There is no Labor Party. At least it shouldn’t be called that. Bob Carr knows this. So does Paul Keating. Albo has sold the party to the haters in the Israeli lobby. First, he blames Iran then he invites a war criminal to come to Australia. What is he thinking? To take Palestinians and their supporters out into the street and to strip us naked? The Labour government in the UK has already placed thousands of supporters in jail without trial. Albo’s mentor, Tom Uren, would never put up with this.- Ian Curr, Ed. 9 January 2026.
The following passage is from Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist and human-rights columnist for Haaretz.
It is taken from his column published on 10 December 2023, written in the aftermath of the Israeli army’s mass detention and public stripping of Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza.
“A Hanukkah Gift of Humiliated Palestinians” (Haaretz, 10 December 2023)
As if all this were not enough – the thousands of dead children, the death toll nearing 20,000, the hundreds of thousands uprooted from their homes, the tens of thousands of wounded and the starvation, disease and destruction in Gaza – on top of this, they must also be humiliated.
Humiliated to the core so that they learn. We must show them, and ourselves, who they are and who we are, to show how strong we are and how weak they are. It is good for morale. It is good for the soldiers. It is good for the home front. A Hanukkah gift of humiliated Palestinians. What could bring more joy?
There is no greater proof that we have lost our way than the despicable attempts to humiliate the Palestinians for all to see. There is no greater proof of moral weakness than the need to humiliate them in their defeat.
Images and videos from last week: dozens of men on their knees wearing only underpants, their hands tied behind their backs, their eyes blindfolded, their gazes lowered. Our group is on a raised street, another in a sandpit, soldiers standing over them.
Bingo, a victory image. A few of the soldiers are masked. Perhaps they are ashamed of their behaviour. We can only hope. Their victims are young men and also older ones. Some are fat with pot bellies, others gaunt. Some have pale skin and others are scorched by the hardships of the war. Perhaps their children watched them, perhaps their wives. That would heighten the achievement.
According to reports, they were removed from a UN Relief and Works Agency shelter in Beit Lahia and detained for questioning. No one knows for sure if any of them were even Hamas members. After the victory photo, they were taken into an unknown location, their fate unclear. Who even cares besides their loved ones? What good does it do? This isn’t the first time the Israeli army has stripped Palestinians this way in order to humiliate them. Such walks of shame were held in the past in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Wanted and unwanted men in underpants for all to see.
That’s what Israel does, and it’s important to record the event and to spread the images. But the truth is that the images humiliate the Israel Defense Forces much more than they humiliate its naked victims.
But even this public undressing was not sufficient humiliation of them in this accursed war. Two weeks after the war broke out, IDF and Shin Bet security service forces took over the home of a senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, in the West Bank village of Arura. Arouri is now based in Lebanon. They attached to its facade an enormous Arabic-language banner that read: ‘Here was Arouri’s home, which became the headquarters of Abu al-Nimir of the Shin Bet.’ Poor agent Abu al-Nimir. His HQ was destroyed a few days later, and with it the spectacular display, but the taste of the infantile humiliation remains.
In Gaza, our forces destroyed the parliament building and the courthouse. Why? Why not? In the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, they smashed all the monuments, including the key of return at its entrance.
The army also destroyed and plundered the great tin horse at the hospital entrance, constructed by a German sculptor from the wreckage of destroyed Palestinian ambulances, a monument to the dead. In Tulkarm, it demolished the Yasser Arafat memorial, and soon will scorch their consciousnesses too.
And the height of the grotesque: Keri, the commander of the Nahal Infantry Brigade’s 932nd Battalion, in an IDF spokesperson’s unit video, flaunts Ismail Haniyeh’s credit card, which expired in 2019. Kudos to the IDF. You fled like cowards and we even got your credit card, the opposite babbles.
Commentators explained that perhaps it was the credit card of someone with the same name. Al-Haniyeh hasn’t lived here for a long time, but Haniyeh’s son lives here, and the IDF spokesperson neither rests nor sleeps. Here are the receipts that prove he bought jewellery. The great victory is closer than ever.
Gideon Levy, 10 December 2023
Intro
The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) 2026 were passed hurriedly into law by the Albanese Labor government with support from the LNP opposition with some National Party members opposed.
The new laws provide a process for declaring that an organization that advocates engaging in conduct constituting a hate crime including conduct that would constitute a hate crime if engaged in in Australia is a Prohibited Hate Group. A declaration is made under a highly politicised administrative process which steers wide of any judicial involvement.
The New laws provide that any person who is an officer or who directs, or is a member, or who recruits for, or who trains for, or raises or provides funds for or provides support for a Prohibited Hate Group commits an offence. The offences carry maximum penalties of between 7 and 10 years and up to 15 years imprisonment.
A UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) found Israel has committed acts that amount to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Gaza.
