Adelaide Writers Week: Australian tolerance defeated by the Woke-Islam Alliance. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.
In demanding a platform, Randa Abdel-Fattah seeks to convert into a right what is merely a privilege: a privilege whose sole condition is the mutual respect she has repeatedly rejected.
Australian tolerance:
[What underpins Australia’s democratic order is] the belief that our shared civic framework is sufficiently robust to contain — even discipline — the passions that inevitably mark a free society.
Central to that order is an expectation of self-restraint, ensuring that we treat one another with mutual respect so disagreements do not degenerate into brawls or dislikes into outright hatreds. Equally taken for granted is the conviction that, however searing our differences, they do not cleave the country into warring camps in which one side claims a licence to intimidate, silence, harass or even assault the other.
Yet none of these traits is a gift of nature. They are instead the hard-earned product of our history, which from the outset forced previously hostile groups of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish settlers to learn how to live together. By the 1850s, as self-government was being established and mass-suffrage democracy was sweeping through, a “democracy of manners” had begun to emerge — one in which settlers of widely differing origins were expected to treat one another with informal friendliness at best and laconic toleration at worst.
It would be absurd to claim that this standard was always met: no society ever has or will. But there was a substantial consensus about the standard itself, repeatedly affirmed by prominent churchmen, leading writers and the press. Indeed, for authoritative voices to denounce the norm as such would have been virtually unthinkable.
Instead, the period’s intellectual elites actively promoted civic education that inculcated habits of mutual respect and elevated them into a civic duty. … Westminster rules and procedures proliferated through handbooks circulated across the colonies and were assiduously applied in the governance of the innumerable voluntary bodies that peppered the social fabric: friendly societies, mutual-improvement and progress associations, bowls clubs, debating and chess clubs, Mechanics’ Institutes, as well as the committees formed to run libraries, community halls, hospitals, schools and charitable institutions.
It was in these institutions, writes historian John Hirst, that Australians “learned how to be good citizens: to listen to opposing arguments, to respect the rulings of the chairman and to accept that voting decided issues”. A proceduralist ethos of mutual respect — so widely adopted as to “become second nature” — was thereby firmly embedded as a shared ideal in the nation’s democratic culture.
That culture has now been dramatically eroded, if not altogether shredded.
Woke is a very young culture, which has learned to dominate by bullying and cancelling. It is postmodern, rejecting the very notion of truth and embracing only power.
Islam is a very strong culture, basically unchanged for 14 centuries. It brooks no opposition, no compromise.
Woke and Islam share a complete disrespect for others, a massive intolerance.
“Most obviously, an Islamist rhetoric of religiously inspired hatred has been allowed to flourish, creating the conditions for escalating acts of intimidation and violence.”
This rhetoric has been amplified by elements of the left that, animated by a deep hostility to the West, have lent their muscle to efforts to silence voices they detest. And far from standing firmly against such outrages, many of today’s self-proclaimed “creatives” — ranging from artists to academics –have excused them while openly defending their perpetrators.
We were unable to identify, for example, even a single instance in which Sarah Ferguson or Laura Tingle — both [woke] salaried employees of the ABC — publicly opposed any one of the 40 or so “cancellations” of Jewish artists, speakers and academics that have occurred since October 7, 2023. Their incandescent indignation at the decision to rescind Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to Writers Week is therefore not merely another expression of the ABC’s indifference to its obligation to be, and to be seen to be, politically neutral. Like the statements issued by many of the other protesters, it is manifestly hypocritical. …
Randa Abdel-Fattah:
It is, after all, indisputable that Abdel-Fattah — who scarcely pretends to be a disciple of John Stuart Mill — is no defender of free speech.
Rather, she claims freedom for herself while denying it to others. Worse still, she endorses a form of vigilante politics in which organised mobs intimidate or suppress the speech of real or alleged Zionists, whom she refuses to treat as fellow Australians.
As Abdel-Fattah frankly put it, “If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety. And it is my duty as somebody who fights all forms of oppression and violence to deny you a safe space to espouse your Zionist racist ideology.” …
In demanding a platform, Abdel-Fattah seeks to convert into a right what is merely a privilege: a privilege whose sole condition is the mutual respect she has repeatedly rejected. …
How can a liberal society deal with the resolutely intolerant?
The conventional answer — central to what might be called the liberalism of hope — is simple: let them speak in a contest of views and the truth will prevail. But that answer founders on two well-known objections.
[First,] it mistakenly assumes speech can be cleanly severed from action. But speech, they argued, need not even cross the formal line into incitement to gravely threaten the civic peace. …
[Second,] the liberalism of hope not only assumes that speech will be deliberative — aimed at exposing truth rather than at preparing the ground for mayhem — but also that, once the contest of views has run its course, the losers will politely accept the verdict and lay down their arms, perhaps content to await a more favourable outcome next time.
But the confrontation with jihadi preachers and apologists for Hamas is not a debating society. Whatever the outcome of any notional “clash of views”, they will continue — carefully treading the thin line between legality and illegality — along the path that has already helped supply the mood music for mass murder.
Those are hard facts for a democratic society to confront. They cut directly against our commitment to the widest possible freedom of expression, compelling the liberalism of hope to reckon with the liberalism of fear: the fear that the social compact earlier generations forged and that we were privileged to inherit will unravel under pressure from groups that openly despise it.
How do we deal with the 3% of the electorate — who mostly vote Labor — whose holy book advocates killing Jews and Christians (“first comes Saturday, then comes Sunday”)?
How do we deal with the 15% of the electorate — who mostly vote Labor — whose self esteem and social standing rests on being morally superior to most people, by virtue of believing special things that most people don’t believe? (Thus, they are in the 20 in nearly every 20-80 issue, and they fall for some pretty crazy fads.)
