COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
A Palestinian-Australian man has been criminally charged for voicing criticisms of Zionism during a protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He could spend months in prison.
The Age reports that restaurant owner Hash Tayeh has been charged with four counts of “using insulting words in public” for repeatedly uttering the phrase “all Zionists are terrorists” at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne last year.
According to the The Age’s Chris Vedelago, the punishment for this crime of political speech is “up to two months in prison for a first offence and six months for three or more offences”.
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“It is believed to be the first time that potential political speech has been deemed a criminal offence that breached the ‘insulting’ law,” Vedelago reports, adding: “The charges are normally levied for using abusive or obscene language against police officers.”
You really couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the authoritarian dystopia that Australia has become than a news report about a man getting criminally charged for normal political speech with a law that is normally used to jail people who speak impolitely to the police.
Deeply concerning that @VictoriaPolice is seeking to criminalise political rhetoric. Dangerous.https://t.co/dKNC1E9GqW
— Greg Barns SC (@BarnsGreg) March 8, 2025
These charges for speech crimes against Zionism follow a controversial assertion made last year by Australia’s Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus:
“The label Zionist is used, not in any way, accurately. When critics use that word, they actually mean Jew. They’re not really saying Zionist, they’re saying Jew because they know that they cannot say Jew, so they say Zionist or words [such as] Zeo or Zio.”
Dreyfus might want to have a chat with outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who just made headlines by proudly proclaiming “I am a Zionist” at his final press conference on Thursday.
Trudeau is not Jewish, nor is genocidal war criminal Joe Biden, who is on record saying on numerous occasions some variation of “I’m a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist”.
Not all Jews are Zionists, and most Zionists are not Jewish. Zionism is a political ideology which upholds the Western decision to drop an abusive apartheid ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilisation in historic Palestine and defend it by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary, and the majority of the people you see defending this status quo are Westerners with no connection to the Jewish faith.
The cult of Christian Zionism alone outnumbers the world’s Jewish population by about two to one.
It is therefore wildly incorrect to conflate Zionism with Judaism, and it is also highly immoral. People who do this are assigning all Jews the blame for Israel’s abuses, when the blame actually lies with the state of Israel and its Western backers. As much as Israel apologists shriek and moan about “antisemitism” when they really mean supporting Palestinians, the real antisemitism problem in our society is the way our ruling institutions keep lumping all Jews in with the abuses of a genocidal apartheid state and the Western empire which supports it.
This is why we call out Zionists and not “the Jews”
Zionism is a cancer that is enabled by White Western society because of their love of colonialism and apartheid https://t.co/pwNrVdFiM9
— Revolutionary Blackout🥋 (@SocialistMMA) March 7, 2025
That’s all the imaginary “antisemitism” crisis is, in reality: people conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. If you declare that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and then Zionism starts butchering children by the tens of thousands in a genocidal onslaught, you are naturally going to see a rapid rise in “antisemitism” as you have defined it.
It’s a fallacious narrative used to justify the strangulation of political speech we are seeing today.
We’re seeing that strangulation surge ahead in Australia with the McCarthyite witch hunt against pro-Palestinian voices, and in a decision by Australian universities to espouse a definition of “antisemitism” which is so speech-suppressing that it has been denounced by Amnesty International.
We are also seeing Zionism strangling free speech throughout the Western world. German police are routinely assaulting pro-Palestine demonstrators. Pro-Palestinian journalists are being persecuted with increasing aggression in the UK and throughout Europe.
In the US the Trump administration is working to stomp out pro-Palestine protests on university campuses while using AI to compile lists of people suspected of expressing support for Hamas on social media.
I have said it before and I will say it again: there is no greater threat to free speech in our society than Israel and the western governments who support it. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to shut down all criticism of Israel. https://t.co/JgMKN9f8PK
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 7, 2025
Almost every day we’re seeing some new escalation in the Western empire’s efforts to stomp out speech that is critical of Israel. Westerners need to understand that we have moved far beyond the point where Israel is a threat only to Middle Eastern lives: it’s a threat to us all, because the Western governments who support it are stomping out our basic freedoms with increasing aggression in order to silence all criticisms of its abuses.
Even if you didn’t have enough compassion to oppose Israel and its Western backers because of their genocidal atrocities in the Middle East, at this point you need to start opposing them out of sheer self-preservation.
This isn’t just about foreigners overseas anymore: it’s about you. Your rights. Your freedom to voice your political opinions.
Zionism is a threat to civil rights everywhere. Zionism threatens us all.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.
