A speech delivered at a recent rally against antisemitism in New Zealand, published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand, offers a revealing case study in what the culture-centered approach identifies as communicative inversion—the strategic appropriation and reversal of liberation frameworks to serve structures of domination, violence and terror. The speech names me directly as someone requiring "apology and self-reflection" for my appointment to a counter-extremism research committee. This targeting is not incidental but symptomatic of a broader communicative strategy that demands careful analytical attention.
The Architecture of Communicative Inversion
Communicative inversion operates by appropriating the vocabulary, rhetorical structures, and moral authority of anti-racist and anti-colonial movements while deploying them in service of precisely the power structures those movements challenge.
The speech
exemplifies this strategy throughout its construction.
Consider the speech's framing: it positions itself as defending "liberal democracy" against "radical upheaval" while simultaneously calling for the defunding of organizations, the silencing of academics, and the targeting of named individuals for their political positions.
The language of tolerance becomes a weapon
against dissent. The vocabulary of human rights transforms into a mechanism for
suppressing critique of state violence. Those advocating for Palestinian
liberation—union leaders, academics, politicians, NGOs—are cast as the true
bigots, while those defending a state engaged in what the International Court
of Justice has identified as plausibly genocidal violence claim the mantle of
anti-racism.
This is communicative inversion
at its most refined: the transformation of resistance frameworks into
technologies of oppression.
Weaponizing Bondi Beach: Tragedy as Rhetorical Instrument
The speech invokes the Bondi
Beach massacre—in which fifteen people were killed during a Hanukkah
celebration in Sydney on December 14, 2025—as evidence of a global wave of
antisemitic violence. The attack was horrific and must be unequivocally
condemned. The victims included a ten-year-old child, two rabbis, and a
Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife. Such violence against any
community is an abomination.
But we must attend carefully to
how this tragedy is being rhetorically deployed. Within hours of the
attack—before any motive was established, before the investigation had
begun—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Australia's recognition
of Palestinian statehood. "Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on
the antisemitic fire," Netanyahu declared, accusing Australian Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese of letting "the disease spread." The New
York Times published Bret Stephens claiming "Bondi Beach Is What
'Globalize the Intifada' Looks Like." The Atlantic ran David Frum's
"The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach."
This is communicative weaponization: the transformation of tragedy into propaganda before facts are even established.
The attackers—a father and son linked to ISIS, not to any
Palestinian cause—become rhetorical instruments to delegitimize Palestinian statehood,
to criminalize solidarity movements, to silence critique of Israeli genocide in
Gaza. As Jewish journalist Antony Loewenstein, a member of the Jewish Council
of Australia, observed, the shooting is "being weaponized by the worst
people imaginable to support incredibly draconian policies."
The speech performs exactly this weaponization.
It lists Bondi Beach alongside other attacks as evidence
that "globalize the intifada" calls produce mass murder—a claim with
no evidentiary basis, given that the Bondi attackers had no documented
connection to Palestinian solidarity movements. The tragedy of Jewish death
becomes a tool to justify Palestinian death, to foreclose any possibility of
Palestinian statehood, to render Palestinian liberation advocacy unspeakable.
Notably absent from the
speech's invocation of Bondi Beach: the Muslim hero. Ahmed al-Ahmed, a
Syrian-Australian fruit shop owner, rushed the gunman, wrestled his weapon
away, and was shot multiple times. A Muslim man, saving Jewish lives at risk of
his own. This does not fit the speech's narrative framework, so it disappears.
The erasure is telling.
The Free Speech Hypocrisy: From Lauren Southern to Silencing Palestine
Solidarity
The speech's author, David Cumin, is a board member of the New Zealand Free Speech Union—an organization that was literally founded to defend the "free speech" rights of Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, two notorious white supremacist propagandists, to speak in New Zealand.
In 2018, Cumin was one of the original applicants in
the legal challenge against Auckland Council for canceling their speaking
event. He argued that "politicians and officials aren't allowed to
discriminate against views they dislike when it comes to ratepayer-funded
venues, regardless of how broadly 'unacceptable' the views might be."
Let us be clear about who
Southern and Molyneux are. The Southern Poverty Law Center documents Molyneux
as someone who "amplifies 'scientific racism,' eugenics and white
supremacism to a massive new audience" and operates "within the racist
so-called 'alt-right'." Southern produced a documentary called "The
Great Replacement"—the same title the Christchurch terrorist used for his
manifesto before murdering fifty-one Muslims at prayer. Both have been
characterized by researchers as propagators of Islamophobic, ethno-nationalist
ideology. Southern was banned from entering the United Kingdom for distributing
leaflets designed to incite religious hatred against Muslims.
