When Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal recommended adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism in July 2025, the backlash arrived within days. The Jewish Council of Australia argued that Segal's plan entrenches a selective approach to racism that serves political agendas. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul and Greens Senator David Shoebridge said the definition's broad framing conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism itself. Amnesty International warned that the plan risks weaponizing criticism of Israel to silence protest. We've discussed how meritless these arguments are - the IHRA definition explicitly allows criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism of any other country - but that doesn't stop the IHRA foes from making up their arguments.
Even if the IHRA definition is vague in parts - and it is - it is at least a definition that can be argued about. It provides a basis for discussion.
But how can one discuss Islamophobia without defining it?
Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik wrote an entire report on Islamophobia while explicitly rejecting any definition of what the report is about. It states in its opening pages that it "does not seek to define Islamophobia, but to convey its pervasiveness and impacts." Malik announces the absence in his introduction, as though declining to define the prejudice he was appointed to fight were a mark of rigor rather than a way of dodging the fight Segal had just walked into.
How can a government combat Islamophobia without first saying what it is? The report has no answer, only sixty pages describing effects and never the boundary that produces them. Does Islamophobia cover criticism of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization that governs Gaza in Islam's name? Does it cover calling Muhammad a pedophile, on the ground that Aisha was nine when the marriage was consummated? Does it cover criticism of Islamist ideology as a political movement, the way criticism of Christian nationalism or Hindu nationalism is treated as ordinary political argument rather than bigotry against Christians or Hindus? Nobody can answer any of these questions from Malik's report, because the report commits to no fixed test any of them could be run against. Every real or imagined objection raised against the IHRA definition — that it is political, that it is elastic, that it lets the aggrieved party decide unilaterally what counts as hatred of them — applies a hundredfold to a report that has no definition to be elastic about. A bad definition can be amended on the floor of Parliament. A missing one has nothing to amend, because there is nothing written down to point to.
The report does gesture towards answering some of these questions. For example, it says that its recommendations are not aimed at censoring "the dislike or critique of Muslims or Islam." But stating intent is not something that has legal teeth, and ultimately the report is meant to be implemented in law and policy. The surrounding text is next to worthless.
And the very next section demonstrated this clearly. It says that critique of Islam should be "grounded in respectful and lawful debate." what, exactly, does "respectful" mean? It is itself never defined. The cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban is not respectful. Does this document say that it is prohibited? The free speech implications are far deeper and wider than anything in the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Another ambiguous part of the report is the heckler's veto. It wants to prohibit prejudice and hate that "incite discrimination, hostility or violence." The sentence never says whose hostility, or against whom. The natural reading is hostility directed at Muslims. Nothing in the text rules out the opposite reading, in which a cartoon that provokes an angry or violent response has thereby incited the violence, and the cartoonist rather than the rioter becomes the source of the harm. Malik does not endorse that reading anywhere in the report but neither does he disagree with it. If the Muslim community is offended, there is little in the report to say that it is not presumed to be Islamophobic. There is nothing comparable in the IHRA definition.
The clearest evidence that Malik's ambitions ran well past "Islamophobia" as any dictionary would use the word sits in two of his recommendations the Albanese government rejected. Malik asked for a Muslim advisory panel with standing input into how counter-terrorism law gets applied, a direct line into the operational judgment of Australia's security agencies. He also asked for a separate commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, distinct from Islamophobia and expressly framed around the Gaza war. Bigotry against Palestinians and Arabs is not bigotry against Muslims; Malik's own report concedes the two intersect without being identical. A commission built around Gaza-war grievance, empowered by a report that already treats offended feeling as evidence of harm, could functionally have provided a state-sanctioned mechanism for relabeling criticism of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism, or of Islamic Jihad rockets as a form of racism — chilling exactly the political speech, disproportionately Jewish and Israel-sympathetic, that such a commission would exist to examine. That they were proposed at all tells you Malik was reaching for something considerably larger than anti-Muslim bigotry, and that the Islamophobia part of the report is meant to be interpreted liberally and not narrowly.
A definition is not an optional preface to a report on fighting a named prejudice. It is the precondition for the report meaning anything at all. Segal wrote hers and has spent a year defending it clause by clause. Malik skipped his and has spent the same period being praised for restraint he never showed, producing a document more sweeping than Segal's, more elastic than Segal's, and far more open to being weaponized than Segal's — because there was never a written purpose to be held to in the first place. That the government adopted two-thirds of it anyway, in the same month it is still absorbing the previous report's IHRA controversy, is the part that should be mystifying.
A missing definition is not a safer definition. It is the one with no limit at all.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
Buy 
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png){kind=link}