MORE THAN TWO years ago, I wrote an article for this platform about the decision to speak or remain silent when faced with injustice. Two years on, after the death of over 78,000 Gazans, the disablement of many more and increasing violent incursions into the West Bank, I believe this choice is even more important. However, those who choose to speak out against the genocide have faced severe repercussions: silencing, loss of funding, public sanctions. 

In this charged geopolitical arena, speech and language are now viewed as weapons to be blunted, disarmed or wielded. Silence is the preferred outcome. Thus, recognising how silencing is enacted is essential to defusing its power.

Language is central to the way we experience the world and is how we interact with one another, share ideas and knowledge, understand history and patterns, and protest. It’s also how we understand our psyche. I deploy language daily in my therapy rooms to explore how people understand themselves and the world. Without speech, there is no collective; when democracy starts moving towards oppression, speech is always one of the first things to be policed. By stifling a person’s capacity to speak about what they have experienced and witnessed, attention can be deflected away from the severe harms caused to victims of violence onto the feelings and experiences of others who may wish to ignore this violence because it challenges their worldview.

The latest manifestation of this  gagging was the Adelaide Writers’ Week debacle, with the former Adelaide Festival board rescinding Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s invitation to speak and making possibly defamatory links between her and the recent terrorist attack at Bondi beach. The fallout was swift. More than 180 writers withdrew; Artistic Director Louise Adler resigned before providing a blistering critique of the pressure that led to the decision to disinvite Dr Abdel-Fattah. Though Writers Week will no longer go ahead in 2026, a new Adelaide Festival board has since been appointed and an apology issued to Dr Abdel-Fattah.

SINCE 2023, MUZZLING of this kind has been prominent in the arts sector, though it’s also been present in healthcare and education. These decisions are often made by board members with limited arts experience of their own. Their focus on governance and risk management often overrides the decisions of the artistic leaders who report to them. Adelaide Writers’ Week is a particularly instructive example in the context of language and its weaponisation: in the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard thought-terminating clichés of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘safety’, disingenuous conflation of constructs (for example, political protest and terrorism), the negation of one identity as a means of supporting others, or the insistence that words themselves are so dangerous that muteness is essential. 

A key tool in this arsenal has been the conflation of accusations of antisemitism with protests against the political Zionist movement or Israeli military actions – including a terrible blending of the Bondi attack with the pro-Palestinian movement. I do not deny the reality of antisemitism, including pockets in the pro-Palestinian movement. However, I note that all forms of racism and discrimination towards the ‘other’ are rising around the world – including an upsurge of hatred directed at my own Indian community in Australia, as well as rising Islamophobia. This does not at all make antisemitism tolerable but does place it within the global context of heightened racial othering and intolerance. No one should ever be harmed on the basis of how they look or who they worship (among a multitude of other protected attributes), nor should supporting the rights to safety of one minority automatically correlate with the negation of another minority to express their felt realities. 

Yet media discourse and pressure from individuals and organisations has led to weeks of increasingly vociferous attacks on pro-Palestinian supporters, as though they – or indeed Albanese himself – had been the ones perpetrating the shooting. This is a complete negation of what the fields of forensic psychology and risk assessment know about terrorism. We know that that it occurs in every society (ASIO has had the threat level set to ‘probable’ for a few years now), that some people are vulnerable to being radicalised, that terrorism has a clear trajectory with established risk factors and pathways to radicalisation (engagement in democratic political protest and speech is not one of these risk factors or drivers). We know that we need – and indeed, have – strong policing and intelligence departments designed to halt these attacks. And we know that we need above anything a clear understanding of why these systems failed to halt the Bondi terrorists as well as mechanisms to ensure an attack like this does not occur again, such as stronger gun control. 

There has been a marked silence around these facts, and a failure of moral leadership. In this vacuum of reasoned speech, hate has spawned. Instead of the natural emotions that arise after a disaster – horror, sadness, anger, disgust, fear – rage predominated in the aftermath of Bondi, fuelled by a frenzied media that relies on outrage as a barometer of engagement. The rushed hate speech legislation – a bill that has raised concerns for granting ministers a lack of accountability and excluding the consideration of hate speech towards disabled people, LGBTQIA+ individuals and First Nations people – is another result of this pressure.

