I had arrived at work on what I hoped would be one of the three busiest Saturdays of the year to find an overweight woman with (Palestinian colours) red, black, green, and white-painted nails yelling at me.

Alongside her were 12 or 14 other people with Greens Party signs, Aboriginal flags, and posters showing images of devastation in Gaza.

For the rest of Saturday morning, this fortunately well-behaved mob of protesters moved through their restricted little playlist: the above-mentioned bookshop chant, ‘Free free Palestine!’ ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free!’ ‘No justice, no peace!’ ‘Always has been, always will be!’ ‘Sovereignty was never ceded!’

Occasionally, I’d hear car horns as passing motorists signalled their support.

You may ask what I’d done to attract attention from such dopey and ineffectual people who hoped their online and in-person protests would be enough to destroy my business.

What I’d done was to use my bookshop’s Facebook account to post three comments and a link that offended three of the most easily offended and vocal groups in Australia: Aboriginal rights activists, Palestinian activists, and trans rights activists.

The comment that most offended Aboriginal rights activists was that all (or almost all) Aboriginal people today are better off than their pre-1788 ancestors.

I’d pointed out that without the arrival of people from the outside world there would be no Marcia Langton – a wealthy and secure tenured professor at a world-class university – because from the dawn of time until a little after 1788, every Australian Aboriginal person who had ever lived existed in pre-literate societies.

The comments that most offended Palestinian rights activists were that Israel had a right to exist, therefore a right to defend itself, and that I hadn’t seen any evidence that Israel was committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

And then later I learned that, by posting a YouTube link to a Spectator TV program that included a short segment with the single-issue campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen, I’d offended the folks who think human beings are like Clownfish and can change sex at will.

I posted the comments on Thursday afternoon. Normally my posts on the Little Bird Facebook page are so anodyne that I’m lucky if I get 20 views, and as one of only three substantial independent bookshops struggling to stay afloat in Brisbane, that’s a bit of a concern.

On Friday morning, I woke up to a tidal wave of online abuse. More than 5,700 people had viewed my posts. An unknown number of people had taken screenshots of my comments and had shared them on a number of different forums, including several local community pages.

In almost every case, the sharers were calling me a racist, a bigot, a colonialist, and (terrible thing this) a Zionist, and instructing people to boycott my shop. A number of people wrote that they had reported me to the Queensland Police Service and the Queensland Human Rights Commission and one said that I would be bankrupt and in jail before the year was through.

Abuse from idiots should, for everyone, be like water off a duck’s back. But, from my point of view, I didn’t know whether what I was seeing was the entire iceberg or just its tip. And I didn’t know how many people who read posts calling me a racist, a Nazi, and a supporter or defender of genocide would simply believe those posts and never visit my shop again.

I spent hours responding to abuse by restating my views in terms I hoped no one would object to. I took countless phone calls, including one from an articulate woman who said my comments about literacy and increases in Aboriginal life expectancy were ‘completely uninformed’. She told me her father was a university-trained anthropologist and that his grandmother (her great-grandmother) had been ‘an illiterate tribal woman who lived to be 118’.

‘How did she know she was 118?’ I asked.

My caller seemed perplexed. ‘How would she not know?’ she asked.

‘Most of know how old we are because our date of birth is written on our birth certificates and we have diaries and calendars to tell us when another year has elapsed,’ I replied.

‘Ancient wisdom tells people when a year has elapsed, you colonialist prick!’ she said, and then hung up.

The people I engaged with on the ‘genocide’ issue said repeatedly that they had evidence of genocide taking place, but when pushed could only come up with images of dead civilians and propaganda spin put out by Palestinians keen to see Hamas survive and rebuild itself.

The anti-Zionists seemed genuinely surprised and appalled that any non-Jew could possibly think that ‘indigenous’ Palestinian and Mizrahi Jews had the right to let culturally compatible diaspora Jews join them in creating and maintaining the only Jewish-majority state on Earth, and a very small state at that.

When I said the slogans, ‘From the river to the sea…’ and ‘Free free Palestine!’ were calls to genocide, they would tell me I was ‘full of shit’.

I would then attempt to explain to people who, on other days, were appalled by Israel Folau’s alleged homophobia and the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, that the first act of a Muslim-majority free Palestine would be to kill or force into exile vast numbers of diaspora Jews and the second act would be to impose a fundamentalist homophobic, misogynistic, anti-abortion Islamic legal code on secularised and liberal people who have had abortion rights since 1977.

Back to the Saturday.

The protest came and went. I saw two customers walk away from the shop after speaking to protesters but, on the whole, people ignored them and it was my busiest day of the year so far. Every time someone walked in with a takeaway drink cup I feared they would throw its contents over my books but in the end, nothing happened.

At the end of my very busy day I went home and checked my Facebook feed. 90 more people had left scathing reviews of my bookshop on Facebook but what really bothered me was a post by the ALP’s candidate for local Paddington ward in the forthcoming council elections.

The candidate, Sún Etheridge, said she wanted to distance herself from my shop because of recent posts she found racist and hateful.

I have Etheridge’s phone number, so I rang her to ask what she objected to. She told me she’d been one of the organisers of the Voice campaign in Brisbane and my comments about Aborigines being better off in some ways as a result of ‘the invasion’ were grossly offensive.

She noted that on other posts I’d approved of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who, she said, was ‘a disgusting human being’ and then she said the final straw for her was that I’d posted the Spectator TV link.

I reminded her that my post had pointed readers to a segment of the program in which Mearsheimer criticised Israel for using excessive force. She replied that she hadn’t actually seen any part of the link she objected to, it was bad enough that I’d promoted a program that included ‘a notorious transphobe’.

I asked Etheridge if she was also opposed to JK Rowling, Helen Joyce, Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Corinna Cohn and others who don’t want male-bodied people in female-only safe spaces and women’s sports and she said yes.

Yesterday morning I woke to a Facebook message saying, ‘F-k you, Zionist!’ posted by a Jewish user whose family moved from Europe to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a city built on land the Americans stole from the Mexicans, who had (at Independence) stolen it from the Spanish Empire, which had stolen it from the First Nations Tongva people.

Profiting from land theft is okay so long as you’re not a diaspora Jew migrating to Israel in accordance with immigration laws designed in part by indigenous Jews who want help in maintaining a viable state with a defensive buffer against Arab/Muslim aggression.

Today, I woke up and there was nothing on Little Bird Bookshop’s Facebook page. Bliss!

Calmness and order has been restored. But I’m disappointed that through all of this only one person – one – had the courage to publicly agree with what I’d written. They, with excessive kindness, called me ‘the sanest person on the internet’. Many other people, I know, agreed with me but somehow think there will be other, better, times in which to defend the fundamental right to free expression.

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Editor’s Note: To all Speccie fans living in Brisbane or nearby please take the time to show your support and go to Chris’s shop for your Christmas presents. Little Bird Bookshop, Shop 8, 2 Latrobe Terrace, Paddington, Qld 4064

– Rowan Dean

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