Grace Tame is not happy. The former Australian of the Year said her most recent speaking engagement was her last for 2026. All three remaining engagements on child safety had been cancelled.

Tame claimed she was the victim of a ‘smear’ campaign that had destroyed her livelihood. Her tormentor was a ‘well-oiled, well-funded political propaganda machine whose aim is to frighten everyone into complicity by maligning its critics’.

It’s reassuring to hear that demand for pro-Palestinian activists is falling. Perhaps Tame hasn’t figured out how to sell herself to the arts community, which still seems to have an unsated appetite for artists with a taste for terrorism.

The ABC’s Virginia Trioli was quick to help the rebel with a sanguinary cause, now down on her luck. She wrote on social media on Friday that she was outraged that Tame was ‘censored’ over her views on Israel, and that Tame was up there with Gloria Steinem, Ai Weiwei, and Margaret Atwood for the ‘clarity of her ideas and her indefatigable courage’. ‘Let her bloody speak,’ she demanded, ‘and can we please abandon this cancerous culture of the repression of opinions?’

By Monday, Tame was on ABC Radio Sydney Mornings discussing her interpretation of the phrase ‘globalise the intifada’, which she said was ‘a call for widespread resistance’ against the actions of Israel.

An ABC report of the interview helpfully offered its view that ‘intifada’ means ‘shaking off’ in Arabic, making it sound as threatening as Taylor Swift – ‘Baby, I’m just gonna shake it off.’

The ABC admits that ‘intifada’ has been used to refer to ‘two periods of violent Palestinian protest against Israel’, which is a bit like describing the Blitz as a violent German aerial protest.

Let’s be clear. A violent protest in Australia is one of Grace’s activist mates biting a policeman. What the ABC calls ‘violent protest’ – the intifadas – were in fact lethal campaigns by Palestinian terrorists who murdered more than a thousand Israelis, most civilians, using everything from stones, knives and cars to guns, Molotov cocktails, and suicide bombs.

And if, as Tame says, it simply means ‘widespread resistance’, then it necessarily encompasses the atrocities of 7 October 2023 – described by Hamas itself as resistance – in which about 1,200 people were massacred, thousands more wounded, and some 250 taken hostage.

But all this was just a warm-up. Tame was asked why she had never spoken out about the sexual assault of Israeli women on October 7.

‘I’m not going to sink to the level of…  entertaining any kind of propaganda,’ she told interviewer Hamish McDonald. ‘Let’s not do that,’ she added, trying to coax McDonald into complicity.

When McDonald timidly repeated the question, she replied point-blank, ‘because those things have been debunked’.

Debunked?

How do you debunk Hamas bodycam footage of a woman set on fire with gasoline from the waist down, and who may still be alive?

Or video of Hamas terrorists shouting Allahu Akbar as they sat astride 23-year-old Shani Louk’s lifeless body, her top pulled up, her bare legs splayed while jeering crowds spat on her.

It took five months, but the United Nations did eventually say there was evidence of rape, gang rape, genital mutilation, sexualised torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Indeed, the only group that claims Hamas didn’t commit gross acts of sexual violence is Hamas.

Yet given the choice of whether to believe the Israeli victims or the Hamas rapists, Tame chose to believe the debunkers. It seems she’s part of the #MeTooUnlessYou’reAJew movement.

Tame said even asking her to denounce the rape of Israeli women was ‘a tactic of bad faith actors,’ designed to ‘trip people up’.

‘Clearly, I don’t support any of it,’ she said.

‘As I said,’ Tame continued sanctimoniously, ‘I am a human-rights activist who advocates for the safety of all human beings, no matter… whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or atheist… we shouldn’t be here arguing over brass tacks.’

Even McDonald was shocked. ‘Let’s not diminish… rape and gang rape… (as) arguing over brass tacks,’ he replied.

But Tame was having none of it.

‘I did not diminish any of those things, Hamish,’ she said haughtily, rushing to remind him who was the real victim.

‘As someone who has been raped multiple times as a child myself… I have been choked, hit, spat on, I have been locked in cupboards, I have seen pretty horrendous things that human beings are capable of. I do not dismiss any of it, no matter who the perpetrator is and no matter who the victim is.’

Ah, the delicacy of semantics. She had not ‘dismissed’ the rape of Israeli women; it had been ‘debunked’. Beneath the contempt, does there lurk resentment at not being at the apex of the hierarchy of victimhood? Is denial rooted in snuffing out the troubling possibility that others might have suffered more?

‘What I think is really important is to remember what the broader context of this whole thing is,’ Tame said, by which she meant who the oppressors were and who the oppressed.

Tame said it was ‘frankly embarrassing’ for ‘this particular shadowy cohort’, which included the Israeli Defense Minister, to call her ‘outrageous’. ‘If he only knew that I was a 31-year-old woman from Tasmania who drives a beat-up Subaru, and at last count, I had zero bombs, Hamish. I’m not the person you should be spending your time and resources to shut down. There are bigger fish to fry than me.’

The trouble is that those who call for a global intifada embolden those who acquire the means to murder Jews, firebomb synagogues or, as in Michigan this week, ram a car full of explosives into a synagogue housing a day care centre with 140 children inside.

Tame can’t see that it is shocking for a former Australian of the Year to use her public profile to legitimise violence. Nor does she acknowledge that nothing resembles the intifada more than the Bondi massacre.

‘I mean, just look at the hypocrisy,’ she concluded.

Hypocrisy doesn’t quite do it justice. A human rights advocate who calls for global terror attacks on Jews?  An advocate for rape victims who sides with the rapists?

The word for Tame is chutzpah, which Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, memorably defined as ‘that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan’.