Major Australian Jewish organizations like the Executive Council of Australian Jewry actively advocate for and support Israeli government actions in Gaza. Under the new law’s own definition, these groups qualify for declaration as “Prohibited Hate Groups”.
Equally, some Australian pro-Palestinian groups which have justified Hamas’s 7 October 2023 action as lawful resistance. The COI found the action included war crimes. These groups may also qualify to be declared Prohibited Hate Groups.
Government objectives
It is likely these laws are designed to silence pro-Palestine protests by targeting specific organisations (“prohibited hate groups”*) to take up their time and resources.
Committed activists will be forced on the defensive with legal proceedings defence and costs. Possible employment and reputational problems may deny them the resources to organise against the genocide.
[*There are no sunset clauses in this legislation. Under this framework the home Affairs Minister can list groups as “prohibited hate groups” and that designation will remain indefinitely.]
Specific slogans or chants are not yet banned. State governments are looking at making it illegal to chant specific slogans or words: “globalize the intifada” (NSW & QLD), “from the river to the sea”, “intifada” (WA), etc.
The “Hate Speech” amendments may also be used to frighten away those who might be attracted to the movement.
Prosecutors may not care whether or not they obtain convictions . Their goal may be achieved by silencing protest and dissent to allow the Zionist narrative to dominate.
The new legislation will not contain procedural fairness: groups will not know why they have been proscribed but they will know which groups have been prescribed. There is no appeal from the ministers decision or ASIOs decision to recommend to the minister the banning of a group.
There is risk that BDS groups may be designated as “prohibited hate groups” because in the new legislation under the pretext that it is incitement.
Any attempt to use these new powers to suppress public discourse will prove the laws are not genuine tools for social cohesion, but targeted instruments of oppression, exposing their true political purpose.
Here is the relevant Federal legislation.
Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Act 2025 (Cth)
114A.1
Objects 11
(1) The objects of this Part are to:
(a) protect the Australian community or part of the Australian community against social, economic, psychological and physical harm (including harm mentioned in subsection (2)), and from the promotion of violence, by prohibiting organisations that engage in, prepare or plan to engage in, or assist the engagement in, or advocate engaging in, conduct constituting a hate crime;
Definition of advocates
(2) In this Part, an organisation advocates engaging in conduct constituting a hate crime if:
(a) the organisation counsels, promotes, encourages or urges the engagement in conduct constituting a hate crime; or
(b) the organisation provides instruction on how to engage in conduct constituting a hate crime; or
(c) the organisation praises the engagement in:
(i) conduct constituting a hate crime; or
(ii) conduct that would constitute a hate crime if engaged in 19 in Australia;
in circumstances where there is an unacceptable risk that such praise might have the effect of leading a person (regardless of the person’s age or any mental impairment that the person might suffer) to engage in conduct constituting a hate crime.
The Processes by which an organization is declared to be a prohibited hate group are all administrative, political and not judicial.
Persons commit various offence if they
Are officers
members
recruit people to
train people in
provide or raise funds for or
provide support for
a Prohibited hate group or if they do any of those things for a group and they are reckless as to whether the group is (or is not ) a prohibited hate group.
Maximum Penalties are usually 7 to 10 years in prison and in some cases up to 15 years
The Editor
The Canberra Times, January 13, 2026, published January 14, 2026.
The Commonwealth Attorney-General defends that her ‘hate-speech’ amendments as being all about ‘race.’
Not only is ‘race’ an un-scientific notion, but it evokes Hitlerian ‘blood and soil,’ one of the ideological bases for the Nazi genocide of Jews, the Roma and Slavs.
Those who identify as Jews are no more a ‘race’ than are the Irish, the Italians, or the Iranians.
While it is still legal to ask: what percentage of Jews are Semites, and what percentage of Palestinians are not?
Humphrey McQueen
Griffith
12 Jan 2026
[for ‘race’ see Stephen Jay Gould, “Why we Should not Name Races – A Biological View,” Ever Since Darwin, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 231-6; for the ethnicity of Jews see Slomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009.)]
Anti-semitism is, by definition, wrong headed. So, too, are the terms of reference of the Royal Commission into the Bondi shooting.
Human beings (homo sapiens) cannot be divided by race. There was great biological diversity when humanity first walked across the African savannah over a million years ago.
The Great Migration north up the fertile Rift Valley and then to the east and west spread part of that diversity across the planet but was never accurately defined by ‘race’.
For example the term ‘semite’ (adj. semitic) is not a term depicting a race of human beings, it is purely a linguistic category i.e. people who speak semitic languages originating from the ‘Horn of Africa’. Modern day semitic languages include: Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic (modern dialects), and so on.
Therefore, it is a tautology to ask “What percentage of Jews are Semites? So, too, is it absurd to define the wrong-headed attack on people in Bondi as being anti-semitic. How many of the people killed or injured could even speak the languages of the tribes that ventured north from Africa so many millennia ago.”- Ian Curr, Ed., 13 Jan 2026
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