I'm a policy nerd and velocipedestrian, studying Italian and Indonesian, trying to grow veggies and learning to be more tolerant and empathetic. I like tea, libraries, jigsaw puzzles, fridge magnets, cooking, mountains, trains, rescue dogs and tropical islands. When I grow up I want to be a train driver. Or a librarian. Or maybe a character in a William Gibson novel. I only boost pics with Alt Text. Most of my posts vanish after three months. Cover: Sam Kerr post-goal backflip
I'm a policy nerd and velocipedestrian, studying Italian and Indonesian, trying to grow veggies and learning to be more tolerant and empathetic. I like tea, libraries, jigsaw puzzles, fridge magnets, cooking, mountains, trains, rescue dogs and tropical islands. When I grow up I want to be a train driver. Or a librarian. Or maybe a character in a William Gibson novel. I only boost pics with Alt Text. Most of my posts vanish after three months. Cover: Sam Kerr post-goal backflip
The difficult truth
Writing exclusively for Crikey, Grace Tame reflects on the prime minister calling her ‘difficult’, the media storm following her pro-Palestine chant, and which social causes do and don’t ignite public support.
13 March 2026
I do not support violence. I do not condone antisemitism, Islamophobia or hatred of any kind. I am a human rights activist who advocates for the safety of all children, no matter their background.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’m currently up against a well-oiled, well-funded political propaganda machine whose aim is to frighten everyone into complicity by maligning its critics. We’re living in an Orwellian nightmare. The same powerful democracies that are bombing and starving children to death throughout the Global South are portraying anti-war protestors as a threat to social cohesion.
Let’s be real, there’s only one reason that the prime minister thinks I’m “difficult”. It’s not because I’m a woman or a child sexual abuse survivor. It’s because I have been outspoken about Australia’s toxic alliance with the US and Israel, and whether you agree with my methods or not, they have cut through.
For the past month, our conservative politicians and media have been running a concerted smear campaign against me because I led chants of “globalise the intifada” outside Sydney’s Town Hall on Monday, February 9, at a peaceful rally protesting Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit. It didn’t matter that the core message of my speech that day was one of hope; that seconds before I spoke the contentious phrase, I said, “You can buy bombs and you can buy politicians, but you cannot buy the truth; you cannot buy our compassion and you cannot buy our love — these are our weapons and we will keep on fighting with them until the very end”.
It also didn’t matter that Isaac Herzog stands accused of inciting genocide, nor that he represents a rogue apartheid regime found to be committing genocide in the Gaza Strip by the UN. It didn’t matter that he signed his name on an artillery shell later deployed by the IDF. All that mattered was that I crossed one of many grey lines manufactured to obstruct dissent.
Language means different things to different people. The Arabic word “intifada” literally translates to “shaking off” or “uprising” and is often used in reference to two periods of Palestinian resistance that began with labour strikes, boycotts and peaceful protests against Israel’s violence.
“Globalise the intifada” is a call for widespread nonviolent resistance to Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people, but along with other pro-Palestine catch cries like “from the river to the sea”, it has been coopted, decontextualised and disingenuously redefined as hate speech by pro-Israel lobbyists, who equate it to threatening collective violence against Jewish people. This is not my interpretation.
#AusPol 1/n
