I am fiercely opposed to Israel’s actions in Gaza, the occupation, and the broader thrust of the Zionist project. I am equally opposed to campaigns that silence Palestinian voices, punish dissent, or blacklist critics of Israeli policy. I have said so publicly for years and worn the consequences for doing so. But opposition to injustice does not require descending into prejudice or encouraging it. On the contrary, it should make one more alert to it.

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That is why Abdel-Fattah’s speech matters.

In her Jerusalem Prize address, awarded by the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network and republished in Mondoweiss, Randa Abdel-Fattah spoke passionately about Palestinian dispossession, censorship, and the destruction of life and culture in Gaza. Much of that anguish is real and deserves to be heard. But alongside those legitimate themes, parts of the speech also leaned on rhetoric about Jews, communal power, and privilege in Australia.

The implication was unmistakable: that Australian Jews, as a community, are collectively bound up with Israeli crimes and beneficiaries of suspect influence. She says, in a strongly Foucauldian turn, “Zionist hunting operates as a technology of power that seeks to survey, neutralize and ultimately eliminate Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices from public life”.

That is where political critique gives way to something uglier.

“The Jewish community gets millions”

Her blunt takeaway line is this: “The Jewish community gets millions in government funding.”

That is not a critique of a grant program. It is not an examination of policy settings. It is not even serious institutional analysis. It is a communal accusation.

Words like these do not float harmlessly in the air. They create impressions and pictures in people’s minds. They echo old and ugly tropes: Jews as collectively influential, Jews as unusually favoured, Jews as a network able to secure rewards through covert power. One need not utter a conspiracy theory outright. Suggestion and insinuation do the work perfectly well.

Forget about the contested IHRA. She risks crossing lines identified in both the AJDS–APAN statement and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Criticise Israel. Criticise Zionism. Criticise particular lobby groups, donors, governments, institutions — all fair game. But once “the Jewish community” is invoked as a singular beneficiary class or coordinated political actor, one is edging into collective stereotyping. That is not brave truth-telling. It is incendiary politics.

Museums, arts and culture — or a hit list?

One section of the speech turns to museums, arts and culture. Abdel-Fattah notes government support for Jewish cultural institutions, then contrasts that support with the destruction of Palestinian cultural life in Gaza and the need for Palestinians in Australia to rely on crowdfunding.

Jewish museums, Holocaust education programs, a Yiddish cultural organisation founded in 1921, and a proposed local arts precinct are paraded not simply as grant recipients from government and an evil philanthropic family but as evidence of communal privilege somehow morally implicated in Gaza (the same family has given over $200 million to local hospitals and charities). That leap from local institutions to war crimes in Gaza is never properly argued because it cannot be argued.

Public grants are always open to scrutiny. Some may be worthwhile, others wasteful, others debatable. I have my own doubts about aspects of publicly funded Jewish projects. We can also argue about the ethics and politics of philanthropists. But that is an entirely different matter from insinuating that Jewish cultural institutions are tainted because Israel is committing atrocities abroad.

What we see in the speech is not analysis. It is associative guilt.

The $57 million claim — and the missing context

Most revealing of all is Abdel-Fattah’s invocation of the $57 million granted to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, a familiar bête noire in anti-Zionist circles, in this discussion of culture. I’ve certainly lobbed more than a few critical words in the direction of the ECAJ over the years.

To cite that amount of money while suppressing the context is no small omission. It is the crux of the matter. The audience’s ears would have pricked up hearing about a $57 million handout with no explanation other than the implication it was for a Zionist organisation, and linked to the hunting down of critics, including Palestinians. Aha!

In fact, she neglected to explain what it was for. That money was emergency security funding distributed across roughly 300 organisations nationwide after escalating threats and attacks. It helped pay for guards, cameras, fencing, alarms, secure entrances, and protection for schools, synagogues, childcare centres, and community buildings. Or are these threats fake and Bondi not to be taken seriously? Even the Australian Human Rights Commission which has been heavily criticized by the ECAJ and others for lack of empathy towards the Jewish community, takes the threats and anxieties of the Jewish community (and Palestinians and Muslims) seriously.

Nor was there any mention in the speech that the National Imams Council and Muslim communities have received or are receiving at least $25 million in comparable security support, alongside other funds for community services. We can argue that amount was insufficient. I would. But omission cuts both ways. If public funding is your evidence of structural bias, then all relevant funding must be on the table. Randa Abdel-Fattah is both a senior academic and a lawyer. She should know about putting facts on the table. She could have checked the funding allocations which are publicly available.

When anti-Zionism becomes something else

Criticism of Zionism, Israeli governments, occupation, settlement expansion, and war crimes is entirely legitimate as is criticism of local Zionist organizations including the ECAJ. Or the Zionist Federation of Australia. I’ve done so for years, and been defamed and vilified for it.

But when “Zionist” becomes catch-all term for moral contamination — applied to vast numbers of Jews and Israelis regardless of what they actually think or do — it stops functioning as political language and becomes a dehumanising label. Jewish institutions become “Zionist institutions”. Jewish donors become “Zionist money”. Criminality as if other donors are not to be associated with blood money. Jewish anxieties become fake “Zionist fragility” that deserve no empathy, as Abdel-Fattah has said elsewhere. Real non-Zionist Jews, persecuted by Zionists deserve empathy. Evil Zionists don’t. Jewish communal life becomes suspect by default.

Jews are not a bloc

Australian Jews are not one machine, one donor network, one ideology, or one-party line. They range across the political spectrum. Many wear multiple hats and hold contradictory views. Many support Palestinian statehood. Many think there is genocide. Many want nothing to do with communal politics at all. Many are alienated and distressed. There are massive splits in the Jewish community. Criticize particular organizations. Get your facts right.

To flatten all that into “the Jewish community” as a singular recipient of money and influence peddler is not merely offensive. It is intellectually shoddy. Yet such a view mirrors the same collective logic anti-racists claim to oppose everywhere else.

Why this matters for the Palestinian cause

Because this speech was published in Mondoweiss, these claims now circulate globally. This was not a stray or accidental remark or a clumsy post dashed off in anger. It was a crafted intervention by a gifted writer.

That should trouble everyone committed to Palestinian rights and anti-racism. The left should be prepared to speak out against this kind of activity.

The Palestinian cause is weakened when legitimate outrage is mixed with racist insinuation. It is weakened when real grievances are wrapped in rhetoric opponents can readily identify as prejudice. It is weakened when solidarity reaches for old stereotypes and collective blaming.

Justice loses credibility when it plays with prejudice.

[AI-generated image]

I spent some today, aided by AI, examining the new Victorian Jewish Community Security Group (CSG) 2024 Victorian Antisemitism Report. As part of this, I read and interrogated the textual contents and I converted the pdf tables of incidents in the report into Excel spreadsheets for analytical purposes.As deeper background, I used other research, including analyses of like and unlike reports and various analytical frameworks that have resulted in 18 variables that can be used to investigate the quality of such reports. Only the AI augmentation device can do that and this has allowed me to interrogate the data more closely and at a speed than would otherwise not be possible. AI can be useful, if used carefully.1

The CSG report also discusses other events such as the incidence of campus antisemitism, but I will leave that for another time because there are also serious methodological issues that limit the utility of that campus-focused research.

