You can’t fault Peter Dutton’s opportunism. Within a day of Hamas’ terrorist atrocities in Israel, he fixed on a line that he has hammered ever since: Labor had failed to condemn them hard enough. Labor’s lack of condemnation, as it were, was to be condemned. Dutton has been particularly keen on insisting that the attacks were “Israel’s 9/11”.
“When the attacks took place in New York and across the United States in the 9/11 attacks, John Howard, who was the prime minister at the time, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with president Bush,” he said on Monday, going on to suggest the government “stand ready to provide munitions or equipment or defence materiel otherwise if it’s requested by Israel. We should make it known to Israel that the Australian government is prepared to provide such support if it’s requested. We should be one of the allied nations.”
It’s almost as if, for Dutton, the attacks had triggered ANZUS treaty-like obligations on Australia, as Howard claimed 9/11 did. He’s repeated the 9/11 comparison over and over.
But Dutton wasn’t the first politicians to invoke 9/11 — that was Government Services Minister Bill Shorten, who used it earlier on Melbourne radio. And it’s now hardened into the standard line of commentary and media coverage, from extremist blogs on Sky News to strategic thinkers, Israel lobby groups and pro-Israel newspaper editorials, even if no-one has gone far as an Israeli Defence Force spokesman who claimed the attacks were “9/11 and a Pearl Harbor wrapped into one”.
This glib, almost reflexive invocation of the 2001 attacks comes with horrific implications. What followed from 9/11? Strategic blunders of historical magnitude by the US, including two major wars that not merely failed to reduce the terrorist threat to the West but, according to its most senior intelligence officials, worsened it at a cost in trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, a litany of war crimes, the creation of a surveillance state in Western countries, the ludicrous misallocation of resources and imposition of absurd security burdens and the extinguishment of basic legal rights centuries old in favour of all-encompassing claims of “national security”.
And despite the 9/11-level Hamas atrocities taking place in Israel, some of the patterns we saw after 9/11 are indeed playing out here. There is little room for balance or accuracy; the media and politics has become a contest to determine who can be as shrilly supportive of Israel and aggressively denunciatory of Palestinians as possible. Pointing out Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians is attacked as supporting Hamas’ butchery. War crimes by Israel in the name of retribution are endorsed or accepted as the grim price that must be paid.
Then there’s the curtailment of civil liberties. NSW Premier Chris Minns said pro-Palestine protesters were “not peaceful” and wouldn’t be allowed “to commandeer our streets”, as if believing Palestinians shouldn’t be subject to apartheid and routine murder by the IDF makes you a terrorist-in-waiting.
Minns also suggested that all pro-Palestinian protesters shared the views of a minority of anti-Semitic scumbags in their ranks (or those dickheads who lit flares like they were at a soccer match), presumably meaning the No campaign and anti-trans activists — which also feature minorities of anti-Semites trying to use those campaigns to spread their poison — should also be banned from public protest.
It’s no time for nuance, context or consistency.
NSW Police went further than Minns and announced “Operation Shelter” to “ensure community safety in response to any future protest activity” and “coordinate high-visibility policing operations at protest activity as well as engage with various community groups to make decisions about protest activity in the interest of public safety”. Any unauthorised protesters, it said, “will be met with a strong police force”. This is literal Joh Bjelke-Petersen stuff, with the right to protest curtailed and police given the power to decide who gets to speak out and who doesn’t.
Strangely, there’s been little outcry from the ardent free speech warriors of the right who are traditionally the first to attack “cancel culture”.
One signal difference with 9/11, however, is that we already know, via Israeli intelligence chiefs, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies worsened Israel’s security situation even before the attacks. While one Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) commentator was using The Sydney Morning Herald to blame the attacks on protests against Netanyahu’s plan to destroy judicial independence, Israeli intelligence figures have been warning for months that Netanyahu’s aggressively right-wing pro-settler policies, and the settler terrorism they foster, were undermining Israeli security.
Netanyahu was already in a self-reinforcing circle of insecurity that the West found itself in after Iraq.
In the black-and-white, one-sided support for Israel, in the abandonment of context, detail and balance, in the reflexive malice towards those now deemed the enemy, the Anglophone West is likely to signal to Netanyahu not merely that Israel’s retribution need not be constrained by normal rules of war but that he can continue and double-down on his violent suppression of Palestinians and the steady expansion of Israel’s colonies on Palestinian land.
The only beneficiaries from that will be the Hamas leaders who masterminded these depraved atrocities, and their sponsors in Iran, as Israel’s vengeance creates a generation of terrorists. The path from 9/11 only goes to more death and less security.
