Published: 20 August 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ANDRE OBOLER: The Australian government must not only ban far-right groups, but also criminalise speech that incites violence in the name of ideological or religious extremism
THE EXPOSÉ OF right-wing extremism in Australia this week by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes was a brilliant example of investigative journalism. It identified 24 members of the National Socialist Alliance, including members with gun and security licenses. Some even working for the government. The reporting was largely based on the work of a source who infiltrated the neo-Nazi group. The Jewish community owes a debt to that anonymous source.
I know handful of former right-wing extremists from different parts of the world. One of them left extremism behind, then went back in as an undercover source for an anti-fascist media investigation. It was the UK, the early 1980s, and this source became a founding member of the British National Party.
After foiling a bomb plot, and other acts of extremist violence, he got out in much the same way as we are seeing now. The story aired as a documentary, The Other Face of Terror, on Channel 4 in 1984. The activist’s name is Ray Hill.
Hill was elected an Honorary Vice-President of the UK’s National Union of Students and an Honorary life member of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), the UK’s version of AUJS. I served for a time as National Secretary of UJS while I was in the UK doing my PhD.
That’s where I met Hill and heard his story for the first time. He liked to share the story of panicked phone calls as the doco aired, far-right activists who were convinced it was a media conspiracy to frame him as a mole and discredit him.
He was far less amused when he relayed the story of a Molotov cocktail being thrown into his child’s bedroom, and the subsequent decades of living in hiding.