I keep the remarks here relatively general, as a full analysis would be considerably longer and take a few days (sorry!) I have don’t have much to say about the reporting of Nazi and related traditional antisemitic hate by CSG. We need this sort of data for obvious reasons. Clear hate against Jews, is on the increase and Gaza or not, it is unacceptable. And I’m sure that some of the perpetrators couldn’t give a damn about Gazans, but just hate Jews. Enough said on that front.

That element of the report is broadly clear and aligns with widely understood definitions of antisemitism.

What’s the problem?

The difficulty arises when the CSG report moves beyond this domain and makes broader claims, particularly in relation to Israel/Palestine and the attribution of incidents to the “far left.” Its data is drawn from incidents reported from a variety of sources across Melbourne and into other parts of the state. Since numbers of incidents of the sort being discussed here outside of a few municipalities, the discussion below only concerns areas Port Phillip, Glen Eira or Stonnington (where most Jews live) and “Northside” municipalities, where there is a lot of left activity.

Whereas prior to October 7, antisemitism related to Israel-Palestine accounted for just 8% of incidents, in 2024 this had ballooned to 59% of all incidents. The 325 antisemitic incidents which explicitly referenced Israel, Zionism or Palestine in 2024 represents a 1,377% like-for-like increase on 2022, illustrating that antisemitic rhetoric has shifted since October 7, 2023. Antisemitism linked to Israel Palestine is now the dominant form of anti-Jewish hate in Victoria. This report does not consider criticism of Israel to be antisemitic.

How to interpret this claim? A diagram helps.

Seeing incidents via this set of boxes, the claims look very different: the “far left” category sits inside a relatively small subset of incidents that have already been selected from a much larger pool through an unseen classification process.

• Outer box (1,883 100%) → all Israel/Jews-related incidents reported

• Excluded (1,558 / 82.7%)→ the majority, classified as not antisemitic

• Included (325 / 17.3%) → those counted as antisemitic

• “Far left” (~297 53.8 %)→ a subset of that Included group.

At first glance the claim “Antisemitism linked to Israel Palestine is now the dominant form of anti-Jewish hate in Victoria” is striking. But this claim has to be unpacked. In fact, the CSG/JCCV report represents an ideological shift in the interpretation of reported antisemitic incident data. The 2023 report provides a useful baseline in this regard: it identified incidents across a range of ideological sources ( roughly Islamist, far right, left etc). but avoided strong claims of dominance or causal transformation. By contrast, the 2024 report advances a much more assertive position—that “far-left antisemitism” is both predominant and a key driver of the overall increase in incidents. The “far left” is, in effect, positioned as the central explanatory category2.

Undefined Left Bashing

But the term “far left” itself, is never clearly defined in operational terms, though it is associated with hate, as in the quote above . But it remains unclear whether “far left” refers to identifiable individuals, organised groups, loosely affiliated protest participants, or broader political environments. Is it Green Left, members of the Greens, ALP Left Faction, various shadowy anarchic groups? Nothing is made clear. No criteria are provided for assigning ideological affiliation/hatred—whether based on self-identification, organisational links, expressed beliefs, or contextual inference. In practice, classification appears to be inferred from context—particularly participation in Israel/Palestine-related forms of discourse—rather than based on verifiable indicators.

This creates a risk of category inflation, where diverse phenomena are aggregated under a single label, and definitional drift, where the meaning of the category expands across stages of analysis. It also reinforces the possibility of perception drift, whereby incidents occurring within a protest setting are taken to characterize the setting itself and this then gets political and media amplification. We can’t mind read the intention of all protesters, particularly at very large events where a wide range of protesters are likely to be present. Thus, if one person holds up an ISIS or flag and another holds a poster of the (now dead) Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as happened on the Sydney Harbour Bridge march, is it possible to claim that all there were associated with extreme hatred? Yet that is what happens. Contrast that with a renegade preacher clearly preaching hate in a prayer hall. The key analytical boundary—between political expression and antisemitism and hatred in different—is has to be judged carefully. Context is everything. At times, it can be opaque, as certainly occurs with certain slogans that while clearly offensive to many, or potentially incitement and politically stupid, are not necessarily antisemitic (I include here Death to Israel, Intifadah Revolution, From the River to the Sea). And as a side note, there is no reference to current Australian legal rulings on hate/political speech in the CSG report. That should be relevant to any future coding activity by any Australian Jewish organisation.

So what are the incidents within the framework they propose? Unpacking the 325 incidents, I came up with:

This diagram shows that most incidents are low-severity* but high-volume, such as verbal abuse, graffiti, and stickering—and these categories account for the largest share of incidents overall. It also shows that the “far left” subset is heavily concentrated within these same categories, rather than in higher-severity incidents like assault or threats. In other words, the apparent predominance of “far-left antisemitism” is driven mainly by how large numbers of lower-level, more interpretive incidents are classified.

* The category of ‘verbal abuse’ is not explained in the report as to what precisely is meant3. Of course verbal violence is a very serious matter but given the considerable controversy over what constitutes political discussion versus antisemitism, there is a possibility that because of the use of IHRA (International Holocaust Alliance) and coding ‘culture’, some of what is claimed as verbal abuse has been in fact been strong, even offensive and distressing, but not necessarily antisemitic protest language. It may not in fact be “politically” severe, distressing as it can be. The issue is highly interpretative, and recent court decisions in Australia underscore this point. Thus for both the Jerusalem Declaration (JDA) or the Nexus Document (JD), strong, even insulting and stupid language isn’t always necessarily antisemitic, however upsetting the political message is.

But this is only part of the story. The report has excluded 1,558 incidents, because they don’t meet the antisemitism threshold. But we are never told what the threshold is. As stated above, we don’t have an explanation of their coding methodology and/or lexicon of acceptable/non-acceptable discourse. In fact, AI was great at prompting me to ask logically - what did the excluded 1,558 likely contain?

There is a clue - once you look at the structure of the included dataset—dominated by verbal abuse, graffiti, stickering, and other low-level, often Israel-related expression—and combine that with the report’s own claim that it excludes “anti-Israel but not antisemitic” material, the shape of the excluded set becomes unavoidable. The excluded reported incidents must consist largely of protest slogans, political criticism of Israel, online discourse, and a significant number of borderline or ambiguous cases where interpretation is doing the work. But this is where the real issue lies: the split between the 1,558 excluded and the 325 included implicitly encodes a decision rule about what counts as antisemitism—and that rule is never made explicit. It is hidden in the classification process itself. The implications are significant. The report’s headline findings do not simply reflect behaviour in the world; they reflect how that hidden rule has been applied. AI came up with this wisdom: AI came up with this wisdom: Change the rule, even slightly, and the composition of the dataset—and therefore the conclusions about “far-left antisemitism”—could look very different.

