A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry.
Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corp again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.
Let’s look first at Mark Latham. After destroying the manifold opportunities presented to him in the wake of his failed political career, Latham’s currently reinventing himself, in his taxpayer-funded retirement, as the world’s oldest teenager. When he’s not snarling at women for not sleeping with him, he’s yukking it up about Pepe and Kek and Big Man Tyrone: all totally normal preoccupations for a grown man who once led the largest political party in the country.
Latham’s recently signed with an outfit called Rebel Media. Who might they be? As Jason Wilson explained in the Guardian, Rebel Media offers a platform for ideologues at the intersection between the right and the far right. In fact, Latham announced his new venture during a conversation with none other than the English Defence League’s founder Tommy Robinson: a fellow who typifies the Rebel stable, what with being both a long-term Islamophobe and a convicted criminal.
Read the article by Jeff Sparrow in The Overland.