TERMS SUCH AS ‘psychological safety’, ‘cultural safety’ and ‘lived experience’ are also being used to stifle dissenting speech. Lived and living experiences can be defined as

the representation and understanding of a researcher or research subject’s human experiences, choices, and options and how those factors influence one’s perception of knowledge. [… it] responds not only to people’s experiences, but also to how people live through and respond to those experiences. […] Lived experience seeks to understand the distinctions between lives and experiences and tries to understand why some experiences are privileged over others (emphasis mine).

Lived and living experiences can contradict each other – this is a core tenet established in the literature and reflects the complex phenomenology of our existence. However, this phrase ‘lived experience’ is now being deployed against pro-Palestinian protestors and activists without clear recognition that the construct is grounded in an understanding of the broader context of how we live our lives and experience the world; it thus requires reflexivity around experience. In addition, there must be a separation of identity and interests – we can negotiate the latter but not the former. Similarly, the concept of psychological safety has a very specific meaning. It cannot be equated with an unchallenged world view or the absence of discomfort.

I suspect part of the reason the pro-Palestinian protests have grown so strong in Australia is not because of latent antisemitism but rather a sustained failure to act on the genocide and the abuse of speech and language deployed to support this harm. People have felt silenced, ignored, othered and shamed for their pro-peace views and have entrenched those views more strongly in response. 

As I have witnessed this debacle unfold, I have been reminded of the psychological principle of defence mechanisms, which are a way for the psyche to tolerate intolerable pain. While defence mechanisms are usually invisible to us, they are clear when we use critical discourse analysis techniques to parse expressed speech. Denial (‘It’s not a genocide, just an alleged genocide’), projection (‘They’re angry, not me’), rationalisation and intellectualisation (‘This is why the deaths need to happen’), displacement (scapegoating entire populations), reaction formation (rigid self-righteousness, aggression as a mask for fear) – we can see all these forces at play.

I’ve noticed this myself. I am a pacifist and refute the need for war or violence anywhere. The reason I write is so I can explore this openly, and I often comment on harms in the world through my work. Yet over the past two years, my speech about Israel and Palestine has resulted in accusations of racism for statements as simple as highlighting child deaths in Gaza cited in UN sources (‘This is blood libel’), and accusations of ‘self-promoting’ using the Bondi tragedy or silencing others by refusing to engage with unsolicited messages on social media. These messages are typically unsolicited injunctions to change my views or staunch denial and rationalisation of the reality of what is occurring in Gaza (‘Of course I feel bad, BUT…’). Addressing any of this openly has resulted in accusations of disrespecting lived experience or of being antisemitic.

I HAVE NEVER encountered anything quite like this linguistic double bind, where highlighting deaths has led to accusations of being harmful and pressure to remain silent, followed by further accusations when this silencing and pressure is itself named. You cannot talk, and you cannot talk about the pressure to not talk; in this obfuscation and repression grows rage.

But empathy is not a zero-sum game; unlike the now common ‘what-about’ discourse, we can and must hold empathy for all individuals. This does, however, necessitate the capacity to be clear-seeing and clear-speaking, to tolerate the epistemic friction that necessarily accompanies the polarities of experience in a multicultural democracy, to investigate and understand the systems of power that give rise to inter and intra group epistemic injustice, to nurture the ability to separate ourselves from the emotions that can override further discourse. Artists and writers are especially sensitive to the nuances of speech and manipulation of language when other groups fall silent. It seems unlikely to me that a group mostly comprising leftist, peace-loving people focused on equity should be driven to speech by a sudden seam of racism. If the explanation does not fit, sometimes it behoves us to look deeper.

All these are immensely difficult tasks, but there is immense value in refusing to turn away from them. Humanity itself may depend on it.

Editor’s note: Dr Ahona Guha is a clinical and forensic psychologist and author from Melbourne. All views are her own.

_{^{Image credit: Ernie A. Stephens via Unsplash}}