In fact, the report defines antisemitism through a set of criteria that include anti-Jewish hatred, intimidation of individuals perceived as Jewish, support for extremist ideologies targeting Jews, the use of Holocaust or Nazi comparisons in relation to Israel or Zionism, and anti-Israel hostility directed at Jewish individuals or institutions solely because they are Jewish. All this is based on the IHRA and examples) . IHRA is being used prescriptively if these narrow terms are followed. The interpretive and coding process is nowhere outlined in the report, and what language is in or out. Which leads to a problem. Is calling Israel an apartheid state or genocidal interpreted under one of the above categories. That is really a problem because apartheid and genocide are words that are now very in the public sphere and apartheid (hafradah in Hebrew) has been current in Israel itself for a long time.

Thus some of the examples coded as “far left” are likely to have fallen under the contested categories of IHRA. Yet while IHRA provides a broad conceptual framework, was is not intended as a formal coding instrument and contains contested examples in relation to Israel. As I said the report does not explain how IHRA was operationalised in practice, nor how ambiguity is resolved. Classification therefore appears to rely significantly on subjective judgement, especially in cases involving political speech or symbolic expression. We don’t see a decision-making tree or coding lexicono for types of acceptable/non-acceptable language.

The composition of the dataset further amplifies these concerns. The majority of incidents fall into low-severity categories, such as verbal abuse, graffiti, stickers and online messaging. These categories account for a substantial proportion of all incidents and are also those most sensitive to definitional interpretation.

The heat map analysis based on using the IHRA interpretation of antisemitism demonstrates that these forms of conduct are included under IHRA-based interpretations according to its use by the CSG. Under the JDA or Nexus they would be treated as low to moderate depending on the content and context.

By contrast, high-severity incidents—such as threats and assaults—are more consistently classified across frameworks and are less dependent on interpretation and no definition would have problem with these (or arson, or other dreadful violence).

What I have also done is map this onto the location of incidents. This pattern. is made clear in the following image. In terms of where Melbourne’s Jews live and where the “left” appears to be strongest, the findings are interesting. I suggest that the numbers in Melbourne largely related to protest-related incidents, but in fact, the actual raw data and interpretive process are critical to go any further here. Because numbers are low I have left out other parts of Melbourne and the state.

This combined heat map provides a detailed view of how incident type, location, and ideological classification (“as far left” by the CSG) intersect within the dataset. It makes visible not only where incidents occur, but also how the “far left” designation is distributed across different categories and spatial contexts.

1. Structural concentration in low-severity categories

The most immediate pattern is that the “far left” subset is overwhelmingly concentrated in low-severity (as compared to assault), high-frequency categories, particularly:

• verbal abuse

• graffiti

• stickering

These categories dominate the dataset numerically and also account for the largest share of “far left” incidents. For example, in Glen Eira, the largest single category—verbal abuse (101)—contains a substantial “far left” subset (55). Similarly, stickers and graffiti show both high totals and high proportions of “far left” classification. This indicates that the overall prominence of “far left antisemitism” is driven primarily by expression-based incidents, which are inherently more sensitive to interpretation. But being entirely subjective here, I’m asking readers out there, how active is the “far left” in Glen Eira? Does that help with properly classifying events?

2. Geographic concentration and amplification effects

The distribution is also highly spatially concentrated, with Glen Eira acting as a dominant node across nearly all categories. This concentration is not simply a matter of higher incident counts; it also amplifies the “far left” classification because large volumes of definition-sensitive incidents are clustered in a single location. Secondary clusters in Melbourne and Port Phillip show similar but less pronounced patterns.

This creates what can be described as a local amplification effect: where high-density reporting environments intersect with broad definitional thresholds, producing a disproportionate influence on overall findings. In this sense, the dataset reflects not just incident occurrence but also reporting intensity and contextual dynamics within specific urban areas.

3. Category-specific clustering (Merri-bek case)

Merri-bek provides an important contrast. Unlike Glen Eira, it does not exhibit a broad distribution across categories but is instead concentrated almost entirely in graffiti and stickering. Within these categories, however, the proportion of “far left” incidents is high. This reinforces the point that certain locations are associated with specific types of incidents, rather than generalised antisemitic activity.

This pattern is analytically significant because it demonstrates that the “far left” classification is not uniformly distributed even within locations, but is tied to particular forms of expression that are more likely to be captured under the applied definitional framework.

4. High-severity categories remain secondary

By contrast, higher-severity categories such as assault and threat are:

• smaller in total volume

• less dominant in the “far left” subset

Although “far left” incidents are present in these categories, they do not drive the overall distribution. This reinforces the broader finding that the headline result is not anchored in the most serious or unambiguous forms of antisemitic harm, but in lower-level incidents where classification is more interpretive.

5. Implications for interpretation

Taken together, these patterns support a key conclusion: the “far left” finding is structurally embedded in the composition of the dataset and how data has been classified, rather than emerging evenly across incident types or locations. It reflects the interaction of three factors:

• concentration in low-severity, high-volume categories

• geographic clustering in specific LGAs

• reliance on interpretive classification, particularly in Israel/Palestine-related contexts

In RC terms, this raises clear risks of category inflation and definitional drift, as a large number of heterogeneous incidents are aggregated under a single ideological label.

The report’s headline finding—that approximately 53.4% of incidents are attributable to the “far left”—must be understood in light of this distribution. The “far left” classification is heavily concentrated in these low-severity, high-volume categories where language interpretation and context are always issues. This indicates that the “far left” finding by the CSG is driven less by a broad pattern across all forms of antisemitic behaviour and more by how particular types of incidents are defined and classified.

The treatment of “far-right” incidents in the report also highlights an important asymmetry. Far-right antisemitism is typically identified through explicit symbols and language—such as Nazi imagery—which are stable across definitional frameworks (IHRA, JDA, Nexus). By contrast, “far-left” antisemitism is often inferred from context and association, making it more interpretive and less stable as a category.

Finally, the report introduces implicit causal claims, most notably the assertion that “far-left antisemitism” was the “driving force” behind the increase in incidents. However, the analysis remains descriptive and does not provide a causal framework, test alternative explanations, or distinguish between increases in behaviour and increases in reporting or classification. Given that the “far left” category is itself a product of the classification process, positioning it as a causal driver risks circular reasoning. The causal flaw also links into the issue of inflated political and media amplification.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the prominence of “far-left antisemitism” in the 2024 report is best understood as a framework-dependent outcome, shaped by definitional choices, classification practices, and interpretive judgement, rather than as a stable empirical measure of ideological prevalence. And the political and media amplification of not-quite-right analysis has profound effects.

