The ABCs of holocaust denial

“Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. But never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice, into a trap, and murdered them for sport” – Chris Hedges, Gaza, 2001

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Mainstream Australia, Murdoch’s bile bubble notwithstanding, still harbours a certain amount of affection for the ABC. Maybe it’s a Big Ted thing. Bananas in Pyjamas. Triple-J, Clarke and Dawe. Unlike its Gaza coverage, there is some truth in the saccharine ads: we do turn to the ABC when bushfires rage, when elections need a-countin’, when our kids crave wholesome entertainment. But I say a certain amount of affection deliberately, because Bluey cannot balance a ledger that now includes the grossest of journalistic malpractices: craven capitulation to a special interest group – a special interest group especially interested in committing genocide in Palestine and covering it up, no less.  

In the case of Lattouf versus the ABC, Justice Rangiah found that Antoinette had been fired for her political opinion (tl;dr = that we shouldn’t mass murder Palestinians), without due process or procedural fairness, in a panicked response to an embarrassingly manageable influx of crank emails.

Lattouf deserves her vindication. She has been brave, more composed under intense scrutiny than any white man would ever need to be, and, most importantly, used this moment to speak for Palestine. But as much as this is about her poise, it’s really about all of us. It’s really about our relationship with the truth and the national broadcaster during a time of Western atrocity. 

If you are searching for the news, or even moral leadership through dark days, you will find more of it on stage at Glastonbury than at today’s ABC; more truth ‘without fear or favour’ from Kneecap (illegally streamed to millions by a woman named Helen) than the national broadcaster’s nightly bulletins of bull. 

Josh Bornstein, Lattouf’s lawyer, told The Sunday Shot: ‘What we are witnessing is the culmination of many right-wing crusades against the ABC, for 30 or 40 years, which have rendered its systems brittle and endangered the careers of many journalists, many of whom have lost their jobs. There are countless others who have been censored or silenced or disciplined. These crusades, and the complaints, and the failure to adequately address those complaints, has changed what the ABC broadcasts.’

Once upon a time, management and editors sought to protect journalists from outside pressure. A key part of the job was to act as a buffer from power (or from insane, angry, stupid people) seeking to apply fear and harangue favour. Despoiling a once revered charter, the opposite happened at the ABC: management threw a worker under the bus to appease a mob advocating for Zionism – a supremacist political ideology that, amongst other sins, has led to the murders of more than 200 Palestinian journalists in less than two years. The IDF has murdered more journalists than were killed across all of WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined (journocide?). Gaza is the deadliest place journalists have ever worked. 

And the ABC sided impulsively with the mass murderers of journalists, while silencing their own from telling the truth about it. 

‘The ABC, at the start of this conflict, banned its staff from using certain words,’ Bornstein told us. ‘Just like Donald Trump has banned the use of certain terms in the public service, the ABC banned its staff from using two words: genocide and apartheid.’ 

Think about that for a hot fucken minute. Genocide and apartheid are not opinions when it comes to Israel. Genocide and apartheid are a transparent truth today. Decades of mind-numbing hasbara has turned to ash alongside every charred infant; shot through the skull with each emaciated mother sniped seeking food. And that truth is quite literally banned at the ABC. Banned. Fascism thrives by abusing language – and by restricting thought – just like this. 

How could any ABC employee, yet alone one harbouring controversial opinions like genocide equals bad, feel secure knowing it only takes a few emails from a from a small group of pro-genocide activists to get you fired? Could the Khmer Rouge jump on the phones and get Barrie Cassidy back on Insiders? Maybe it’s anti-Semitic that they haven’t let me host an episode of Rage yet? Whatever we decide to get behind, the cranks are in charge now. 

We cannot lose sight of just how depraved this is. Zionists, lawyers and other assorted establishment creeps, sought to skew coverage of the first holocaust the world has ever been able to watch on Instagram. And they were successful. And this has been established by the law. The distance between the ABC’s news and the truth has never been more doomscrollable. 

Whether we are talking about media ethics, Lattouf, bias, or neoliberal managerialism and how no one seems to know what they’re fucking doing anymore, all of this needs to be centred around the context that Israel and the US have murdered hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of children, in Palestine, and that being a Zionist and advocating for more of this is simply not okay. I grew up learning that being a genocide denier or enabler was one of the most shameful things any of us could ever become. I actually understood all those movies. And this is what our national broadcaster is now. 

Here’s what will happen next. The ABC will attempt the pseudo apology route to repair its image. They will not go deep enough to fix this rot. They will pretend this is an isolated incident and they will try to move on. 

Breaking: we’re hearing reports Antoinette Lattouf is only weeks away from developing nuclear weapons!

What the ABC actually needs is akin to the de-Nazification process that happened across Germany after the war. Far too much blatant murderous imperialism and Zionist upsidedown logic has been normalised and treated as neutral for far too long. No one in mainstream Australia will suggest this, it will be seen as extreme, but nothing short of a clear out will fix this problem. 

The scariest truth here is that the ABC didn’t even need those crackpot emails to churn out news coverage that denies, obfuscates, excuses, and thus enables genocide. Kim Willams, present chair of the ABC, is a proud self-confessed Zionist. In 2013, Williams told the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce that he is a ‘lifelong dedicated supporter of the State of Israel’. How on earth is that viable while Israel debases the entire human race? Just like the BBC in the UK, just like all mass media in the US, when the Empire wants to slaughter people in the Middle East, media bigwigs understand instinctively that their role is to polish the death machines.

I hold little hope for what’s left of the ABC. There are good people there. Strong, brilliant journalists. But they have been silenced or, worse, sentenced to a life churning out podcasts about the mushroom lady. In the case of John Lyons, who is working remarkably between the lines around atrocious restrictions, I salute you. 

The big picture of the West is alarming. Our democracy is being incrementally quashed with state violence, with relentless propaganda disguised as news, with an erosion of protest rights. This is happening presently on behalf of a hate-fuelled supremacist colony that enjoys slaughtering hundreds of thousands of children, women and men. The impunity of American capitalism is naked for all to see, as is the hypocrisy and hollowness of the West’s values and selective championing of human rights. 

The media, the ABC most especially included, has taken the side of the psychopathic, the rich, the white, the establishment, the warmongers, at such a crucial moment, against the broader wellbeing of humanity. And against the truth. So many institutions designed to protect and uplift the people have sold us out for a brief stint inside the tent of the powerful and depraved. Today, they are etching their reputations in the blood of Palestine. It will never wash away.