The pro-Israel lobby has proven they can nail activists to the wall, and now they will do it to your cultural sacred cows, too, writes Tom Tanuki.
VICTORIAN LIBERAL SENATOR Sarah Henderson made a goose of herself and her office by "grilling" the SBS about Eurovision during Senate Estimates on 28 May. Her big concern was why Australia didn’t give any points to Israel during the Eurovision 2026 Grand Final. She demanded to know what the selection process for SBS’s seven-person jury was.
The question was taken on notice.
Does any other subject besides Israel make Australian politicians indulge in this degree of time-wasting about trivial subcultural bullshit?
It’s a little like Pauline Hanson walking into Parliament with a burqa every second year of her life. Useless bait, solely designed to piss these guys off, pander to those guys, and make those other guys over there run a big headline with your face on it.
At least the mainstream Australian Left is gullible enough to jump up and down whenever Pauline dusts off the same stupid old stunt. When the public noticed what Henderson was doing in Estimates, all they did was laugh at her.
Meanwhile, it’s 2026, and we let the Australian Government and their attendant pro-Israel lobbyists ban slogans, banners, symbols, flags, activist tactics, nascent political parties and more.
What won’t they ban to shut you up? Nothing. Any legislation at all may be crafted to nail activists to a wall.
This is the problem with laughing at Senate Estimates interrogations about Eurovision. We may laugh at the stupidity of it now, but tomorrow someone in charge at the SBS might lose their job. The SBS itself could be defunded. Eurovision could be declared a terrorist organisation. Anything goes!
I wish someone had told Senator Henderson that the SBS’s jury didn’t decide the popular vote. The public did, with online and phone votes.
Australia, in fact, now has the most unfavourable attitudes toward Israel of any Western nation. This month's Pew polling data found 79 per cent of the public now feel unfavourable about it.
Australia overwhelmingly has unfavourable attitudes towards the nation-state of Israel. Not the SBS. Australia.
What got us to this stage is not just Israel’s genocide and certainly not the pro-Palestine movement per se. I think the bulk of Australia’s population would rather pretend all of that wasn’t happening.
Regarding Australia’s sizeable centre-Left political formation and Labor base, I recall Dr Catherine Liu’s sentiments about American liberals:
[They] all are having a hard time with the Israeli attacks on Gaza ...
Most importantly, they don’t want anything to change. The status quo is good for them. Protests demanding any kind of change are unseemly.
But the resultant Australian Government repression of anti-Zionist activism, if not the activism itself, has brought many of them reluctantly along for the ride. After watching two years of bans affect nothing but a shot in the arm for real antisemitism and the organised Far-Right, they see how all the repression hasn’t actually helped anyone.
If Sarah Henderson really valued popular politics – not even populism necessarily, but simply a politics that involves appealing to any real person anywhere – she really wouldn’t have brought up Eurovision votes for Israel in the Senate.
But Sarah Henderson demonstrates here who her performance is for. She’s dying on a hill that the pro-Israel lobby led her up to. She summarily demonstrates why the Liberal Party is losing voters to One Nation.
(One Nation also favours Israel, just as they favour self-interest over having principles. But at least they child-mind their pissed-off base with flashier fake promises than the Libs. "Ending mass-immigration" is a more exciting lie than interrogations about Eurovision votes.)
Content with their capacity to annihilate the local pro-Palestine movement, these gremlins are moving on to crushing any subcultural ephemera they discover that doesn’t suit their tastes.
Like Eurovision. Or a singer from Australian cult band TISM.
Between the two of those, one wonders if the pro-Israel lobby is on a mission to crush all millennial nostalgia in Australia.
The Herald Sun’s Brooke Grebert-Craig published 'Catholic art teacher’s "Hitler" stage persona' last week, seeking comment from ring-in pro-Israel media-monger, Dr Dvir Abramovich, about the evils of the legendary Melbourne rock band TISM.
Grebert-Craig doxxed band frontman "Ron Hitler-Barassi" as Peter Minack from Sacred Heart Girls’ College in Oakleigh, Melbourne.
Abramovich opined:
"We consider it entirely appropriate for the school community, including parents, the school board, and the Catholic education office, to be aware of this association and to consider whether it is consistent with the values their school represents and the duty of care owed to their students, particularly their Jewish students."
His express intention here is to get Minack sacked over the 1988 TISM lyrics.
TISM’s The Ballad of the Semitic Nazi features the following lyrics:
They called my dad the only rabbi in jackboots
They called my mum the wife of my dad
They circumcised me at the Nuremberg rally
That's how I became a semitic Nazi for life
Was it about the old rumour that Hitler was secretly Jewish? Or was it just more of the kind of obnoxious shock material that was TISM’s bread and butter — the kind of tacky and ridiculous shit that kept us flocking back to them, in an age where edge-lording meant a lot more to us once-young millennials?
I don’t know. Who cares? TISM are legends.
Leave Melbourne’s musical sacred cows from last century alone!
Even Victorian State Government Libertarian politician David Limbrick, normally in the business of agreeing with the pro-Israel lobby, argued over the matter in a video on his Facebook page.
Limbrick said (and I agree by the way):
“In the olden days in the south-east [of Melbourne] Hitler and Nazis were just things that were the butt of jokes, and I think we should get back to that.”
But for Abramovich, as for the pro-Israel lobby, "Hitler" and "Nazis" are the butt of campaigns, media spots and careers. So if you ever used the word "Hitler" for anything and you still breathe, expect a proscription sometime.
Time, history, nuance, subculture, information and background are irrelevant. They are all subordinate to a notional, politicised narrative about Jewish trauma over random 1988 song lyrics and/or poor performance in Eurovision polls.
The lobby has proven they can nail activists to the wall, and now they will do it to your cultural sacred cows, too.
They’re making Israel almost universally reviled along the way. But if we all end up in gaol, perhaps it won’t matter how we feel about anything.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, 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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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