In terms of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism, it is an example of how carefully community-based data needs to be considered. On the one hand, few of us would have issues with the classification of far-right data. On the other hand, the assumptions behind the “far left” data are very problematic with the particular orientation of the CSG and the assumptions it is using to conduct its work.

Here is the X post that I found a particularly offensive. Her posting lead me to ask why was she doing this? It clearly has nothing to do with the Gaza war, but something to do with posting for information that puts Jews into a bad light. That then led me into thinking about what is her world view as former TV journalist, and a frequent user of X. I then used AI in a very careful way to investigate various aspects of media theory, but as well, the worldview of a certain sort of anti—imperialist. I think the results are very interesting, though I have of course engaged in some editing. I already have a whole set of queries about the left, and he imperialism of various sorts attitudes towards Israel, Palestine, and so on, and I have been able to draw on that to help me. However, the final result is all my responsibility.

I also take up the issue of whether or not her post was deliberately or intentionally antisemitic and the effects on what is clearly an adoring audience, and I also got some help from AI. So you can claim my writing my interest in this topic is fake. My counter claim is that I’ve doing a lot of social science-type-research over the past couple weeks of and I think I’ve got a good handle on what is good and what is weak and what is bad and how to use AI to basically save a lot of grunt work. I’m actually writing research paper about that at the moment, and maybe I’ll put a summary online for you to read at some point point I have already had a rant in a previous post. So here we go

Over many decades, Mary Kostakidis has established herself as a trusted, credible presenter, or as they say, news anchor. She has become a powerful mediator of public understanding in Australia and has been rightly recognised for that. However, such a role can also serve as a potential amplifier of bias or error, Think that at times, because of her political passion and orientation, she has fallen into a bad trap.

The trusted TV presenter derives authority from institutional backing, familiarity, and performance of neutrality. Over time, audiences come to trust not only the information presented but the presenter’s judgement about what matters and how it should be interpreted. The TV anchor in the past was the person to trust for neutrality. Walter Cronkite, in the US, was for decades, the paragon of this kind of role.

But trust can convert interpretation into taken-for-granted reality by viewers and listeners, reducing scrutiny of sources and methods. When presenters move to platforms like X, this trust often persists even as institutional safeguards—verification, editorial oversight, and sourcing transparency—are reduced. Authority shifts from institutional processes to individual choice and perception of credibility, increasing both influence and the potential for error amplification. You are doing your own research advertising and product placement, based on your brand and reputation there is no editor working with you.

Kostakidis’ use of Twitter can now be understood as a form of interpretive, morally-driven practice, shaped in part by a critical, and at times insufficiently self-reflective, anti-imperialist perspective. This refers to a worldview that strongly critiques Western power but does not always apply the same level of scrutiny to non-Western actors or her own assumptions, potentially producing selective analysis. Sometimes, it works well, other times, it fails.

Her style privileges meaning : events are read as expressions of underlying systems of power and inequality. This produces coherence and moral clarity, but also introduces the risk of compression of complexity, where contingent realities are folded into broader structural interpretations without sufficient differentiation. Western power often becomes the primary explanatory frame, sometimes limiting engagement with internal diversity or alternative causal factors.

On social media interpretation and signals become compressed and affectively intensified, often stripped of visible sourcing and conveyed through selection and a few words, and tone rather than extended argument. This increases the likelihood of polarisation, confirmation bias, and misinterpretation, as audiences may be shown strong conclusions or provided with strong signals without clear evidentiary support.

Consequently, though Mary Kostakidis say at the start of her X feed says that posting something doesn’t mean endorsement, the very fact that she as a famous person has posted something means that it is there with a purpose. It to be read and acted upon on some that way. She has chosen it for you. It’s product placement. She can generate income as well. It pays to be provocative.

These dynamics are illustrated the above post where Kostakidis reposted a claim circulated by RT concerning an Israeli Jewish infant contracting herpes following a ritual circumcision, adding only shocked emojis. RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Moscow-based, state-funded broadcaster that positions itself as an alternative to Western media but is widely regarded as reflecting Russian government perspectives and strategic messaging. Reliance on such a source raises questions about editorial judgement and critical distance, particularly given its record of selective and politically inflected reporting.

The post exhibits weak evidentiary grounding. The claim appears in second-order form, with RT summarising a report attributed to The Jerusalem Post, but without direct linkage or verification (The Jerusalem Post report in fact showed revulsion at this practice). ‘Accidentally’ implies deliberately. All this produces an evidentiary chain that cannot be readily assessed. The absence of contextualisation compounds the problem: the report concerns a specific and controversial ultra-Orthodox practice, yet no information is provided about its rarity, internal debate in the Jewish community, or regulatory context. Yet the message is clear: blood sucking sex-abusing Jews. And the image has nothing to do with the story. It is a file photo. And the reference to a Rabbi is erroneous. The procedure was conducted by a ritual circumciser or not a rabbi, but it doesn’t matter because the use of the term rabbi has worse connotations

Framing operates through selection and affect rather than argument. The combination of a highly emotive story—infant, disease, religious ritual, rabbis, whole evil Jewish communities in turn- and shock emojis by Kostakidis encourages a moralised reading while bypassing analytical mediation. This produces “context collapse,” in which a specific incident is implicitly generalised without clarification of scope. The issue is therefore not factual falsity but slippage: sourcing is opaque, context is absent, and emotional signalling substitutes for verification. Outrage at Israel’s conduct (over which I have no issue), is backed up by dredging up a Jewish stereotype. Of course, it’s completely unnecessary to engage in this. Just stick with the fact of genocide in Gaza. Don’t connect it to antisemitic stereotypes This is where Mary Costa Keiters has failed, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s hard to tell. But one’s psst , as a respected TV anchor, isn’t a sufficient defence.

This is best understood as compression of complexity, where nuanced material is condensed into rhetorically powerful but ethically weak forms. Jewish crimes of the worst sort. Gaza crimes of the worst sort .

Within contemporary antisemitism frameworks, this post occupies a boundary position rather than an absolutely clear case of antisemitism, though my view is that it does fall over the line. Under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, it is not explicitly antisemitic, as it refers to a specific incident rather than making general claims about Jews. However, the combination of emotive framing, lack of contextualisation, and association of disease with religious practice creates a risk of negative stereotyping through inference. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism would be less likely to classify it as antisemitic, as it permits discussion of religious practices absent explicit hostility, though the signalling by Kostakidis and the use of a propaganda site sets the context. The Nexus Document similarly identifies the issue as one of risk and interpretive effect, rather than inherent antisemitic content. Yet Russia has a long history with this sort of material, and cartoons referring to Jewish ritual abuse are all too familiar.

The broader implications are significant. The compression of evidence via X coupled with various signals and the poster’s status means that audiences receive generalised conclusions without transparent reasoning, making evaluation difficult. These dynamics can reinforce echo chambers here it is an echo chamber about Israeli/Jewish moral corruption And the comments to her post demonstrate that.

