On Grading 'Australian' Universities

The ‘australian’ government’s response to its Special Envoy on Antisemitism, arch-Zionist and far-right adjacent Jillian Segal’s ‘Plan to Combat Antisemitism’ includes grading universities on how well they ‘deal’ with any sign of support for Palestine. Universities may have funding withheld if they ‘facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism.’ This can include displaying a Palestinian flag.

The ‘Report card’ proposed by Segal is a direct borrowing from the Anti Defamation League’s yearly ‘Campus Antisemitism Report Card’. ‘Australian’ schools do not refer to ‘report cards’; this is an Americanism. Our ‘war on antisemitism’ is second hand.

I discussed Segal’s plan in my post, ‘War is War’. To reiterate what I wrote then,

Segal is the settler colonial Australian state’s envoy. She was appointed by its Prime Minister, head of a Labor Party steeped in the history of Australian white supremacism. As such, her ‘Plan’ is not intended to respond to antisemitism because it requires antisemitism to exist perpetually as a political object. It is part of the arsenal of what the Palestinian scholar, Anna Younes, calls ‘the war on antisemitism’. This is a counterinsurgency that goes far beyond the question of Palestine. The war on antisemitism, like the war on drugs and the war on terror before it, has a much wider function; to manage all who pose a threat to the functioning of the western state, racial-colonial capitalism, and white supremacy. As the conditions that breed resistance – not the genocide alone but also deepening unliveability for growing numbers among the populations of the states which pose as democracies – grow, so does repression. Antisemitism, and along with it the chimera of a beleaguered Jewish community, provides a framework for the counterinsurgent machinations of the state and elites.

Far-right white supremacists for whom Israel represents a utopic response to the feared (and inevitable) demise of western dominance find a home in the war on antisemitism, even as they continue to racistly decry the influence of ‘Jewish globalists’. As we can see in Trump’s America, there is a glee with which racist elites, who have no special love for Jews, wield antisemitism like a weapon of mass destruction. Germany, France and Britain do the same.

In this regard, it is important to note that last November, Segal appointed the former Vice Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, Greg Craven, to lead the Report Card initiative which the government has now decided to adopt. Craven presided over the establishment of the Ramsay Centre funded Bachelor of Arts degree in Western Civilisation at the ACU. This full ride for students willing to submit themselves to a three year degree on what Craven calls the ‘force for the good’ that is Western Civilisation was the subject of much debate in 2018 with right wing Catholics represented by the ‘suppository of all wisdom’, Tony Abbott on one side and people who have actually read the history of the West on the other.

The choice of Craven to lead the ‘report card’ process should be called into question due to his support for the now dead paedophile Cardinal George Pell whose trial he described as unfair. He continued to defend his ‘dear friend’ after he was found guilty. I will leave it to others to inquire into what this portends given the release of the Epstein files and the deep imbrication of (child) sex abuse and political power.

For good measure Craven also denies the severity of Islamophobia in ‘australia’. One of the reasons Craven set out for his belief in the value of the study of Western civilisation was as a ‘counter-narrative to the narrative of jihad’ which an imaginary ‘Australian youth whose parents immigrated to Australia from the Middle East’ would not otherwise find in Australian culture. However, it is truly ironic - but entirely understandable given the hypocrisy in which racism is bathed - that Craven’s biggest selling point for the supremacy of the West is its

tradition of respectful disagreement and careful scrutiny of opposing arguments that has allowed for the very kind of critique of Western civilisation that would not be tolerated, let alone encouraged, in any other civilisation. Those who are ashamed of Western civilisation seem to forget that we ought to be proud that Western civilization not only permits its own criticism, but has an intellectual tradition that encourages it.

In contradistinction, he now says that the expression of Palestine solidarity at universities should not be tolerated, equating ‘occupation of buildings, vicious protests, occupation of campuses’ with antisemitism. The reason for the double standard is because, as I wrote in The New Racial Regime,

the survival of western civilisation is being outsourced to a Jewish proxy standing in for a homo europaeus battling an oriental threat that, like the Jew historically, is located within the western citadel, usurping him (sic) on his home turf. The Christians for Israel Australia website puts it directly: ‘the canary is Israel, and the coalmine is Western Civilisation, based on its Judeo-Christian foundations’.

The ‘war on antisemitism’ is a war for the survival of the west, an ultimately fruitless endeavour, especially on occupied and unceded Indigenous lands.

Given universities are in the spotlight, I reproduce here the final section of Chapter 3 of The New Racial Regime, ‘Institutionalising Dissent in a Time of Genocide’. Cedric Robinson’s exposure of the fact that racial regimes are faced with ‘constant trembles’ and that they must be constantly reinvigorated to stamp out attack from below, is an important reminder, given what we are facing; a reminder to stand firm and to retain hope in resistance.

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