IHRA definition of antisemitism

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar announced after the vote that party leader Zac Polanski, who is himself Jewish, would now be banned from entering Israel as a result of the motion.

In a statement to the press, Sa'ar's ministry claimed that the resolution, quote, "constitutes a clear antisemitic text according to the IHRA definition." That is Israel's bogus definition of antisemitism, whose origins in fact lie in a Mossad-funded project, which is a fact that you can read about in this article on screen now by my colleague Ali Abunimah, The Mossad Roots of the Bogus IHRA Antisemitism Definition.

Gideon Sa'ar's ministry sent out a particularly unhinged post to X, in which they bizarrely accuse the Green Party, which was founded in 1990, of having, quote, "adopted the green of Hamas," a tenuous link if I've ever heard one, uh, and demanded that, quote, "every political party in Britain, first and foremost the governing Labour Party, must unequivocally reject the policy." The Israeli government and its proxies in the pro-Israel lobby are used to issuing demands on the British government, and often getting them.

Deliberately obscured in all of this discourse has been the Palestinians themselves, whose rights the new Green Party policy called to comprehensively uphold.

Mm-hmm

... to why that is.

So, if you cast your mind back to the Corbyn years, the IHRA definition of antisemitism was a huge flashpoint.

What IHRA did is that it created this horrible semantic quagmire where you were just stuck having these academic definitions about language, definitions, and history over and over and over again.

And yet it is exactly that same lobby group still working hard to ensure the Australian public is let down badly over and over and over again in order to protect the indefensible actions of a foreign state from international condemnation.

The gutting of University of Queensland Press is another example of the way the I-H-R-A, or IHRA, definition of s- antisemitism can cause great damage.

Because the University of Queensland had signed up to the IHRA definition, its subsidiary, UQP, one of Australia's most storied and celebrated literary publishers, was made to pulp a children's book that had been illustrated by a man who had written an online essay about Israel.

That essay was stupid and offensive.

But on the other hand, it had nothing to do with his children's book illustrations.

After all that, Albanese caved to the lobby's demand.

And so, instead of fully backing a gun buyback that would've been a practical good for all, not least terrified Australian Jews, he adopted in full the Segal Report, the same report he'd previously quietly shelved.

He ordered a royal commission that immediately and, and perhaps terminally compromised any findings it might make by adopting the discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism.

... is just on a political level, before we drill down into the rights and wrongs of it, um, you know, suboptimal because, uh, it, it really does, you know, it, it, it binds you to a kind of a, a position with a lot of historical baggage.

And also, and I think this perhaps hasn't been surfaced as much as it should've been, it puts you on the wrong side of the definition of antisemitism which is now universally regarded as the, the s- the gold standard which is the IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition, and one of its definitions of antisemitism is denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Mm.

So immediately the Greens have put themselves on the wrong side of that.

Now, this is not official law in Canada, but it has been adopted by a lot of provinces.

They use the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, and in fact, here's a quote from it.

I'm just reading it verbatim.

"Institutions across Canada have increased access to tools, guidance, and training to support the recognition, understanding, and response to contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism, including anti-Zionism, as outlined in the Canadian handbook on the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism." So this is also the same government that, uh, is being lobbied by CJA in response to this horrific shooting saying, "Stop demonizing Israel," where they have accepted this definition in some respects.

And we could go into a whole episode on the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

I think there's a lot of journalism out there.

But the fact that this is the stance at least of some arm of the government in the wake of the synagogue shooting and this condemnation of Lewis, what does that say about where the Canadian state may be? Because since Mark Carney took office, there's been a lot less focus on his defense of Israel, but it is certainly there in a lot of material respects.

Now, as you said, this document stressed that it wasn't a piece of legislation.