What to do? I clearly don’t know. The law is a blunt instrument, and she sees herself the victim of Zionist forces, so I think she has a real blind spot In the current environment conviction, probably only inflame the situation and reinforce the view that Zionists control the narrative and and that and accusations are a put up job whether you call her a tankie or a campist it’s going to be pretty hard to get her to change . Maybe others need to talk to her about her problem.

[A scared Dr Syntax and his Robot]

I'm in a state of gobsmackery if there is such a word. For 3 days I have been analyzing a series of published and controversial reports from all sorts of angles, the rigour of thinking, definitions, the tone of language, the rigour of research methodologies. It's the sort of thing that is very familiar to me, that I usually do by marking up documents, coding in some way and so on prior to writing it all up and drawing conclusions -- a kind of literature review/summative evaluation at the desk. But this time around, I have been using generative AI on the reports- all of which I had read or skimmed in the past. And in fact, some of the material, particularly the more advanced statistical stuff, I really don't have a personal handle on, but I do have enough experience to recognise what they are, but not be critical beyond a certain level.

I started working and questioning the quality and so on about one document. Based on the results, I asked for different forms of writeup -- as dot points, narrative, developing explanatory tables and so on.

Then I realized (how stupid of me), that I could work on multiple documents at once, and ask a very complex interdisciplinary and multilevelled question something that is impossible to a human being. Boom. Answers in seconds. And from that, I asked even more precise questions, engaged in a kind of debate and this is the shock, it made suggestions about what to ask next, or alternatives (all based statistically, on other's queries about data). Sometimes I could see errors in the answers, and I told it of the error and to correct, which it did. Or I added in more material or insights to consider. And I drew in some other academic concepts (which I was familiar with) and used that with the material.

The whole exercise has resulted in a powerful explanatory table and some precise explanatory sentences, as well as some pretty good summary documents from the incredibly long explanations i got. It is stuff that might have taken months to discover, and I might never have discovered it. I even got to play around with the style of presentation.

Now, I knew my data set to begin with, and I know a bit about research methodology, but this tool as taken me to a new depth of well, original knowledge -- all based on trillions of bits of data being interrogated for their relationship to each other and then put into line as words. It was easy for me to see when it drifted into bland generalizations because there was not data and it was trying to be helpful. I didn't get hallucinations.

What is original here, what is not? Do we just say, well, it's like running some formula for stats and getting the results and then running another test. Instead of the slide rule or using a calculator you have used the computer. Or is it really of a different quality here, it has done far more than come up with answers to my natural language algorithms? Are they my conclusions or the machines? Is what so offensive is that it more or less talks like us?

All this is outside the questions of putting researchers, writers, editors, out of work or the vast amount of energy it consumes. Or instead, will new forms of work come into being and it will go green? I don't have an answer, but I do know that in my work life the kind of work I did could not have existed before the invention of the internet, and within that period, communication changes also meant new ways of doing things. From duplicated letters stuffed in envelopes (sometimes taking days of work), to emails, to clunky voip, to zoom. Time and space disappear and not just here. It was all present in Bangladesh as well for me. Villagers were online. As much a we can be dystopian about social control and Mammon, we can also be utopian about the opportunities to manipulate it all for social good.

And of course do I paraphrase, and make changes as necessary to what turns up in an instant. This takes time, that valuable commodity. Alternatively, to remain at least textually original, do I use more or less what the box has produced and acknowledge textual non-originality. I suppose if you care about language, you will go for the rewrite, but if you go for the latter, does it matter, as long as you can show that you were the driver, so to speak?

I know that in the academic world there is a lot of thinking going on about this from an ethical point of view, but here, I'm just reflecting on my own experience. How are others coping?

This is a highly significant report from the AHRC. However- it will stand or fall on its rigour, because so many concepts and perceptions are disputed by different parties. A couple of observations.

A generic survey form was used across different ethnic groups. Racism is a complex phenomenon and to collapse its complexity into one final term is bound to mask much nuance. What one person may see as racism may be perceived by another person (even from the same group) as nothing at all. The report admits as much. “Some of the difficulties we encountered are also indicative of a broader issue – the lack of adequate frameworks for collecting data on racism in Australia. Nonetheless, our study had a very strong response rate [76,000 responses ]and the story it tells simply must be acted on”.

The definition of racism is a particular problem when it is applied to discussions of the experience or perception of racism by Jews because there is considerable a dispute over with the term racism can be applied to Palestinian advocacy when exploring the experience of Jewish students and staff should be queried.

That being said, we should not fall into the trap of dismissing concerns about the cultural safety of Zionists as lightweight, manipulative, or irrelevant as compared to the lived experience of other groups. 94% of Jewish respondees report experiences of direct or indirect racism (again, “racism” here collapses many different elements that were measured). Now, it may well be true that this figure conflates traditional antisemitism with the politics of the Gaza war and distress and discomfort by Jews, but dismissing that such a figure may have an element of truth is wrong. Of course, because the research is based on self selection to an online survey the non-scientific samples are going to be biased towards motivated individuals from all communities as distinct from those who didn’t participate. This is a similar problem faced with other similar research. However, the fact that members of various minority groups (including Jews) have come up with a range of figures putting them all on the outer is of deep concern.

However, the accusation that Jews are too sensitive to criticism of Israel and their desire for cultural safety is undeserved cannot be used to dismiss such a high figure outright. The desire for cultural safety in the face of deep anger over the Gaza conflict cannot just be treated as “making an inappropriate request in anti-colonial spaces” (I am making an assumption here that the university is also considered an anti-colonial space). This is jargon devoid of a human connection, and as the report suggests, it downplays psychosocial safety in challenging situations. I have no doubt, there are situations which far exceed an ordinary level of discomfort for Jews that might be expected, politics aside.

Now what would really help in the report if all the different tables for the different groups and answers to questions (for example impact on mental health) could be assembled. This would make comparison of the data much easier. For example,

All that being said, is this experience of difference or racism towards minority groups any different to that experienced in any Australian institution such as the workplace?

The results will be probably be used to unfairly beat up on higher education.

I wrote the original version of this a few days back in response to an article in the Melbourne Age and Sydney morning Harold about how Isaac Hertzog was invited to Australia. I first put it on Facebook where there was a lot of interest. Here it is with a few modifications

This is how it works at the top of the Jewish community. Issac Herzog, understandably distressed at the cold-blooded murder at Bondi first rang Jeremy Lieberman of the Zionist Federation of Australia who is part of a dominant political and business dynasty in the Jewish community in Australia. He wanted to know what he could do. I think we all know the politics of the rest (and the visit is about to happen)

At very top of the permanent elite in the Jewish community it’s natural to get a call from a foreign head of state who happens to be an old family friend and for the local Prime Minister to then end up inviting him. ( I assume Leibler gets to talk to Albo any time).

There’s not the slightest embarrassment at such privilege, it’s what “folks like us” do naturally at the top, and that a favourable political course of action is undertaken That’s entitlement par excellence.