This is the "free speech" that Cumin and the Free Speech Union spent time, money, and legal resources defending: the speech of white supremacists whose ideology directly animated the worst terrorist attack in New Zealand history. My research has documented extensively how the "great replacement" narrative promoted by Southern and Molyneux—the very speakers Cumin championed—provided the ideological infrastructure for the Christchurch massacre.
Yet in his speech, Cumin calls for academics who critique Israeli state violence to be silenced, for teachers to be censored, for organizations advocating Palestinian rights to be defunded, for named individuals to face professional consequences.
The same person who
argued that Stefan Molyneux—a man who promotes "race realism" and
white genocide conspiracy theories—must be given platforms to speak, now
demands that scholars of decolonization be expelled from committees and
rendered unemployable.
This is not principled
commitment to free speech. This is the selective deployment of "free
speech" rhetoric to protect Islamophobic white supremacist terror promoters while
silencing Palestinian solidarity. The principle was never free speech; the
principle was always the protection of settler-colonial and white supremacist
interests.
Targeting He Whenua Taurikura: Attacking the Response to Islamophobic
Terror
The speech demands
"apology and self-reflection" from the directors and board of He
Whenua Taurikura—New Zealand's National Centre of Research Excellence for
Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism—for my involvement with the centre.
This attack requires careful contextualization.
He Whenua Taurikura was established directly in response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques on March 15, 2019.
Fifty-one Muslims
were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist whose ideology was shaped by
precisely the Islamophobic "great replacement" narratives promoted by
the terror promoting speakers Cumin defended. The centre's specific remit was to address
Islamophobic terrorism—the threat that had actually killed New Zealanders, the
threat that the Royal Commission identified as having been ignored by security
services too focused on surveilling Muslim communities rather than protecting
them.
The centre was established
because New Zealand's security apparatus had failed. It had failed because, as
the Royal Commission documented, resources were directed toward surveilling
Muslims as potential threats rather than toward the white supremacist networks
actually planning mass murder. He Whenua Taurikura was meant to correct this—to
center the expertise needed to understand and counter the Islamophobic
extremism that had produced the Christchurch massacre.
The targeting of this centre by someone who defended the right of white supremacist terror promoting ideologues to speak in New Zealand—ideologues whose ideas were echoed in a terrorist's manifesto—represents a profound communicative inversion.
The person who fought
for platforms for white supremacist terror promoting speakers now attacks the institution
created to counter the violence their ideology produced. This is strategic, promoting Islamophobic terrorism while seeking to silence scholarly analysis that dissects the nexus.
The Zionist-Islamophobic Nexus: Manufacturing the "Terror
Sympathizer"
And what is my "crime" that requires apology?
I am a scholar of the culture-centered
approach to communication, which centers the voices of marginalized
communities—including colonized peoples—in struggles for liberation. I write
about the communicative right to voice, the right of the oppressed to
articulate their experiences and visions for freedom. The right to decolonize
is, at its foundation, a communicative right: the right to name one's
oppression, to speak one's truth, to imagine and articulate alternative
futures.
In Cumin's framing, this scholarly commitment to the voices of the colonized becomes "terror sympathy."
The culture-centered approach—which insists that subaltern
communities are knowledge producers, theorists of their own oppression,
architects of liberation—is transmuted into support for violence. This is the
logic of colonial silencing: any articulation of the colonized's right to
freedom becomes terrorism.
There is a deep structural connection here that must be named. Zionist organizations like the Israel Institute have long operated in alliance with structures promoting Islamophobic terror. The "great replacement" ideology that Southern and Molyneux promote—the ideology Cumin defended—shares a common enemy with Zionism: Muslims.
The
Christchurch terrorist's manifesto praised Israel. The ideological overlap
between white supremacist Islamophobia and Zionist anti-Palestinian racism is
not coincidental but structural.
This explains the apparent
paradox of a self-proclaimed anti-racist speech saturated with Islamophobia.
The speech can simultaneously claim to oppose bigotry while peddling
anti-Muslim hatred because, within its framework, Muslims are not victims of
racism but vectors of threat. Palestinians are not colonized people but
terrorists. Solidarity with Palestine is not human rights advocacy but
Jew-hatred. The framework inverts reality to serve settler-colonial power.
The Islamophobia Saturating the Speech
The speech is saturated with
Islamophobic tropes, even as it claims to oppose bigotry. Consider its
rhetorical architecture:
First, the speech repeatedly
invokes "Islamist extremists" as equivalent threats to neo-Nazis,
collapsing complex political realities into a framework where Muslim resistance
to occupation becomes indistinguishable from white supremacist terror.
"Neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists, and vile leftists must equally be kept in
check"—this formulation positions Palestinian resistance movements as the
moral equivalent of those who perpetrated the Holocaust. The conflation is not
accidental but strategic: it delegitimizes any Muslim political agency by
association with fascism.
