Shut It Down

The politicians and Jewish community leaders criticising the antisemitism emanating from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) are like firefighters blinded by smoke, spraying water in all directions and unable to identify the source of the blaze.

To be clear, the source of the antisemitism in this instance is QUT’s Carumba Institute, a strange hybrid of problematic teaching, second-rate research and extreme left-wing activists nestled in the campuses of QUT. Once one considers the intellectual and activist preoccupations of the Carumba Institute, it will be clear that antisemitism is a feature, not a bug.

While university management has no business sitting in judgment on the outputs of academic research projects, it is responsible to the people of Queensland via an Act of state parliament for how it allocates its resources. [see also "Spartacus", excellent on this point]

At a time when social cohesion is at a historic low point in Australia, how can it be justified that QUT allocates resources to the activist Carumba Institute which peddles antisemitism, and has become a shelter for radical activism disguised as scholarship? (read an account here).

Rather than mouth pointless apologies and hide behind false notions of academic freedom, Vice-Chancellor Margaret Sheil should immediately shut down the Carumba Institute and hold its researchers accountable for peddling propaganda under the guise of radial left catchphrases such as ‘anti-racism’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘intersectionality’.

QUT originally established the Carumba Institute to provide support for Indigenous researchers on campus, announcing with great fanfare in 2021 its mission to ‘transform and lead Indigenous research, education and community engagement on a global scale’.

Whatever the mission, it has been hijacked. Queenslanders would be entitled to expect any conference hosted by such an institute would indeed focus on matters of education, social policy and community building relevant to Indigenous communities. Instead, it decided to put Israel and Judaism at the heart of its National Symposium on Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action, inviting Palestinian activists and domestic opponents of Zionism.

And here is the point at which it is impossible to understand what is happening at the Carumba Institute unless you take a minute to examine the intellectual framework in which its leaders and key researchers operate. Examining their speeches, research papers, interviews and promotional materials, we see again and again the occurrence of the key buzzwords of the academic left: ‘antiracism’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘intersectionality’ and ‘structural racism’.

The leader of the Carumba Institute, Professor Chelsea Watego, proudly explained to The?Lancet?that her work was ‘trying to shine a light on the structural dimension of race and its role in the production of health inequalities’.

Her published record suggests that the oppression most keenly felt is her own. In a 2019 paper, Watego and her co-author claimed, ‘Drawing on our lived experience of academia, we suggest that the academy functions as a frontier of racist violence’.

Her deputy, David Singh, began by noting in his CV that his career started in the United Kingdom as ‘a community organiser against racial violence and saturation policing’. He was one of many co-authors of a 2022 paper in The?Lancet?on ‘Intersectional insights into racism and health’.

‘Anti-racism’ is a development of a radical critique of modern society that is not to be confused with being opposed to racism. The latter is laudable and necessary, the former is not. Frequent appearances in The?Lancet?do not indicate academic rigour, but rather the much-noted turn [under editor Richard Horton] towards what even within its own pages is referred to as the ‘woke’ agenda.

The high point of anti-racism as a unifying concept was reached in the wake of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, when Ibram X. Kendi established the Centre for Antiracism Research at Boston University, raising more than US$45 million from corporate and philanthropic sources including $10 million from Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. Just a few years later, Boston University had to launch an investigation into allegations of bullying within that unit, and the distinct absence of actual research output.

The criticisms run deeper. The black American intellectual, Coleman Hughes, has observed, ‘Make no mistake: if totalitarianism comes to the West, it won’t be the fascism or communism of the 20th century, it will be the “anti-racism” of folks like Kendi.’

‘Intersectionality’ involves slicing and dicing oppression along various axes, including race, class, gender and sexual preferences. This is an intellectual move that facilitated what came to be called the ‘oppression Olympics’, in which wannabe victims would compete to see who had accumulated the most points from their various disadvantages. And who are thus most entitled to pity and to affirmative action.

‘Decolonisation’ has more recently become the universal explanation for all negative social outcomes of a group of people who identify as oppressed. It has displaced the older and simpler use of the term to described physical colonisation in the real world, such as the British asserting sovereignty over the Australian continent, or Zionists asserting Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel. As two scholars helpfully explained in The?Conversation, decolonisation ‘is now used to talk about restorative justice through cultural, psychological and economic freedom’.

In brief, theories of decolonisation have now so thoroughly merged with activist agendas that such an achievement of restorative justice could only be achieved through the literal decolonisation of the colonisers. This might mean the ‘British’ and later arrivals in the Australian context, and it increasingly is taken to mean the Jews in the context of Israel. This is the literal meaning of the chant ‘from the river to the sea’, calling for the expulsion of the Jews from the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

This is how an institute established by a naive university administration to further Indigenous advancement decides the most important step to achieving this is to discuss ‘anti-racism’ at a conference, and to denounce Zionism.

Ironically, the Carumba Institute has proved an important point. If identifying with those whose oppression is structural means Indigenous Australians must ally themselves to the Palestinians, then the other side of the coin would be an identification of the West with Israel. Which is precisely the point of view of ‘Dutton’s Jew’ ridiculed at the Carumba Institute conference.

With that one achievement from what otherwise is a very thin academic track record, the Carumba Institute can and should be shut down immediately.

This article first appeared in The Spectator Australia, here, 1 February, 2025.

Main image: Digitally altered (section removed to fit), source, Instagram, here.