For the rest of us, nahh, not a chance. We are ordinary folks. There are no elections to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and the ZFA serves as a kind of twin. AIJAC involves much the same people. People at the top swap roles and what a surprise, they also get Orders of Australia. Some families have run the show over the decades . The same incestuous relationships lurch across into other organizations and business. It begins at school and university, religious and social networks It’s all very top end of town, a mirror image of how other elites work. If you want to get theoretical, they are engaged in horizontal and vertical (intergenerational) transfer of social, cultural, intellectual & material capital (Bourdieu) . It’s not nothing to do with Zionist conspiracies. It’s just how the elite does its stuff.

The kids & favoured ones get all the phone numbers, contacts & the resources & skills via the networks & families . This is corporate training as they also go into the same workplaces. Such elites are experts in political cultivation & pollies enjoy the rewards (trips, dinners, adoration) .

In the Jewish community, this is the result of a traditional cultural style- deference to the ‘machers’ (the big shots), power, money, intimidation (I’ve copped it), and decades of blind obedience or staying quiet by too many people who should know better than to cower to elites.

Insight into the elite particularly comes through into the fawning biography of Mark Leibler (Jeremy’s father), by Michael Gawenda where Leibler is quite frank about his family. However, it also gives much insight into insider elite influence of the government.

Once again. This is not about Zionist lobby or alleged Jewish power. It’s just the same with other well-resourced groups. Look at the mining lobby and the bad side of the CFMEU.

I note that at two places in the book about Mark Leibler inflammatory assertions were made about me. One was a quote from a letter of Leibler’s that asserted I was an antisemite because I had been critical of Mark Leibler 30 years ago. I tried to take legal action when the book appeared but unfortunately I did not have the resources to follow through on my complaint to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission which was felt to have merit. What was so interesting is that every defamation lawyer I approached could not take on to the courts because there was a conflict of interest with Arnold Bloch Leibler law firm.

That’s how it goes in a relatively small country in a relatively small community dominated by a few The little guys, the other points of view rarely get a go.

And I always ask, why should the Zionist Federation have a role in Australian politics at all? Shouldn’t it be registered as a foreign lobby?

And of course, there is the whole question of political donations…

He justifies homicide against Jews in this country as coloniser agents, assigns collective blame and launches into everything else, even condemning mourning. And he gets it very wrong about the Bondi event. It was not a celebration of Chabad politics, whatever we think of them. It was about Hanukkah (the politics of Hanukkah are another matter as well.

What a piece of antisemitic shit. He needs to be called out. The Amanda Gelender he references is in the Netherlands. Big deal.

Anyone on the left who supports him is basically an accomplice. See all of this degenerate’s attack on well, not just Jews, but the left, for not being anti-imperialist and decolonial enough. Pro-Palestine groups if they have any decency, should denounce him for his antisemitism and break all ties.

instagram.com/p/DS_AIOz…

The full ‘essay’ mattchun.substack.com/p…

Two screen-shots here. One from Instagram, one from substack.Sadly, he has many followers

.

Some of what he observes about antisemitic and tankist tendencies of some on the fringes of the left not be new to readers (we certainly see this in some wildly popular social media posters in Australia) , but he is observing this as an Italian progressive confronting what is occurring there and in the rest of Europe. That is what makes his point of view about the crisis of the universalist, cosmopolitan state in Europe versus dogmatic forces ( on the left and right so interesting. His pairing of Russia and Israel as the embodiment of deadly state power is also something I’d never thought of. We are overwhelmed by concerns from the Anglosphere and don’t get this perspective

Thus he argues that “the deadly [Bondi] attack should be viewed in the context of a broader shift in global political conflict in which violence plays a central role…If the cosmopolitan and universalist project towards which international law tended – together with European experimentation – arose in response to the massacres that took place on European soil, today we are seeing the return of state violence – Israel and Russia embody the most deadly side of sovereign power, whether national or imperial – and of groups without legal recognition but equally definable by the combination of force and identity, requirements that are indispensable but insufficient for modern statehood.”

Here is the full article

The anti-Semitic attack in Sydney on December 14, 2025, in which 15 people were killed and 60 wounded, is the most serious attack against Jews since October 7, 2023.

However, the deadly attack should be viewed in the context of a broader shift in global political conflict in which violence plays a central role.

The attackers were Naveed Akram and Sajid Akram, and according to the latest reports, their ideological motivation was Islamic fundamentalism. They were disarmed by a Muslim man, Ahmed el Ahmed. The fact that the religion of the perpetrators and the hero is the same has made it possible to defuse, at least in part, the appeal of the deadly rhetoric of the clash of civilizations, fueled by widespread Islamophobia.

This episode, together with the murders of other Jews in Manchester, Washington, and Boulder over the past year, has reopened the debate on the rise of anti-Semitism, this time with quality viewpoints.

However, discussion on this issue has been poisoned by the political use of the category of anti-Semitism and by the overlap, in both senses, from the right and the left, between Jews and Zionists—the victims were being attacked as “Zionists” and not as “Jews.”

At the same time, the Israeli and global far right have used accusations of anti-Semitism to delegitimize legitimate anti-Zionist political criticism, which has been particularly heated in response to the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, yet largely nonviolent. The center-left has frequently done the same, in England and Germany.

At the same time, since many Jewish representatives in the diaspora identify with the state of Israel and its government, the term Zionist—understood as synonymous with racist or fascist—easily becomes synonymous with being Jewish .

Contemporary ‘real’ Zionism is certainly comparable to racist extremism, but in fact, it has a more complex history and, even today, many people identify as Zionists without sharing the project of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. Furthermore, the attackers called their victims “Zionists” – Anna Foa herself, before her latest book, was certainly considered a left-wing Zionist, as was Gad Lerner, to give the most well-known examples [Anna Foa is a distinguished historian of Italian Jewry and public intellectual; Gad Lerner a well known Italian journalist - L.S]

Differing from how many on the left think, there is therefore no necessary incompatibility between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, but the assessment of the spread of anti-Semitism is undoubtedly exaggerated.

However, it is not only ideological reasons that contribute to the sense of danger and threat, but also the crystallization of the Jewish experience, made up of two millennia of persecution. The psychological and experiential precipitate—filtered through oral family and community tradition, as well as the enormity of the Nazi genocide—thus amplifies the sense of insecurity.

However, the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah must be viewed in a broader context: “a piecemeal third world war” (Pope Francis [ Francis has used words like this on a number of occasions to describe interconnected conflicts around the world- L.S.].

In this sense, Bondi Beach is not simply a symptom of a flare-up of global anti-Semitism – which certainly exists – but rather of a global conflict in which violence and identity are welded together for the sake of ethnic or religious homogeneity.

If the cosmopolitan and universalist project towards which international law tended – together with European experimentation – arose in response to the massacres that took place on European soil, today we are seeing the return of state violence – Israel and Russia embody the most deadly side of sovereign power, whether national or imperial – and of groups without legal recognition but equally definable by the combination of force and identity, requirements that are indispensable but insufficient for modern statehood.