Second, the speech targets a South Asian police officer—Rakesh Naidoo—for making "social media videos with
hate preachers," a vague accusation that implies South Asians in positions of
authority cannot be trusted. This reflects the broader securitization of brown identity that characterized the failures leading to the Christchurch attack:
the perception that brown bodies are threats to be surveilled rather than
communities to be protected.
Third, the speech demands the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps be proscribed as a terrorist organization—a
demand that frames an entire nation's military as terrorist, a framing applied
to no Western military despite their well-documented war crimes. This selective
application of "terrorism" language to Muslim-majority states while
refusing to apply it to Israeli state violence reveals the Islamophobic
structure underlying the analysis.
Fourth, the speech's framing of
"intifada" as purely terroristic erases the predominantly nonviolent
character of the first intifada and reduces all Palestinian resistance to
violence. This is the Islamophobic logic that denies Muslims any legitimate
form of political expression: protest becomes terrorism, resistance becomes
extremism, the demand for rights becomes hatred.
Fifth, the entire speech
operates within a framework where Muslim suffering is invisible while Muslim
resistance is hypervisible as threat. Gaza does not appear. The tens of
thousands of Palestinians killed—many of them Muslims at prayer, in hospitals,
in refugee camps—are absent. The destruction of mosques, the killing of imams,
the erasure of Islamic heritage sites: none of this registers. Muslims appear
only as perpetrators, never as victims; only as threats, never as the grievable
dead.
The Erasure of Palestinian Voice
From a culture-centered
perspective, the most striking feature of this speech is what it systematically
erases: Palestinian voices, Palestinian suffering, Palestinian humanity. The
culture-centered approach begins from the recognition that dominant communicative
structures operate precisely through such erasures—determining whose voices
matter, whose experiences register as real, whose suffering counts as
grievable.
In this speech, Palestinians
appear only as perpetrators of violence—never as the subjects of it. The word
"Gaza" does not appear. The tens of thousands dead, the children
killed, the hospitals destroyed, the systematic starvation, the forced displacement—none
of this registers. Instead, we encounter only "the barbaric massacre led
by Hamas," a framing that erases seventy-five years of dispossession,
occupation, and settler-colonial violence that constitute the structural
conditions for October 7th.
This erasure is not accidental
but constitutive. The speech can position solidarity with Palestine as
inherently antisemitic only by rendering Palestinian humanity invisible. The
culture-centered approach insists we ask: whose voices are centered? Whose knowledge
counts? Who is rendered grievable and who expendable? This speech answers those
questions with brutal clarity.
Conflation as Strategy: Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Critique
The speech's central propaganda
move lies in its systematic conflation of antisemitism—a real and serious form
of racism with a horrific historical trajectory—with criticism of Israeli state
policy and Zionism as a political ideology. This conflation performs multiple
functions simultaneously.
First, it delegitimizes
Palestinian solidarity movements by casting them as expressions of ancient
hatred rather than responses to ongoing dispossession. When the speech
describes "globalize the intifada" as calling for "suicide
bombings, stabbings, and mass murder," it refuses to engage with
intifada's meaning as popular uprising against occupation—the stones thrown by
children, the general strikes, the civil disobedience. The first intifada was
predominantly nonviolent. The term names resistance to occupation. By reducing
it to terrorism, the speech forecloses any possibility that Palestinian
resistance might be legitimate.
Second, the conflation shields
Israeli state violence from critique. If criticizing Israel is antisemitic,
then documenting war crimes, challenging occupation, or advocating for
Palestinian rights becomes a form of bigotry. This is a remarkable rhetorical
achievement: the transformation of human rights advocacy into hate speech.
Third, it appropriates Jewish
identity for a political project. Not all Jews are Zionists. Many Jewish
voices—including Dayenu, Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the Jewish Council of
Australia, and countless individual Jews—challenge both Israeli state violence
and the conflation of Jewish identity with Israeli nationalism. The speech
erases these voices, claiming to speak for "the Jews" while advancing
a particular political position that many Jews reject.
The Targeting of Dissent: Naming as Silencing
The speech names numerous
individuals and organizations for public targeting: union leaders, politicians,
academics, journalists, NGOs. I am named as a "terror-justifier"
whose appointment to a research committee demands "apology and self-reflection."
This targeting serves specific communicative functions.
The culture-centered approach understands naming as a technology of power.
To name someone publicly as a "terror-justifier" is not merely to describe but to perform—to enact social consequences, to mobilize harassment, to signal to institutions that employing or platforming this person carries costs.
I know this intimately.
Such targeting has material consequences: the threatening emails, the
coordinated complaints, the pressure on institutions, the attempt to render
certain voices unspeakable.
This is the McCarthyism of our moment.
