps, both the vulgar Jew-baiters and the myopic Zio-bashers, are two cheeks of the same arse.

I’m continually struck by the commonalities between hard right-wingers who bemoan Jews and soppy leftists who bemoan the Jewish state. …

The furious anti-Zionism of “respectable society” is a wily, coded version of the hatred that festers on the far right.

The Z-word gives the activist class a get-out-of-jail card.  … It really does get them out of jail. So where Koschel gets locked up for saying Jews are the enemy of civilisation, his better-educated compatriots are free to say Zionists are the enemy of civilisation. Everyone with a functioning moral compass knows they mean the same thing.

Vague laws and selective enforcement negate the rule of law and allow class warfare to flourish.