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Meanwhile in Australia: Islam, Gaza, and Party Loyalty
Let's take a break from our regularly scheduled Trump-related programming to consider some drama in another country...
This is Fatima Payman. She's a Labor senator for Western Australia who's recently found herself in a spot of bother, which I found interesting enough to be worth comment. Let me set the stage with a bit of background first.
Australia has a Westminster system of government with a bicameral legislature. The lower house of parliament has MPs who are elected representing particular districts, but the upper house, or senate, has a different and convoluted method of electing its members. Each Australian state (there are six) gets twelve senators and each territory (there are two) gets two, for a total of seventy-six. Most of the time the way senators are elected is by political party. A senate ballot paper looks like this, and rather than number specific individual preferences, most voters merely vote for a single party, and then their votes are allocated according to that party's pre-selected preferences.
This is relevant because Fatima Payman, who's only 28, was third on the Labor list of preferences for the senate in Western Australia. She was not particularly expected to win - only six seats were up and Labor didn't expect to win three. So it's worth noting that neither the party nor Payman herself thought she'd get into the senate in 2022, and perhaps more importantly, almost nobody at the ballot box even knew who she was, much less expected her to win. How this affects her democracy legitimacy is for you to determine.
Labor, or in full the Australian Labor Party (ALP; note that the party is Labor even though the word 'labour' has a U in it in Australian English, it's because there was significant American influence on its foundation in the 19th century), is the centre-left party in Australia and is currently in government. Its traditional rival is the centre-right Liberal Party (in coalition with the National Party, hence Liberal/National Coalition, LNP, or just 'the Coalition'). Labor is traditionally a working-class, blue-collar party with a heavy base in the Australian union movement. In the 90s, like many labour parties in the West, it rebranded a bit to try to appeal more to the middle class and progressives, but the union heritage is still very much present.
Meanwhile, coming up on Labor's left flank is the Australian Greens. Australia has preferential, ranked-choice voting, so there's no spoiler effect, and this has allowed the Greens to rise without ruining the left's chances overall. The Greens were originally a one-issue environmentalist party in the 80s, but have since become a general progressive or far-left party. The Greens tend to take more idealistic, some might say extreme positions than Labor, and have been nibbling away at Labor's left flank for decades. The Greens tend to do best with middle-class or wealthy progressives and especially the young and students - stereotypically, they're the hipster, yuppie party.
One last thing is worth noting. Internally, Labor have traditionally had a strong emphasis on party discipline and solidarity. The norm for Labor has generally been that MPs and senators may voice disagreements in private, but once the party has come to a collective decision, everybody is expected to maintain discipline and stand by that decision, even if they disagree. Despite a few exceptions, Labor have generally stood by this in the past - one famous example was when the Labor party room agreed to oppose gay marriage, Penny Wong, a Labor MP and lesbian in a committed relationship (and obvious private supporter of same-sex marriage) voted against it and even argued against it in public, not changing her public view until the party as a whole came around.
So, time for the drama.
The Greens recently put forth a bill to recognise Palestinian statehood. This is a long-standing part of the Green platform. (The Labor platform includes something waffley about supporting a two-state solution in principle, but without committing to anything. They have been fending off criticism for this over the last few months.) Naturally it failed, with both Labor and the Coalition voting against. At the time, in May, Fatima Payman made some defiant pro-Palestinian speeches and was quietly censured.
Then last week, in the end of June, a motion in the senate to recognise Palestinian statehood came along. Again, Labor and the Coalition voted against it, but Payman crossed the floor to support the Greens.
Crossing the floor - voting against your own party - is a big deal in Australian politics.
Since then, Payman has been temporarily suspended from the Labor caucus, but not removed from the party; she may yet return to the caucus in good standing if she promises to follow the Labor party's rules. She has been criticised by some of her fellows, but supported by some authors, and the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, seems to be struggling to find a middle path. The Greens are naturally praising Payman for her display of conscience, while the Coalition are mostly just pointing and laughing.
What's even more interesting is that local Islamic groups in Australia, which in the past have mostly been Labor voters (they don't like the Coalition for usual right-wing-party-related reasons, and they're not nearly socially progressive enough for the Greens) are strongly siding with Payman, and are flagging the possibility of an electoral revolt against Labor.
(The teals were a group of traditionally Coalition seats who cared a lot about environmental issues and climate change and revolted, electing independent MPs - so blue (the Coalition colour, conservatism) plus green (environment) equals teal. The possibility of a similar revolt against Labor would be terrifying for them.)