For several decades now, sovereign states have no longer been the only perpetrators of violence. In addition to private militias such as the Wagner Group, there are also armed groups with varying degrees of political legitimacy: the case of Afghanistan, where former jihadists have gone from being enemies to be defeated to representatives of the state, or Gaza, where Islamist militias are financed by Israel to fight Hamas – show that those considered terrorists can, if necessary, become reliable political partners. It is no coincidence that, from a certain point of view, ‘terrorist’ is the name given to revolutionaries who have been defeated or have not yet been victorious.

Against the backdrop of the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China (and BRICS), we are witnessing, on the one hand, the weakness of international law and, on the other, the apparent paradox of a global conflict within the international right. From the United States to Iran, from Italy to Russia, the forces commonly understood as progressive lack strength and, when they do have it, they lack a perspective that is up to the challenges of the present.

The crisis of the US-led unipolar order and of supranational institutions – which were never really “in good shape,” with Europe as a fragile clay pot among variously aggressive powers – has made it difficult to adopt an internationalist point of view, abandoned after the anti-globalization phase of Genoa and Seattle.

The cynicism and weakness of the European and Western ruling class with regard to the genocide in Gaza is matched by that of part of the critical left, which has regressed to crude partisan positions with regard to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

From the point of view of public opinion, the war against Ukraine, after the horror of Assad, has shown the limits of those who practice so-called “anti-imperialism of fools”: anyone who is not the United States or Europe – from the “axis of resistance” to Putin – is a representative or ally of the oppressed. Such a point of view results in the situation of other groups’ situations being regarded homogenously rather than as heterogeneous. Paradoxically they are then “read” in a more positive limelight because of this simplification.

Multiplicity becomes uniformity, and the ideological, class, strategic, and interest differences that divide each group are erased. Non-Western oppression becomes freedom, resistance—even when it is the exact opposite, as in the case of Hamas and its system of alliances—and an imperialist invasion such as Russia’s becomes a legitimate reaction to the enlargement of the Atlantic Pact, according to a misunderstood sense of ‘realism’ or so-called geopolitics.

This point-of-view, made up of essentialisations and national characteristics that are always the same (the thesis that Russia ‘has never invaded’ corresponds to the concern about a Germany that is rearming, considered ontologically imperial and, in the worst interpretations, intrinsically ‘Nazi’).

This interpretative collapse has been aided by certain strands of research simplified for the use and consumption of activists who need dichotomous categories and radical simplifications in order to interpret and act: this is why Ukraine becomes “a country of Nazis,” NATO becomes the primary and immovable engine of evil in the world, Hamas becomes a benign force of liberation, and so on.

Jürgen Habermas, faced with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the so-called coalition of the willing, described the political field as divided between those who felt “resentment” against the alleged abstractions of a “bloodless moralism” which, through international law, wished to “tame” state power, and the alternative of neoconservative and Straussian [Leo Strauss ] armed unilateralism—a truly “revolutionary” force.

Even then, the “world organization” was “unable to compel member states that violated its rules to guarantee their citizens a democratic and constitutional order.”

Norberto Bobbio [Italian philosopher] spoke of a third absent party, a “third” power with respect to the parties in conflict. Thus human rights policy remains narrow and selective selective and subject to the constraints of the veto power of the powers sitting on the UN Security Council. We are still in that situation, but without any form of optimism, mired in the nationalist horizon of geopolitics.

The transformations of global capitalism have led to a coexistence of states and concentrations of capital in which political and economic functions can be, from time to time, in the hands of one or the other. Sovereign law without power—just think of how easily Netanyahu can ignore the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, even in Europe.

Europe, which was defined by the New York Times as the second world power at the time of the Iraq war, is fact accompanied by a generally weak global civil society, with a few exceptions, such as in Italy for the Flotilla or, at times, in various global cities, from London to New York to Cairo.

The post-national experiment of the European Union is constantly on the verge of implosion, due to its inherent flaws, insufficient ambition and, above all, the flourishing of extreme right-wing forces within it that want to rewind the tape of shared functions and resources and return to a Europe of nations, held together by that patriarchal and reactionary nightmare that is its Judeo-Christian roots. Progressive forces also contribute to this weakness – think of Danish Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen, committed to undermining the European (and not European Union) space of rights that is the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), together with Labour’s Keir Starmer in pursuit of Farage on the issue of racism.

Habermas, based on the peculiarity of his reflection on German guilt, has taken a highly controversial position with regard to the genocide in Gaza [Jürgen Habermas has said there is no genocide & defended Israel -L.S]

However, in a recent speech, he correctly observed that, precisely when Europe seems to be on the verge of collapse, more Europe is needed (echoing Hölderlin’s [19th century German intellectual] well-known and much-quoted motto: “Where danger grows, so too does that which saves”).

Similarly, the project of a cosmopolis is becoming increasingly necessary, even if it lacks the legs to walk on and faces multiple obstacles—from the need to reform the composition of the Security Council to the selection mechanisms of the General Assembly, to mention only the first ones relating to the United Nations, which is itself under attack from the United States.

And thus a transnational movement is needed, against war and identity politics, which fights not for one side or the other in the various conflicts that exist, but fights for the abolition of identity distinctions, also with a view to redistributing power and resources.

But there is something else. While traditional, with a missionary orientation towards other Jews and a particular interest in people of other religions to support with they call the Noahide commandments, Chabad are are also a highly political organisation, at least at a leadership level (networked by family ties), they are astute at being seen as non-political but very close to power in countries around the world to advance their religious and sometimes business agendas. It is hard to say no to a photo-op with religious men in black and a constituency. However, their politics on Israel are essentially reactionary though they are technically non-Zionist. They are also associated, at least through individuals, with all sorts of dodgy or worse business practices, and its members, including those in Australia are not immune from suing each other in the civil courts over property and other matters. There is also controversy about their handling of sex abuse cases as documented in the courts and a Royal Commission in Australia.

They will certainly now have a particular seat at the table with the Australian government in policy and strategy discussions with government. However, they should not remain immune from criticism while at the same time everyone should be careful to not engage in anything remotely anti-Semitic or crudely anti-Zionist. None of this criticism of Chabad is meant to imply that they are not loving and caring people. I have had an excellent Chabad doctor and psychologist, but they may in fact be oblivious to the political games that go on at a higher level of the organization. It is a multifaceted and multi-levelled sect.

Gopnik—

“The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever more elaborate resurrection narratives, serves, Pagels suggests, both to address the practical difficulties of reclaiming the bodies of the executed and to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. Stories of resurrection and rebirth, after all, recur throughout history. Bereavement hallucinations—intensely vivid encounters with the deceased—are reported by as many as half of all grieving people. …

Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming—much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson’s death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul.

In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans’ loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. “Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!”—the Lubavitcher slogan …is, in essence, no different from “Christ is risen.” Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence.

