Australia’s Iran response demonstrates our love for double standards

From Gaza to Iran, hypocrisy reigns — Australia backs U.S. strikes while shedding even the pretence of principles or international law. Tom Tanuki reports.

FROM MY FRINGE-POLITICS VANTAGE, I’m too familiar with the effortless double standards of a little merry-go-round of chameleonic far-right political opponents over the years.

Men guilty of domestic violence who boldly campaign on violence against women, men who aren’t white who become white supremacists without batting an eyelid and migrants who have ‘country-shopped’ (their own lingo) their way into Australia before insisting that they own it and no other migrants should ever be allowed in.

These sorts of influencers and grifters. They’re shameless, and it doesn’t behove them to feel any shame; it isn’t profitable to feel it, and anyway, nobody in the memory vacuum of the social media age remembers what it is they should be ashamed of anyway.

Ultimately, I think these vipers and vultures know to attach themselves to the perfect place for them: politics. The umbrella culture that we’ve all come to recognise is that mainstream politics is a place where you conduct spin, and manufacture consent for whatever line you’re peddling, ethics be damned. We don’t have to have read Noam Chomsky to understand that. If we’re old enough, we’ve seen it anyway.

Middle East violence, Gaza genocide, no one safe in USA...BUT Trump 'snubs' Albo

Israel has started a war with Iran while continuing its onslaught in Gaza and the U.S. is turning on its own citizens, but our PM didn't get to meet the U.S. despot, so that's just "abject failure".

You don’t have to be too old, for example, to have listened to Western political leadership uniting in shameless dishonesty to furnish tacit popular consent to go bathe the Middle East in blood after 9/11. They didn’t really bother with the details, flinging out a flimsy lie about "weapons of mass destruction" to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

No huge swathes of the Australian population ever really believed this spin. Certainly not the hundreds of thousands of people who stood around me in Melbourne in that year, chanting "NO WAR", shaking the city’s streets with their roars.

It all happened anyway, with millions of Arabs dying for nothing. That’s the world we inherited, and that’s the framework for Western politics that we all intuited, whether by theory or by osmosis.

At least back then, the liars in power and their stenographer journalist allies enjoyed a more centralised network of communications. Now, information and news, and who gets to distribute it, is a diffused affair in the social media age. It’s easier to find out when they’re lying, and it’s easier to log on and see that popular opinion is against them.

But now that they’re bombing Iran, they’re still lying and forwarding effortless double standards.

Israel launched its second wave of attacks on Iran after an inept and failed negotiation by the incapable Trump Administration, over which U.S. President Donald Trump notoriously snapped to a reporter:

"We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing."

Three days ago, I logged on to see a line of ABC live reportage that said:

“Iran denies claims it violated ceasefire; Israel warns of 'intense' retaliation attacks”.

Ceasefire? Retaliation? Our media are so talented at rendering a state defending itself into an aggressor. I believe they do it to "belligerent" Middle Eastern states in a reflexive manner, finessed after decades of practice.

Abraham Edwards wrote about the double standards of suddenly condemning bombing hospitals again now that Iran has done it, after two years of stooping so low as to equivocate over that same practice in defence of Israel. The Australian Jewish News has 'slammed' the Australian Medical Association (AMA) for its ‘silence’ over the bombing of the Soroka Medical Health Centre. No word on whether any of these lobbyists, or Zionist journalists, recognise that this is a principle that they have lost all right to defend. It’s beyond hypocrisy.

Western hypocrisy calls for Iran to de-escalate, not retaliate

In the upside-down logic of Western diplomacy, bombing is peace and retaliation is provocation.

And now, after nearly two years of practised fence-sitting over Israel’s Gaza genocide borne of some kind of sense of political self-preservation, our Labor leaders have no qualms with siding with attacks on Iran. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Nick Bonyhady tangibly demonstrated that Labor have slid backwards here in contrast to their stance on Iraq two decades ago: Labor signed a stern 2004 letter of protest over that U.S.-backed invasion, whereas now they run cover for this one.

Is there nothing to preserve politically for them here at the bare minimum, abstaining from taking a real stance, just as they’ve managed to do for the most part with Israel? There absolutely is: Antoun Issa wrote for Deepcut News about the many warnings for Labor over potentially dire consequences for supporting these U.S. strikes. The U.S. broke international law by attacking Iran. We should not support the breaking of international law.

But we have already thumbed our nose at the rule of international law for nearly two years, in running cover for Gaza’s genocide. So what’s the difference? It’s easier to have double standards after you’ve thoroughly demonstrated you have no standards left at all.

Two decades ago, they didn’t bother to lie well, but at least they lied first. Now they just bomb first, and manufacture consent later.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.