Just as Cold War anti-communism targeted labor organizers, civil rights
activists, and progressive academics through accusations of communist sympathy,
today's accusations of antisemitism target Palestine solidarity activists,
scholars of settler-colonialism, and anyone who challenges Israeli state
violence. The structure is identical: the transformation of political dissent
into moral contamination, the demand that institutions choose between their
values and their safety. And the irony is profound; catalyzed by one of New Zealand's most vocal proponents of "free speech" and flagbearers of the Free Speech Union.
False Equivalences and the Erasure of Structure
The speech repeatedly invokes
false equivalences: "globalize the intifada" is equated with
"blood and soil"; "neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists, and vile
leftists" are collapsed into equivalent threats. This equivalence performs
crucial ideological work.
Neo-Nazism is a fascist
ideology rooted in white supremacy that produced the Holocaust. "Globalize
the intifada" emerges from an occupied people's resistance to ongoing
dispossession. To equate these is to erase the structural distinction between
oppressor and oppressed, between settler-colonial violence and resistance to
it. It is to claim that the violence of the colonizer and the violence of the
colonized are morally equivalent—a claim that every serious engagement with
colonial history rejects.
The speech also equates
"leftists" with neo-Nazis and "Islamist extremists,"
revealing its broader political project. This is not merely about antisemitism
but about delegitimizing left political movements—unions, solidarity organizations,
progressive academics—that challenge structures of domination. The targeting of
union leaders alongside neo-Nazis tells us everything about the speech's actual
political alignment.
Indigeneity as Appropriation
The speech's reference to "our ancient indigenous land" deploys indigeneity as a settler-colonial strategy.
This appropriation of indigenous identity to justify
displacement is familiar to those of us working in Aotearoa, where similar
claims have been made to erase Māori sovereignty. The claim to indigeneity
becomes a weapon against actually indigenous peoples—Palestinians whose
families have lived on that land for generations, now displaced to make room
for settlers claiming ancient title.
This is not to deny Jewish historical connection to the land. It is to note that such connection does not justify ethnic cleansing, does not authorize the destruction of Palestinian society, does not legitimate the ongoing project of settlement and dispossession.
Many indigenous peoples have historical connections to lands now occupied by others; this does not authorize them to displace current inhabitants.
The
appeal to indigeneity in service of settler-colonialism represents another
communicative inversion: the language of indigenous rights deployed against
indigenous people.
The Demand for Silence
Beneath its rhetoric of tolerance and liberalism, the speech's fundamental demand is for silence.
Teachers should not teach about Palestine. Academics should not research Israeli violations. Organizations should not advocate for Palestinian rights. Politicians should not express solidarity. Media should not publish Palestinian perspectives.
The demand that Amnesty International's credibility be destroyed
because it documented Israeli apartheid reveals the speech's actual
relationship to human rights: they are valid only when they do not challenge
Israeli power.
This demand for silence is the opposite of the liberal values the speech claims to defend.
Liberal democracy
requires the free contestation of ideas, the ability to criticize state power,
the protection of dissent. The speech demands that an entire political
position—solidarity with Palestinians—be rendered unspeakable, that those who
hold it be driven from public life, that institutions be pressured to enforce
this exclusion.
The irony is profound: a board
member of the Free Speech Union, formed to defend the rights of white
supremacists to spread their ideology, now demands the suppression of
Palestinian solidarity. Free speech for fascists; silence for the colonized and
those who stand with them.
Conclusion: Toward a Culture-Centered Response
The culture-centered approach
calls us to center the voices of those most systematically silenced. In this
context, that means centering Palestinian voices—the voices of those living
under occupation, those in Gaza under bombardment, those in the diaspora
fighting for return, those whose existence this speech renders invisible.
It means refusing the
conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel, while taking seriously the
real threat of antisemitism—a threat that is not served by weaponizing it
against Palestinian solidarity. It means building solidarity across communities
targeted by the same structures of racial capitalism and settler-colonialism
that animate both Zionism and white supremacy.
It means continuing to speak
despite the targeting, continuing to research despite the pressure, continuing
to teach despite the campaigns. The demand for silence tells us that our voices
matter. The targeting tells us that our work threatens structures of power that
depend on our compliance.
The hypocrisy at the heart of
this speech is now laid bare. The same person who went to court to defend the
rights of white supremacist Islamophobes—whose ideology animated the murder of
fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch—now demands that scholars of decolonization
be silenced, that the very centre established to counter Islamophobic extremism
be attacked for including voices committed to the liberation of the colonized.
The same organizations that weaponize tragedies like Bondi Beach to silence
Palestinian solidarity are silent about the ongoing massacre in Gaza, silent
about the ideology they promoted that produced the Christchurch terror attack.
I will not apologize for my
scholarship. I will not engage in "self-reflection" designed to
produce capitulation to propaganda. I will continue to center marginalized
voices, to challenge structures of communicative inequality, to build solidarity
across communities struggling for liberation.
That is the culture-centered
approach. That is the work. And no amount of targeting, harassment, gaslighting or demands
for silence will stop it.