On my way to work in the morning as I walk over to the station I first pass a Jewish primary school and then turn the corner where I pass the Holocaust Centre. The Holocaust Centre is a memorial to the murder of six million Jews who are lovingly remembered and mourned by many still alive today. And what’s more, many of those murdered were in every way the same as the children who are found in the playground of the school. If you are a Jew, anti-Semitism is no small matter. It has been a life and death issue across the centuries and remains so to this day.

The leaders of the Jewish community constantly seek ways to ensure a Holocaust does not happen again. Mark Liebler seeks ways to ensure that it does not happen again. Hatred of Jews is just how it is in many parts of the world. One of the reasons Australia remains a great nation is that its record in accepting and defending people of Jewish origins is exemplary. No Jew living in this country is anything other than grateful for the not just tolerant attitudes of their fellow Australians but the full acceptance of Jews as an integral part of this community, an overwhelmingly Christian community. A Sir John Monash and a Sir Isaac Isaacson is unimaginable in any part of the world a century ago, but the first led the Australian forces in World War I and the second became Governor-General in 1930. If I am happy to call Australia home, this is part of the reason why.

Andrew Bolt and Mark Liebler are now trying to clarify the issues that stand between them on free speech versus blood libel. Andrew Bolt was dragged through the courts over whether it was legal for him to make pointed remarks about the skin colour of individuals who identified with their Aboriginal descent. This is, moreover, not just a matter of skin colour but involves access to programs designed to overcome Aboriginal disadvantage which are being used by people who are in no way disadvantaged either by circumstance or origins. His point was a valid political point and on those grounds there should never have been a prosecution never mind a conviction. This is not what the law was intended for and was mis-applied. It was no more wrong for Andrew Bolt to point out how these programs are being exploited by those who are experiencing no disadvantage as it was for those to implement these programs in the first place. If we are going to overcome the uncontested existence of Aboriginal disadvantage, then a law that relates specifically to Aboriginals must be enacted which is a law based on racial identification. But if such programs are to exist it also means that they can be criticised on their own terms.

But I have been in this country long enough to remember when the first Aboriginal State Governor, Pastor Doug Nicholls in South Australia, went into a maddened frenzy because his wife had been insulted by someone using a derogatory term for an Aboriginal woman. And you know, I have only ever sympathised with Nicholls. It was an absolute disgrace, utterly indefensible on free speech or any other grounds. Not just impolite. Not just rude. Not just unkind. Not just boorish. It was full blown uncivilised, absolutely unacceptable and is rightly made illegal. People say things to each other in private about other racial and religious groups, but to make these kinds of vicious statements in public is more than just a tut-tut offence against good breeding. It should be a matter for the law.

But that would in no way limit the ability of governments to form policy on Aboriginal issues nor would it stop debate from occurring on any matter relating to Aboriginal policy. That is open and must always be open. But insults and threats, that is, insulting or threatening speech, is different. Here are two significant paras from the article by Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz which touched off this debate:

It would be difficult to have missed the recent campaign in these pages and elsewhere against section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes conduct unlawful where it is done because of someone’s race/ethnicity and is reasonably likely to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ them. . . .

Most importantly, 18C does not make it unlawful to merely say something that might be construed as racist and hurt someone’s feelings. What is unlawful is doing something ‘because of’ the race/ethnicity of a person that is reasonably likely to offend them. The issue is not that anyone’s feelings are hurt; it’s that someone is targeted for harassment because they happen to be of a certain ethnicity.

The serious error in my view made by the author of the article was to suggest that those on the other side of this debate were “dishonest”. On this, he wrote:

If people genuinely think it should be legal for Australians to harass others on the basis of race, then they are welcome to make that argument. What’s troubling about the anti-18C campaign is its dishonesty.

The provision is made out to be an offence when it is not. The freedom of speech defences are ignored. It is purported to be a unique law against causing offence, when it is actually modelled on centuries-old breach of the peace laws. One controversial decision is focused on to the exclusion of almost 20 years of positive outcomes.

But then, being honest about 18C makes it harder to spin the provision as a threat to free speech, and nobody wants to openly defend racial harassment. Do they?

They were not being dishonest and it is pernicious for him to have said so. He doesn’t know what they think and has no idea what their motives were, but whatever they were, dishonesty was not amongst them. It is ridiculously wrong to apply motives to people of goodwill in every respect. Everything he wrote was all right to that point so why say it? It ruined the argument because it tried to convict Andrew Bolt and his supporters when the point of this article should have been to explain the way things are as seen by a representative Jew.

I don’t think it is dishonesty so much as bewilderment. The judge and the prosecutor misused the law in ways that have put this piece of legislation under deep examination. Andrew Bolt was not causing a breach of the peace, and it was worse than shameful – indeed utterly disgusting – for the prosecutor to have brought the Holocaust into his case. It made me personally very angry at the time because doing so desecrated the sanctity of the Holocaust memorial which should never be demeaned by being brought into the secular world in this way.

But I have Chinese friends who have been abused in public and there are real anti-Semites around who hate people for no other reason than because they are Jews. As a Jew I am with Shylock in asking, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But in Shakespeare’s own time, this was a laugh line that in no way was intended to raise sympathy for Shylock nor did it. Anti-Semites perfectly well understand that Jews will bleed since they have so often drawn this blood themselves. It is not a matter of free speech to deny racists the right to their rants, and it is not enough to think that the good people will make such expressions of hatred and ill will unacceptable in polite society.

That the modern practice is to be anti-Zionist, to say that I have nothing against Jews but I am blah, blah, blah about Israel is now the way it is done. Anti-Semitism is very much alive and I am content to have such legislation on the books because, while it is a weak reed, at least it is something.

Free speech is about allowing the freedom to say whatever one believes in the midst of political discourse. If an acceptance of racist rants is defended as examples of free speech then the very notion of free speech will be discredited by these very claims in the eyes of anyone who wishes to live in a decent society where individuals are protected from the kinds of racist abuse that has no part to play in a civilised community which seeks to promote peace, order and good will.