Kill 'social cohesion' with a baseball bat

As Israel invades Lebanon, bombs Yemen and Syria, continues the genocide in Gaza, steps up its assault on the West Bank and gets ready for World War III with Iran, Australia’s political, security and media establishments are focused on what really matters — stopping people at protests from waving flags.

Yesterday NSW Police applied to the NSW Supreme Court to stop this weekend’s planned protests in the Sydney CBD, apparently due to “not [being] satisfied that the protest can proceed safely”. The cops cited the presence of Hezbollah flags at Monday’s rally protesting Israel’s carpet-bombing of Beirut (including a Palestinian refugee camp in the city’s south) and attendees’ supposed refusal to stop displaying “a symbol that is prohibited” as reason enough to decide that protesters this weekend pose a threat to public safety, as well as the recent addition of some planter boxes outside Town Hall.

On Tuesday AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw told Ray Hadley (who else) that federal police would be targeting anyone in the CBD displaying Hezbollah flags, and that doing so was “un-Australian”. (Aside from everything else, I refuse to be told what to do by a grown man named “Reece”.) NSW Premier Chris Minns invoked “community safety” in his support of the police application, as well as, laughably, “crowd control”. Penny Wong found her active voice to condemn “any indication of support for a terrorist organisation such as Hizballah”.

Anthony Albanese went even further, calling the planned protests “incredibly provocative” and insinuating that they may “look like a celebration” of October 7. Displaying his usual earthworm-like grasp of things, he also said the fact that the Hezbollah flag “has a gun at its centre should be a bit of an indication that it's a violent symbol”. Presumably we are now cutting off relations with the nations of Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Bolivia, Guatemala, Kenya, Angola, Eswatini and Saudi Arabia, all of which have weapons on their flags, and reclassifying the African National Congress as a terrorist organisation because its logo has a spear in it.

As they always do, most of the big media outlets have been churning out coverage in lockstep with the crackdown. On Monday the Daily Telegraph ran a story about a toddler in a “Hezbollah t-shirt” and published photos yesterday of a young woman “of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance” who was wanted for questioning by police for the alleged “display of prohibited symbols”. She was later arrested after handing herself into Kogarah Police Station. The Sydney Morning Herald is running hit pieces against sheikhs for expressing support for Hezbollah and for mourning Hassan Nasrallah, while The Australian is going after creative arts students.

I don’t want to get too deep into the ins and outs of why Hezbollah’s designation as a terrorist organisation in the first place is as much a matter of politics as public safety. Guardian journalist Nour Haydar has an excellent thread on Twitter laying out the process by which the government designated Hezbollah a terrorist organisation in 2021 after extensive lobbying from domestic Zionist advocacy groups and neoconservative Washington think-tanks. Nor do I want to rehash why it’s perfectly reasonable for Lebanese people — or Palestinians, or anyone being carpet-bombed by an occupying power — to express support for those who resist that occupation.

Instead I want to focus on the standard disclaimer that governments and police use whenever they’re gearing up for another assault on people’s civil rights — that they support the right to protest, really and truly, but not at the expense of “social cohesion”.

“Social cohesion” is the new “national security” — a meaningless catch-all phrase to justify any new method of brutalising people who object to genocide. It’s like the _{“gamble responsibly”} you hear mumbled at the end of ten consecutive ads for whichever heinous new gambling app has just signed a sponsorship deal with the NRL. Whenever you hear it, your bullshit detector overheats.

Never mind that the government’s support for Israel’s genocide — including the targeted murder of Australian citizens, not to mention the thousands of loved ones in Gaza and Lebanon that Australians have lost in the last year — is to blame for community unrest. Never mind that police routinely instigate violence at peaceful protests, like when they pepper-sprayed a 13-year-old kid at Monday’s rally. Never mind that the media has been stoking fear and hatred against Muslims for decades.

The “cohesion” these institutions want to maintain has nothing to do with peace or harmony or any of the other Play School reasons they give. It’s about control — a control that the protests for Palestine and Lebanon pose a threat to.

A great many people have already been deemed worthy of sacrificing in order to maintain this “cohesion,” including the 15,000 Australians who have Palestinian ancestry, the 250,000 who have Lebanese ancestry, the more than 800,000 who are Muslim, and the countless people who have been targeted and persecuted for their advocacy. As if this week wasn’t proof enough, supposedly foundational aspects of our society like freedom of assembly and freedom of political expression are on the chopping block too. (I’m genuinely beginning to wonder whether writing stuff like this will earn me a knock on the door.)

What Albanese and co. don’t understand is that no one is doing any of this willingly. No one wants to be marching in the streets week in, week out. No one wants to be pepper sprayed by the cops or vilified by the media or doxxed by Zionist psychos. We’re doing it because the choice available to us is to “cohere” in a society that enables mass slaughter, or to resist.

Which, if you’re reading this, is no choice at all. See you in the CBD this weekend.

What I’m looking at

• Mondoweiss — The most precarious place in the world to be a child: Israel’s year of war on children

• Al Jazeera — Israel’s assassinations can’t kill resistance

• The New Arab — Like in Gaza, killing Lebanon's civilians is Israel's only goal