Link: https://michaelwest.com.au/grace-tame-a-difficult-woman-who-scares-men-of-power/

What happened to Grace Tame tells you everything you need to know about who holds power in this country and how ruthlessly they will defend it. Andrew Brown reports.

When former Australian of the Year, sexual assault survivor and outspoken human rights activist Grace Tame took to the steps of Sydney Town Hall, she did so as a woman who had already paid an enormous personal price for speaking truth to power.

I stood ten feet away when she spoke the words now being carved into something they were never meant to be.

Close enough to hear the cadence, not just the content. Close enough to feel the weight of what was said, not merely parse the transcript afterwards in an air-conditioned office with an agenda already written. Close enough to know, with the kind of certainty that only presence provides, that what followed in the days after bears no relationship to what was actually said.

It is not misinterpretation. It is not even spin in the ordinary, grubby sense, but wilful fabrication, coordinated and executed by people who know the truth as intimately as I do, and chose otherwise.
She did not call for violence. She called for solidarity. She stood before a crowd of more than five thousand people and spoke a rallying cry, “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada,” and what she received in return was a campaign so precisely constructed, so rapidly deployed, that its architecture reveals itself to anyone paying attention.