JENI O’DOWD: Grace Tame apologised but the biggest question about her October 7 comments remains

I need to talk about Grace Tame.

Her apology finally landed last week. Not at a press conference. Not in an interview where a journalist might ask a follow-up question. An Instagram video, filmed and edited entirely on her own terms.

Funny, that. This is a woman who once wore a T-shirt reading “F..K MURDOCH” to the Australian of the Year morning tea, happy to court every camera in the room.

She didn’t mind the spotlight then. But when it comes time to apologise for something she got wrong, she used a platform where she could control every word.

That’s not an apology. That’s a PR exercise with better lighting.

Let’s go back to what she actually said. In March, on ABC Radio, Tame called the mass rape of Israeli women on October 7 “debunked propaganda”. Not disputed. Not unproven. Debunked.

Never mind the witness testimony. Never mind the video evidence. Never mind Pramila Patten, the UN’s own Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, who found reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape took place.

It’s very clear to me that last week’s video wasn’t an apology. It was more a rebrand developed by a PR agency so Tame could begin earning money again.

In her video, Tame says she “stands with survivors of sexual violence everywhere, no matter who they are.”

Nice sentiment. Except her defence now rests on the claim that Human Rights Watch “was unable to find evidence” of rape “en masse,” a line she reached for six months after the fact, not one she had back in March.

She had no such qualifier then. She just called it propaganda and moved on. Now, conveniently, she’s found the fine print. She hasn’t retracted a word of the substance. She’s just softened the delivery and hoped nobody would notice.

Lynda Ben-Menashe, National Council of Jewish Women Australia President, did notice and did not mince words.

“Saying she’s sorry for how people interpreted her words is not an apology,” she told J-Wire, an Australian Jewish community news site.

“It neither rehabilitates her nor reverses the damage her original words did to us.”

Notice, too, what Tame left out.

She said nothing about her call to “globalise the intifada”, the chant she led at Sydney’s Town Hall in February at a pro-Palestine rally against Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Former federal minister Peter McGauran, now a senior adviser at political and trade advisory firm Bondi Partners, called her apology “very, very restricted”. I think he’s being generous.

But I guess even the morally superior have to eat and pay rent or a mortgage like the rest of us.

In a Daily Mail article, Peter van Onselen said Tame’s speaking engagements had dried up for months.

Tame’s Instagram performance came as Australia is consumed by fresh allegations involving the Sydney Swans and students from Scots College and St Gregory’s.

As Van Onselen said, it’s exactly the national conversation on sexual violence Tame ordinarily would be leading.

Read the apology again with that in mind. It doesn’t look like contrition. It looks like an application to rejoin a conversation she locked herself out of.

Tame built an entire career, a foundation, a memoir, a national honour, on one principle: survivors must always be believed. Then the survivors were Israeli, and the principle got flexible.

Plenty of us hold strong views on Israel and Gaza, a conflict that has confounded historians and diplomats for generations, and this isn’t about which side Tame is on. It’s about whether the survivors on one side are owed the belief she demands for everyone else.

Grace Tame, here’s what a real apology sounds like: “I was wrong to call those allegations propaganda, and I’m sorry.” Pretty simple, really.

One sentence. No caveats about “en masse”. No relitigating what Human Rights Watch did or didn’t find. Just a plain admission that she got it wrong.

Instead, we got six months of silence, followed by a video with no interviewer, no follow-up questions and no risk of anyone asking the one thing she can’t answer: why Israeli women were the exception to a rule she built her entire public life on.

Grace Tame doesn’t owe Israel anything. But she owes the survivors she claims to speak for far more honesty than this.