This rebellion may not come to anything and may not be very influential in the long run - there just aren't enough Australian Muslims, and most of them are in heavy Labor seats anyway - but with the next election rapidly approaching, Labor would really want to avoid any appearance of strife or disunity, especially with inflation, rising cost-of-living, energy policy, and the failed Voice referendum all making this government look a bit more ramshackle than they'd like - the Coalition are rapidly closing in on them in the polls.
As for Payman herself, it's not clear what she will do. She claims to have been bullied or intimidated, but at least from what's been seen in public so far, she appears to have been treated relatively gently. She could commit to abide by the Labor party's rules again and return to the caucus, or she could quit Labor entirely and become an independent senator, though this would make it extremely unlikely that she would ever get re-elected. Still, she's not up for re-election until 2028 anyway, so that might be worth it.
I don't have a conclusion to draw from this mess yet - but I think it's an interesting example of how Palestine and the Muslim vote are influencing centre-left politics in Western countries. Muslims aren't even a particularly large proportion of Australians (per the last census, 3.2% of Australians; compare 2.7% Hindus and 2.4% Buddhists), and yet they've got some influence here.
Of course, it's also possible that this is just a one-off - Labor screwed up the ticket in 2022 and by bad luck, a millennial who never should have been a senator in the first place got in there, and now she's grandstanding in a way that hurts her own party. Perhaps the only moral to draw from this is just "don't be stupid when selecting senate candidates". (A lesson the Greens might need to learn as well; this invites comparison to the saga of ex-Green independent senator Lidia Thorpe. But more on that some other time.)
Anyway, I offer the situation up for your reactions.
It baffles me how Israel-Palestine has blossomed into this defining political issue in so many countries with no real reason to have a vested interest in the matter.
I agree it seems strange, but not nearly as odd as BLM blowing up in countries with basically no black people.
This is not the first case of weird leftist obsessions crossing country boundaries in random ways.
I repeat myself, but yes, seeing BLM in a German context was baffling indeed. We didn't ship them here as slaves, they came on their own!
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In the Australian context, BLM was fascinating because we had copycat BLM marches... about a completely different issue.
BLM in the original context means 'African-American lives matter'. BLM marches in Australia were reinterpreted as 'Aboriginal lives matter', even though Australian Aboriginals have nothing whatsoever to do with African-Americans, and even by analogy, are much closer to Native Americans than they are to African-Americans. The relevant similarities are that some Aboriginals have dark skin, and that there's a perception of disproportionate police violence against them. That's it. It was strange to see the branding appropriated in real-time like that.
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Very hard to call it random when it's so consistent.
Trans hasn’t.
It very much has where I live in Scandinavia. It's barely even registers as a culture war issue. There's just 100% acceptance at every level. We even have smoother and more competent political navigators that have learned from the fires in the US with youth hormones, bathrooms, sports and such, solving those issues, to a degree, before they ever become a media thing.
It's almost embarrassing for the 'against' side, as they simply have no avenue to attack or resist. The imported 'against' narratives from America simply do not apply.
Wait, how’d they resolve those issues?
I dislike how much importance is afforded to that CW battlefront back here in the states. If there’s policy which skips over all the difficult bits, I want to know about it. We could defuse the whole awkward subject.
There's not really a resolution, just more media savviness, conflict aversion and less crazy people.
Everything is more behind the scenes. On the medical end everything is private. It's simply not made into a matter that the state is paying for breast augmentations for trans people. Most anti-trans activists can't even tell you how young the youngest person receiving HRT is.
Schools have genderless bathrooms and many public areas like pools are adding a third changing room.
At the same time there is a central LGBT organization that has a long history of 'fighting' for gay rights. So when there is a storm brewing they are very quick to get into action and quiet everything down if things don't look good for their side.
Basically, there is no big public battle. Everything that needs to happen happens behind the scenes. Everything that makes the rural townsfolk reach for their pitchforks is smothered down. That involves taking some L's, but in the long run it leaves the anti-trans side with nothing to fight against or rally around.
Yes, your(royal) solution to most of these problems was to stop looking, like explicitly not recording crime and rape stats by ethnicity, I wouldn't be surprised if gender affirmative care is not tracked/tabulated/stated up by age on purpose.
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What do you mean? I'm pretty sure it has, unless you're talking about Asia, Africa or the Middle East.
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Indeed. I rather suspect that high levels of foreign interest in the conflict is why it continues to be unresolved. Other countries keep intervening politically to "promote peace", but that actually leads to the underlying issues never actually being sorted out.
The west stayed uninvolved in Rwanda, and while that was a horrible and protracted conflict with a shocking death toll, in the end Kagame and the Tutsis won, and it came to an end. Sometimes one side just needs to definitively win and one side needs to definitively lose for the fighting to stop.
The current situation in Sudan is awful, much worse than what is happening in Gaza. But I'm much more optimistic about that conflict being over ten years in the future than I am about Israel/Palestine.
