Politics of free speech

When the very existence of your country is under threat and your ethnicity can be a matter of life and death, it tends to focus the mind.

And so the first thing you notice about Israel is that, well, it’s all about Israel. It is a state constantly obliged to justify its statehood. It is locked in a perpetual struggle for survival.

And adding to its wonders and its woes is the fact it is home to three of the holiest sites for each of the three Abrahamic religions – all within a literal stone’s throw from each other.

And so the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not just a contest for territory but a contest of faiths. Or perhaps, more accurately, a test of whether those two faiths – Judaism and Islam – can peacefully coexist.

This was front of mind as I flew from Tel Aviv to New Delhi on the way home to Sydney after joining a delegation to Israel. Can these ancient enmities ever be fully resolved and what mechanism could possibly alleviate thousands of years of spiritual tension?

It was perhaps divine intervention that led me to pick up a copy India Today on the plane and find myself reading an article about blasphemy.

Just like Israel, the modern state of India was forged in the post-war embers of World War II and the victim of arbitrary colonial lines. And just like Israel this partition resulted in – for the most part – two great religions forced to coexist at the same time as one also had a smaller territory carved out for itself.

And so a simple mind might think anti-blasphemy laws would be critical to keeping the peace in such a potential powder keg of a country.

But no. Not only has India’s colonial-era blasphemy law spectacularly failed to curb religious violence in the country – from innumerable uprisings and riots to a recent beheading – but warring religious groups are actually using the law to target each other.

This has now reached absurd proportions, including a case against a stallholder who happened to wrap a piece of meat in a newspaper that carried the image of a Hindu deity.

And so, once more, attempts to police language and curb free speech have achieved little benefit and arguable made things worse. More importantly, as the India Today article rightly argues, such laws have no place in secular liberal democracies.

As for Israel, you would be forgiven for thinking the state would be directing every resource to propagandising the case for its own existence. Instead it is one of the most free and outspoken societies on the planet.

So much so one Arab Israeli journalist told me he felt almost obliged to critically investigate the Palestinian Authority because his Israeli colleagues were so critical of their own government.

And so Israel, like India, sees its salvation as a nation not in restricting or regulating contrary views but allowing and even encouraging them.

But if two such ancient and religiously divided nations are so dedicated to enshrining free speech, how is such a peaceful multicultural modern nation like Australia under the thumb of a band of cultural elites so committed to policing language?

Just look at the Twitter feeds of “diversity” experts and curiously titled academics to see some of the torturous pontificating semantics that these people are obsessed with – not to mention their myriad imagined oppressions.

God knows what would happen if they stumbled across a real problem.

Because one of the few drawbacks of living in a country as peaceful and affluent as Australia is such problems are indeed non-existent for the chattering classes – and the people who actually do have problems get drowned out. I have never, for example, heard a homeless person complain about pronouns.

Indeed, just imagine if half the energy spent on, say, shutting down a firebrand conservative such as Katherine Deves was diverted to outrage about a lack of affordable housing.

Of course Deves is both more photogenic and more fun than the homelessness crisis, but if we were at least mature enough to accept she had a right to say what she wanted – and others had a right to ignore it – then perhaps there would be more time and space for tackling outrages that are truly outrageous.