Grace Tame stay in your lane

As usual, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. Grace Tame has stolen the limelight from the very cause she espouses. She is now on the defensive.

“This should terrify us all. Democracy is eroding before our very eyes.”

The head of the nation’s peak body representing Jewish women said that Ms Tame should be stripped of her Australia Day honour, and accused her of hypocrisy.

…Many have also spoken out in defence of Ms Tame, including Greens leader Larissa Waters, who told reporters “she deserves every accolade that she’s received as a great Australian”.

You’ve made a mistake, Grace. Yelling at crowds to “globalise the Intifada” is a clear incitement of violence.

What do you think the Intifada is? It’s an Arab word for rebellion.

I don’t think Ms Tame should be stripped of anything. This is freedom of speech. We cannot allow Australia to turn into Israel for no apparent reason.

Tame’s work on sexual assault is extraordinary, and her public leadership on the issue is equally so. I am a huge fan of her fierce advocacy.

But stay in your lane, Grace Tame.

You can’t be so naive as to think that you would not become the story when you start yelling at Aussies to rise up violently against Israel, something that is completely irrelevant to Australia and Australians of the Year.

This was always going to result, probably rightly, in a broad sanctioning of bad behaviour, doing harm to the cause of Palestinians, which is also utterly irrelevant to Australia. We cannot allow Australia to turn into Palestine either.

I don’t know what’s going on in the engine rooms of the fake left, but it appears to have dislocated entirely from day-to-day reality.

After the rise of US shale oil and the crushing of OPEC, the two-thousand-year-old Levantine War has never been more irrelevant to Australia and Australians.

Turning it into something it is not, a local issue, is fake politics 101. It puts everybody off, thereby degrading the issue. This is just stupid politics.

It’s entirely bizarre but typical of today’s endless culture-war distraction from the real economic distribution issues of the day.

William Butler Yeats put it best. (I apologise for quoting the most overquoted poem of all time).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The dispossession Grace Tame should be fighting is here, in Australia, where change can be effected. Not wasted in some galaxy far, far away. That is the obligation of the Australian of the Year.

That counts equally for all the culture-war dills quoted in this debate.

Including me!