What an idiot Brandan Koschel is.

“Jews are the greatest enemy to this nation,” he told the mob at the March for Australia in Sydney on Monday. And now he finds himself behind bars, suspected of publicly inciting hatred.

Doesn’t he know you’re meant to say “Zionist”, not “Jew”? That if you really want to let rip against Those People, then the Z-word is your safest bet? You can rage and splutter all day long about how Zionists are the enemy of Australia – of the entire West, in fact – and the police won’t lay a finger on you. You can say Zionists are a stain on humanity and no prison cell will await you.

You can call Zionists “terrorists”, a “cancer” and “genocidal maniacs” and, far from being banged up, you’ll win a hearty round of applause at every Guardianista soiree in the land.

The very people who said “That’s a bit much” about Koschel’s comment on Jews would say “Well said, sir” if he’d used the Z-word instead.

The arrest of Koschel has really brought home the hypocrisy and futility of speech-punishing laws.

For here we have the state making an example of a man with poisonous beliefs while doing precisely nothing to challenge the sneakier antisemitism that runs riot among the activist class, in digital spaces and even in institutions.

Koschel, a white nationalist, got Monday’s rabble squealing with delight with his Jew-blaming.

He was nabbed by cops and now faces serious charges of inciting hatred.

The double standard is glaring.

For more than two years, Australia, like the rest of the West, has been convulsed by orgies of public loathing for “Zionists”.

Turbo-smug liberals and keffiyeh-smothered leftists have hit the streets to denounce Zionism as the cruellest ideology and its adherents as the scum of the Earth.

We’ve seen placards likening Zionists to a disease. We’ve seen Zionists branded as lovers of genocide.

We’ve seen graffiti saying “Zionists not welcome here”.

We all know who the Z-word refers to – Jews who support the existence of a Jewish homeland.

Which is the vast majority of them.

Polls consistently find that close to 80 per cent of Aussie Jews identify as Zionists.

It’s not much of a defence for progressives to say: “People like Mr Koschel hate all Jews whereas I only hate Jews who feel an affinity with the Jewish nation.”

To some of us, these two camps, both the vulgar Jew-baiters and the myopic Zio-bashers, are two cheeks of the same arse.

I’m continually struck by the commonalities between hard right-wingers who bemoan Jews and soppy leftists who bemoan the Jewish state. 

People were rightly horrified when neo-Nazis gathered outside the NSW parliament in November with a banner saying “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”. Yet where’s the anger when the keffiyeh mob calls for the expulsion from Oz of the “Zionist lobby”?

You couldn’t fit a cigarette paper between these positions.

Both are underpinned by a swirling belief that some ominous Jewish thing – whether the Jewish people or the Jewish state – wields massive power over our puny nations.

The furious anti-Zionism of “respectable society” is a wily, coded version of the hatred that festers on the far right.

The Z-word gives the activist class a get-out-of-jail card. It allows them to spout ancient ideas about the Jews – they’re all-controlling, they’re a disease, they kill children – and then to say “It’s anti-Zionism, not antisemitism” when someone calls them out.

It really does get them out of jail. So where Koschel gets locked up for saying Jews are the enemy of civilisation, his better-educated compatriots are free to say Zionists are the enemy of civilisation.

Everyone with a functioning moral compass knows they mean the same thing.

We’ve just seen a literary festival collapse because the luvvies who were meant to be attending rushed to the defence of writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, who called October 7 a “moment of freedom”.

And there it is, two-tier morality.

Lauding the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust makes you a hero; saying Jews are the enemy of civilisation lands you in the clink.

You couldn’t ask for better proof that the state punishment of speech is a spectacular folly. All that has been achieved with the jailing of Koschel is that a far-right nut has been made into a martyr, while the “progressive” animus for Jews and their homeland goes uninterrogated.

Let them all speak, I say. And let the rest of us say that polite society has done far more to assail the Jews of Australia than any gruff twat at a hard-right rally.