Yes, it’s become almost impossible to solve the conflict due to outside meddling. Probably the best example of this is the creation of UNRWA, and the special Palestinian refugee status. As opposed to the UNHCR which aims to resettle refugees, UNRWA keeps them in perpetual refugee camps and decrees descendants of refugees to be refugees themselves - thus the Palestinian refugee problem will never be solved. This is by design.
Why would we support mass ethnic cleansing and a giant refugee crisis next to Europe?
They have every right to stay and it is best for the world if we don't get millions of refugees.
This happened in 1949, and is literally the reason that Palestinian stateless refugees number in the millions. By now they would have mostly died out.
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I have bad news for you - there is already a giant refugee crisis next to Europe, hence the refugee camps.
Which is why we need to help them return and help the ones who are still there stay.
Return where? The lands they used to live in got conquered.
The nearest semi-stable company with conditions resembling the place that they took refuge from.
Or in Israel's case there's 2 million or so local Arabs who are largely prosperous compared to regional comparisons and aren't associated with Hamas. An Israeli Arab is generally healthier and wealthier than any other Arab aside from those privileged enough to have their hands in the till in Petrostates.
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I'm pretty sure he means to send them back to the lands they used to live in and send the conquerors...somewhere.
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This is not true, both France and the UN sent troops. UN troops didn't intervene militarily, but they did shelter thousands of people from the genocide.
As far as I understand, the UN (and the French peacekeepers in particular) were famously useless during the Rwandan Genocide, and their major contribution was in setting up refugee camps in DRC (then Zaire) for fleeing Hutu genocidaires after the Burundi invasion ended the genocide.
In other words, they did little to shelter people from the genocide, but mostly sheltered the people who had committed the genocide.
If that's wrong, I'd appreciate the fact-check. My opinion of the UN places them somewhere between people who talk in the theater and malaria, so I'd be delighted to find that they're not quite as contemptible as I had thought.
It's lucky that they're so ineffective.
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I don't think that's true but I'm not much of an expert. Certainly the UN sheltered many Tutsis in its mission's headquarters. Overall they did not do much though.
...The wiki article on the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda is tough reading.
The original UNAMIR mission was given a mandate under Chapter VI, meaning its role was exclusively to maintain a demilitarized zone and to negotiate peace after the earlier civil war. When the genocide began, the UN ignored the urgent requests of the force commander to expand its mandate (it waited 40 days before providing the go-ahead to "provide security" to refugees) but instead withdrew 90% of its local forces (drawing down from 2500 to 270) and ordered the remaining soldiers to prioritize the evacuation of foreign nationals.
The protection of Tutsi refugees in Amahoro Stadium seems almost entirely incidental to the UN soldiers defending their own HQ.
On the other hand, the UN Security Council did authorize a French army (officially a 'multilateral force' with 2468 French soldiers and 32 Senegalese soldiers) to set up a 'safe zone' in SW Rwanda under the name Operation Turquoise. This military mission was officially intended to stop the bloodshed, but mainly served to delay the advancing RPF (Tutsi) army from ending the genocide in the 'safe zone', as well as providing supplies for the mass migration of Hutus into eastern Zaire, which set up the humanitarian crisis (and ongoing border conflict) that resulted in 'Africa's World War' a few years later.
At some point I really need to write up an effortpost about France and the Rwandan Genocide. Where the UN and US can be shamed as merely feckless, France was astonishingly brazen in their embrace of villainy. It takes a special kind of moral monster to sit next to Tutsi refugees fleeing a genocide as you evacuate the country, only to kick them out at a Hutu border checkpoint so you can watch them be butchered mere yards away from freedom. Appalling is far too weak a word.
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They have Jewish (and now) Muslim populations, so they have reasons to care. Small numbers of dedicated people make a lot of noise.
It's also just...fun? A little geopolitical drama, a little proxy culture war to fill our days.
If you're a Westerner skeptical of Islam or the sorts of people who push for some cosmopolitan accommodation with it but are too cucked to just argue your own nationalism (or you don't have a nation) Israeli nationalism is something you can support.
If you're on the flip side you can inveigh about the brutality of Western imperialism and those who support it and believe you're like your parents opposing apartheid. And, of course, give voice to vicious instincts you're not brave enough to slake yourself.
Both sides get to pretend that they care about the world as such, and many smaller nations get to pretend they have a say in outcomes.
It's great for everyone but Israelis and Palestinians, tbh.
The role that Jews play in maintaining outside interest in the region is pretty much non-existent apart from in the US (which is the only country apart from Israel to have a large enough Jewish community to matter to anyone) and even the US is involved in the region for reasons that go far beyond AIPAC.
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