Academic freedom is a red herring when discussing antisemitism

Attacking the IHRA definition undermines empathy for the Jewish experience of racism, writes PHILIP MENDES.

The attack by a small group of mostly Jewish Australian academics on the IHRA definition of antisemitism is disingenuous.

It attempts to twist a debate about the most effective strategies to combat antisemitism into a debate about the separate and contentious issue of political views on Israel/Palestine.

As a number of recent Australian and global debates have showed, the intent of such attacks upon the IHRA is to undermine empathy for Jewish lived experience concerns regarding racism and prejudice.

To give one local example, the recent pro-BDS vote by a group of National Tertiary Education Union counsellors attacked the IHRA definition as an alleged threat to ‘free speech, academic freedom, and peaceful political expression’.

What nonsense. The real unstated concern of the BDS advocates was to reframe the debate away from combatting antisemitism to advancing an unrelated political agenda, that being the Palestinian nationalist cause. Their statement ignored the oft-convergence of anti-Zionism with traditional racial stereotypes of antisemitism (particularly within Corbyn’s British Labour Party) as extensively documented by a number of radical Left critics.