Dorothy Doxxer

On Zionists and the politics of distraction

Any Australian even vaguely interested in the machinations of government will be familiar with the term “Dorothy Dixer”.

Dorothy Dix was a journalist best known for her work as an advice columnist. Rumoured to have occasionally written the questions to her column herself, a “Dorothy Dixer” in Australian politics is the euphemism given to a question planted by a serving representative and posed to a member of their own party in order to introduce material to parliament discussions that paints the government in a favourable light.

In light of the government’s ludicrous response to a leaked transcript from a secret Zionist chat group, it seems fitting to christen it a “Dorothy Doxxer”. For what could seem more favourable right now to a government drenched in cowardice than the chance to distract from the genocide they have been complicit in enabling? By rebranding the exposure of coordinated attacks against Palestinian activists and their allies (a group that includes anti Zionist Jewish people, which has been rather inconvenient for a media salivating at the thought of crushing anti establishment activists) an “antisemitic hate crime”, the Albanese government can continue to perpetuate the lies churned out by the Israeli propaganda machine, which insists that any and all critique of Israel and its actions is automatically rooted in the hatred of Jews. As any thinking person with even a passing interest in the preservation of human life can and should argue, this is absolute garbage.

Too many column inches have already been dedicated to defending the actions of this “secret” group, while conspicuously erasing any reference to what it is they actually did. It’s important to restate though that the members of that WhatsApp group are not victims of anything other than their own hubris. For weeks, they confidently worked together to damage the reputations and livelihoods of people whose stance on opposing genocide they considered offensive – and they operated in secret because they knew how unacceptable their behaviour was and how embarrassing it would be to have it exposed. Despite the remonstrations of the government and the media (which have been enthusiastically taken up by certain particularly active, particularly vicious members of that group who, despite claiming to be scared at the thought of having their names and faces on show, have been more than happy to plaster themselves across newspapers and radio broadcasts), their identities were not revealed through nefarious or criminal activity, but by one of their own members; someone who was sufficiently disgusted enough by the politically motivated coordination of their behaviour to expose it. Additionally, the fact that they are Jewish is utterly irrelevant; what matters is that they worked in secret to intimidate and silence anyone who expressed views in solidarity with Palestinian people, and to strongarm their employers into enacting punishment for this. The exploitation of antisemitism in order to silence any critics of Israeli policy (or even any expressed sympathy for Palestinians) is a longstanding manipulative tactic designed to scare people into complicity with Israel’s imperialist agenda, but the advent of social media has made it much harder to prosecute quietly. And so we have instead the government and the media throwing themselves into revisionism in the hope that if they just say it enough times, it will make the lies true - but only so long as they service the empire. It’s worth pointing out that had this been a group of 600+ anti Zionists coordinating to wield the same influence, neither the government nor the media in this country would be exerting such an impressive amount of energy trying to re-establish them as the victims of a fake crime.

If you want to know more about the extent to which they sought to harm activists opposed to Israel’s genocide, you can find ample evidence of it across social media. My intention with this post is not to revisit their behaviour in point-by-point detail, but to highlight the why of the government’s response.

This fixation on rewriting narratives in order to obfuscate the truth is yet another tactic to conceal Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza even as the number of lives claimed by Israeli militants rises daily. Consider this. While Anthony Albanese - who not that long ago had enough courage to stand in parliament and call for a free Palestine - was busy distributing Zionist propaganda across the media and misrepresenting the actions of this group as a benign collaboration between wounded people looking for emotional support, Israel was launching a bombardment on Rafah, the very place to which Netanyahu and his murderous policies have forcibly displaced over 1.5 million people. While capitalism and celebrity fanfare coalesced to distract the globe via a pointless game of football, Israel exerted one of its deadliest assaults so far. In just three hours, over 100 people were killed and many more injured. I will personally never forget some of the images I’ve seen from that night, which are now added to more than 129 days worth of an endless library of images of dead children, grieving mothers, destroyed limbs and ruined cities.

And yet, the only thing the media and the government wants to focus on is the writing of nonsensical legislation in response to a fabricated crime.

Well, that and Taylor Swift.

This is extremely well designed. We are being deliberately distracted by absolute nonsense in order to facilitate a genocide, and it’s a disgrace. Almost 30,000 people have been slaughtered by Israel in just under five months. Over 13,000 of them are children. That is 13,000 DEAD CHILDREN. Those who remain alive (for now) are being ritually maimed and disabled as well as orphaned. Ten children a day are being made amputees by Israeli bombs and our politicians are sitting on their hands and allowing it to happen while delivering an absolute masterclass in DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim order), participating at a government level in the demonisation of people who cannot stand to see any more children be killed to satisfy imperialist interests.

And why should anyone who uses their influence to silence critics of genocide be guaranteed the protection of anonymity, simply because they occupy a marginalised identity? If a Zionist Jew secretly targets a non Zionist Jew and the latter leaks the evidence of this, which one will this legislation consider to have committed the antisemitic crime? What of the long term consequences? Has the government considered how this legislation will also invite unfettered abuse to anyone in the form of private correspondence, knowing that the victims of it will be unable to expose the perpetrators? How the perpetrators of domestic abuse will use it to continue abusing their victims? How privileged young men already making deepfakes of young women will now be able to, according to this legislation, have their anonymity assured should they be caught out? Australian Labor is absurdly proud of how many women they have in government - have they considered how many of them will now no longer be able to expose the men who routinely send rape and death threats, and who’ll now be allowed to do it directly from their named work accounts without fear of reprisal? Have they considered too how this obnoxious race to satisfy the pantomime of suffering (and to be clear, when I say that I am referring to the loud tantrums being thrown at having been exposed) from the members of that WhatsApp group will in fact criminalise the behaviour of the group itself? Or does releasing the employment details and emails of employers in order to mobilise a hit squad against your political opponents not count as doxxing in the government’s estimate?

We do not need our elected representatives to deliver swift legislative change to protect those who are working to silence any political criticism of genocide, especially not when this legislation will ultimately result in similar abuses of power with the promise of protection. We especially don’t need them to fast track such legislation to cover up their own involvement with the facilitation of war crimes, hoping it will silence their critics and assure them a win at the next election (good luck with that).

What we need is for our elected representatives to actually show some moral fibre and stand against totalitarianism and brutality. We need a permanent ceasefire, an end to the Israeli occupation and the (illegal) settlement movement, and for Netanyahu and his collaborators to be prosecuted for war crimes. We need leaders who will demonstrate day after day that we were right to put our trust in them, and not ones who have the audacity to believe we won’t remember how much they prioritised their own political power over the preservation of human life.

How many children need to die before Anthony Albanese remembers he once had a backbone? And how many more children might have lived if he’d never forgotten.

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Parts of this post were submitted in response to an enquiry from a journalist at the Guardian. I have expanded here on my original reply. Image here courtesy of Josh Mayfield (IG: @josh_mayfield_art).