Josh Burns' Parliamentary Committee on 'Human Rights'
Plus a few references on armed resistance
On Wednesday this week, politician Josh Burns criticised me during an Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee1 on ‘Human Rights’, which he chaired.
This Zionist-led show trial was held to attack the recent Symposium Unifying Anti-racism, which itself was primarily exploited to intensify a virulent campaign against the academic careers of Chelsea Watego and Randa Abdel-Fattah.
If you haven’t yet read my article on the dangerous and increasingly fascistic and censorious response from politicians and Zionist media to the Indigenous-led anti-racism conference, I urge you to do so here. I include important first-hand details about the event that are still being deliberately erased by both politicians and the media.
Meanwhile, here’s my post about Burns’ specific criticism of me in the Parliamentary Joint Committee, in which he focussed on accusations of ‘support for terrorism’:
You can ruin your day by watching the full video of the Parliamentary Joint Committee (although my edits above are much more entertaining).
Anyway, here’s a photo of Josh Burns with his special friend2:
I watched the entire ‘Parliamentary Joint Committee’ proceedings this week. It’s clear that the point of this show trial, and Burns’ obsession with Abdel-Fattah, is an escalation of his campaign to have anti-Zionism legally framed as antisemitism. It would appear the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel is Burn’s primary political project, which includes his advocacy of the transparently absurd ‘IHRA definition of antisemitism’. In 2022, he became one of the inaugural co-chairs of the ‘Parliament Friends of IHRA’, along with Julian Leeser and Allegra Spender.
Burns was also the first Labor politician to publicly call for police action against the 2024 anti-genocide protests on university campuses.
On 12 December, 2023, The Australian cited Josh Burns ‘speaking from Israel’, denouncing bare-minimum calls for a ceasefire:
On resistance
Rather than answer Burns’ criticism with a restatement of my views, which are on record, here are a just a few practical and historical references on the right to — and necessity of — armed resistance:
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961:
Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.
Steve Salaita, A practical appraisal of Palestinian violence, 2024:
The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have to measure a hunger for dignity against the agony of retribution. They cannot sit passively while the oppressor inflicts continuous misery — and they refuse to accept a narrative in which they exist only to be vanquished.
What, then, is left for them to do? They must fight.
Bikrum Gill, Liberation against genocide, 2024:
While the entirety of the Western media and political class has joined ‘israel’ in racialising Palestinian violence as an irrational savagery that must be responded to with a war of extermination, the response of the Palestinian resistance has been instructive.
Rather than appeal for its humanity to be recognised by Western imperialism and Zionist colonialism, the Palestinian resistance has, in continuing to defeat ‘israel’ on the battlefield in Gaza, commanded a recognition of its political rationality and thus brought the racialised framework of ‘irrational savagery’ to a crisis point. In doing so, it has opened a road beyond the genocidal colonialism that is the foundation of the Western world order.
Stanley Cohen, Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle, 2017:
Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed.
In accordance with international humanitarian law, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere. Though Israel has tried, time and time again, to recast the unambiguous intent of this precise resolution – and thus place its now half-century-long occupation beyond its application – it is an effort worn thin to the point of palpable illusion by the exacting language of the declaration itself.3
The Guns will not be Silenced, PFLP, 1973 — feat. George Habash:
Tara Alami, The Sunday Paper, Issue 3, 2024:
Gaza is the popular cradle of Resistance because its people turn to armed revolt as righteous in the face of a colonial death machine. In return, the Resistance nurtures the masses’ refusal to capitulate to the unfathomable violence of the Zionist settler-colonial project.
This reciprocal relationship is not only (re)produced by the material conditions of dispossession, displacement, and genocide - it also constantly maintains the revolutionary psyche of those who choose to take up arms and partake in guerrilla warfare.4
Refaat Alareer, 2023:
Never condemn the Palestinian resistance, especially armed struggle. There are no both sides here. The occupier can always go to hell.5
Within Our Lifetime, 2024:
We will not condemn October 7th. We will not condemn our people’s resistance forces.
We will not condemn the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Tet Offensive, or distance ourselves from the resistance fighters of the Haitian Revolution. We will speak of the Algerian Revolution with our heads held high.
We will not ask any oppressed person to accept their own annihilation, nor will we accept attempts to shame us into accepting such injustices.6
Leila Khaled:
‘No liberation is achieved without resistance.’
Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 2024:
Lies about rape and beheaded babies were swiftly debunked by The Electronic Intifada and other independent media – often at the cost of being smeared by mainstream media and banned or censored.
Israel killed hundreds of its own people between 7 and 9 October 2023.
If made a miscalculation in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it was perhaps to overestimate the value Israeli planners assigned to the lives of their own people.7
Nora Barrows-Friedman, 2025:
...these doctors and journalists and teachers and municipal workers and the brave and uncompromising armed resistance that defeated the most disgusting forces of empire...8
PFLP, The Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 1969:
Palestinian people in the camps of displacement and isolation; tillers of our inflamed land; Oh poor, steadfast in our cities and villages, in the camps of misery:
Through your valor and resistance in confronting the enemy, one slogan is paramount and repeated daily — only armed resistance, and there is no life for us on our occupied land except the life of popular armed struggle in the service of our objectives and the daily battle.
The armed resistance is the only effective method that can be used by the popular masses in dealing with the Zionist enemy ... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence.9
Basel al-Araj:
‘The Beginning of every revolution is an exit.’
Disclaimer: the second video in this post has been edited for satirical effect.
Music credit: Our Struggle Continues, a PFLP song dedicated to its 53rd launch anniversary, performed by the PFLP Media Office's Artistic Production Unit, 2020.
Another special friend of Burns is politician Georgie Purcell of the ‘Animal Justice Party’. Burns and Purcell are currently dating. It's never ethically acceptable to befriend a Zionist, let alone date one — just as it would be unacceptable to befriend any other kind of Nazi or genocidal supremacist.
But to actually date a genuinely dangerous and influential Zionist politician? It may be assumed that Purcell's supposed 'progressivism' on Palestine to be at best disingenuous.
Stanley Cohen, Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle: It’s time for Israel to accept that as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist – in every way possible, Al Jazeera, 20 July 2017
Tara Alami, The Spirit of the Guerrilla, The Sunday Paper, Issue 3: Resistance. Order copies of The Sunday Paper here.
The martyr Refaat Alareer on Twitter.
Within Our Lifetime, Why We Protested Nova: Confronting Zionist Propaganda and the Manufacturing of Consent for Genocide, 2024.
Asa Winstanley, How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October, Electronic Intifada, 2024.
PFLP, The Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Foreign Languages Press, 2017, originally published by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969.