What Sydney University REALLY thinks of the clowns running Honi Soit is far more embarrassing for its editors than the terror drivel they publish: PVO

The student newspaper at the University of Sydney, Honi Soit, published an article titled ‘Who’s Afraid of Hezbollah/Houthis/Hamas/Islamic Jihad’.

It wasn’t a parody headline. Written by Selene Zhou, it called for ‘unconditional support’ for ‘the resistance’, declaring ‘glory to all our martyrs’, ending with the line: ‘From Gadigal to Gaza, we’ll have an Intifada.’

It has since been taken down after a public backlash, including from Jewish students. The University of Sydney says publication of the piece was ‘completely unacceptable’ and it is working to strengthen ‘oversight and accountability’ around the paper. 

Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), the higher education regulator, is also making inquiries.

All of that sounds appropriately serious until you ask the obvious question: what if it had come from the other side of the ideological divide?

Imagine if Honi Soit had published an article praising hard-right militants, calling for unconditional support for their resistance, glorifying their martyrs and invoking extremist organisations associated with racial violence, fascism or white nationalism to rise up.

Would the response have been limited to taking the article down, promising stronger oversight and talking about editorial training?

Of course not. Not that Honi Soit would publish such right-wing trash; it only publishes left-wing trash.

Universities shouldn’t tolerate the glorification of violent extremism, no matter which ideological costume it wears. If extremist romanticism is unacceptable from the hard right, it is unacceptable from the hard left as well.

That is where Sydney University has a problem, and not for the first time.

Universities exist to test ideas. Students should encounter arguments they dislike; they should be exposed to political disagreements and intellectual discomfort. That’s part of higher education, and I should know. 

But there are limits. There is a difference between criticism of Israel and romanticising terrorist-linked resistance.

And this didn’t appear in a vacuum. Sydney University has already been through the encampments, the antisemitism complaints, the vice-chancellor’s apology, the external review, and the ritual assurances that lessons have been learned.

Yet here we are again.

Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott has already apologised for failing Jewish students and staff. But an apology only matters if it changes the conduct that made it necessary in the first place. 

Repeated controversies after apologies, reviews and promises of reform look less like isolated lapses of judgement and more like institutional failure.

Scott’s position now deserves scrutiny. He keeps chasing his tail, controversy after controversy.

The irony of this appalling article is that the author has previously written for Honi Soit on LGBTQIA+ migration and queer rights. Yet the organisations invoked in the title of this latest article, are not exactly known for rainbow-flag liberalism. 

I’ll tell Selene who should be afraid of the groups in her headline: those whose rights she advocates for in her previous piece.

Queer sexual relations remain criminalised in Gaza, where Hamas has long exercised power. Hezbollah’s record is hardly more comforting. The Houthis have used courts under their control to sentence men to death, flogging or imprisonment on charges linked to same-sex conduct.

These aren’t minor inconsistencies. They are the collision between campus theory and brutal reality. The activist vocabulary that claims to defend queer liberation is being used to romanticise movements under which queer people would have every reason to be terrified. 

There is another fiction worth exposing: the idea that student publications and activist student bodies speak for students. Spoiler alert – they don’t.

In most cases, they represent a tiny, self-selecting, highly ideological slice of campus life. Most students aren’t sitting through SRC meetings, writing manifestos or arguing about revolutionary slogans.

Most don’t vote at their elections, nor do they bother to pick up a copy of Honi Soit. 

They are attending classes, working part-time, commuting, studying, doing work placements, and focusing on getting a degree they hope leads somewhere.

International students in particular (the fiscal backbone of the modern Australian university) aren’t paying large sums of money to become extras in someone else’s radical theatre. Not that the overwhelming majority of domestic students are either.

Student politics has always mistaken intensity for representativeness.

The loudest people on campus aren’t necessarily (or usually) the voice of the wider student body. Often they are simply the people with the time, ideology and organisational networks to dominate the machinery.

The deeper problem is ideological asymmetry.

Universities know how to condemn the hard right. They do it quickly, confidently and with the full vocabulary of moral certainty. They are far less confident when extremism comes dressed in the language of anti-colonialism, liberation, resistance and solidarity.

Too many campuses have normalised a politics in which radical left-wing language is treated as morally serious, while far less extreme language from the right is treated as dangerous.

Honi Soit thought Selene’s essay was publishable because the activist world around them rewards this kind of escalation, so long as you use the right buzzwords.

In the background, universities like Sydney have spent years losing the confidence to enforce neutral standards, emboldening this kind of drivel.

Universities should be places where ideas flourish. But ideas don’t flourish when one side is protected from consequences and another is policed into silence.

And they don’t flourish when activist minorities masquerade as student opinion.

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