Chabad, as in other attacks around the world, has new mratyrs for whom they will seek comfort in the Rebbe and it will also play out politically in Australia.

See archive.today/ZDo20

“When the very concept of antisemitism is subject to enormous debate, unless its core is focus is agreed upon, a Royal Commission or similar inquiry could become a Star Chamber

If any investigation is to go ahead, it must have absolutely clarity. This comes down to core definitional problems around political speech critical of Israel or Zionism as distinct from more traditional bias and violent actions about which there is no dispute.

The Australian government has fallen into the trap of supporting International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism. It has been subject to much criticism for being taken as a prescriptive standard limiting free speech, not least of all by many Jewish experts in antisemitism. An academic document must not be treated as a legal dictum.

Its key drafter, Kenneth Stern has warned against its misuse as a tool against political speech in the culture wars. The IHRA has become a weapon of the Trump administration.

There are other tools available such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

Without accounting for this significant problem any inquiry will reek of McCarthyism.”

I’ve got too old and bitter & fearful of angina for protests, but when I see certain names and photos that keep appearing on the far far left as being engaged in being associated with various outbreaks, is seems to be that there is a local hardcore which engages in what they see as productive revolutionary violence. It comes out of a Leninist tendency (probably crudely read through Fanon) to lead, not follow. This is coupled with a radical internationalism/antiimperialism/ anticolonialism for both Australia and especially Palestine - liberation by any means possible in desperate and awful times. The keffiyeh is appropriated for local revolution but no one says No!

This on top of hated for local Nazis who are being clever and not breaking the law by skirting around the edges. The police can’t stop them if they are not breaking the law 😞 and clearly, some police have shown themselves not to be antipathetic.

Social media & encryption have resulted in what I think is at least one underground nucleus ( WACA) with numbers of hangers on & publicizers. And unknown the past, a number of the most radicalized people ( some quite reactionary), are women who appear to believe in violence. Others on the left may be reluctant to criticize for fear of being accused of gender or cultural disrespect.

And then of course there is all the COVID period alienation which set off bells on the right and left about state control of public movement (not to speak of vaccination but I think that’s a right, not left issue).

A review essay by Ian Buruma may be of interest to people with an interest in the rise of contemporary antisemitism, though I would have liked a little more attention by Buruma to the relationship between what the years before the Holocaust and its effects on Palestine, but if I am not wrong from what I remember of reading his essays years ago that he is basically a liberal Zionist, and so has his limits. He only sees the rot after 1947 and especially 1967.

That said he does make some perceptive observations about some left attitudes towards Jews and Zionism , and I do like the following phrase, “Still, to adapt an old Jewish joke, some anti-Zionists dislike Israel a little more than is necessary.”

I think that actually nails it for me on why I’m so uncomfortable with the rhetoric used by people such as the American commentator Chris Hedges who has been in Australia. The dislike of Zionism and Israel and the language used to express that just doesn’t stop at political dislike or severe criticism, a severe criticism which is mostly entirely justified. But his clear dislike reflects something deeper, far more personal

It reveals something disturbing, more than a desire to rid the world of colonialism and imperialism (Palestine is the linchpin). Some of Hedges’ inflammatory, catastrophic turn of phrase, using the worst case scenario, definitely gets into that grey zone when it is completely unnecessary to use certain language to make a valid political point. His case could be made without the extra twist of the knife, but he can’t resist. He may not even be conscious of it. It doesn’t matter. It has an effect on readers or listeners to have those phrases repeated. Jews, as a whole, with their alien culture and supposed sense of superiority and fascist imperialist Zionists are conflated.

Here, in quotes, is some of the language used by Hedges in his Edward Said Memorial Lecture: ‘Requiem for Gaza’, recently delivered in Gaza.

• The “alien culture of Zionism”. This was said in the context of Palestine, but all too easily would the angry reader or listener see hear alien/Jew/ foreign. It’s a classic trope. Jews never fit in anywhere. And as well, there is for the nth time, any infinite number of Zionisms.

• “ [A] morally blind nostalgia for an invented past.” As if the other great religions are neither normally blind nor guilty of invention of their past including prophets, events, and theologies. Sadly, we see some of the same rhetoric is picked up in elements of the Australian left.

• “ The fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique”. A pretty broad statement, though one associated with much Zionist propaganda. However, it i a claim disputed by many Jews, and has been so since the claim was first made. In think the original claim was about the scale of industrial organisation of death, not victimhood. Thus Raul Hilberg who wrote the classic The Destruction of the European Jews, said in an interview (quoted on Wikipedia) “For me the Holocaust was a vast, single event, but I am never going to use the word unique, because I recognize that when one starts breaking it into pieces, which is my trade, one finds completely recognizable, ordinary ingredients.” And isn’t Hedges aware of Serbian and others’ claims of unique forms of victimhood to justify their violence?

• “Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians,” He doesn’t really qualify this after linking it to Israel ethnofascism and calls for the killing of Amalek, even though he mentions attacks on Jewish liberals as an out from generalizing such a call to all Jews. The Jewish supremacy trope is an old one, linked to the “chosen people” dogma and antisemitism. In fact, the chosen people dogma has been subjected to much debate over the centuries by Jews ; more of a burden of religious obligation/covenant than superiority. The fascist stream in religious-nationalist thinking has been denounced on numerous occasions by mainstream thinkers, yet Hedges makes no acknowledgement of what amounts to the Jewish Wars, to paraphrase Flavius Josephus.

These are the dangerous exaggerated, attention-seeking tropes that stick in the minds of angry people who aren’t interested in nuance.

Sadly, this sort of rhetoric turns up in the rhetoric of some loud voices on the Australian left.

http://archive.today/OwVr7

By the 2000s I was playing with automated platforms for a number of different organisations and affiliations. But I was never a coder, just a tinkerer and in fact, I had no skill at all in keeping up the requirements of various platforms. I ended up doing websites because my academic colleagues didn’t have a clue. This is while we were trying to remain independent of the control of faculty-run websites. And Facebook for all its evils, was and can a pleasure, but it’s not a great place for longer writing. So here we go. My posting has been a mix of academic writing, political advocacy, and just fun.

You can catch up with past materials on the Internet archive. A lot of academic papers can be found via Google Scholar and look on the Internet archive for more recent ones.

But life is more than scholarship. I’ve been involved in a lot of socially-connected activity and writing over the years. See the Internet Archive as well. Any my Facebook page has tens of thousands of words.

But it’s time to be more reflective across a range of things, so that is what I will be trying here. I wish I could find my first webpage!

- and up there amongst the best - was the enormous gold and other colours (blues, reds) mosaic of the Last Judgement in the Church of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello. I probably spent close to 90 minutes - mostly alone, in the quiet- trying to absorb all the detail and meaning in the panels. Some tourists just walked in and then walked out. I don’t think they recognised what it was and it’s all too much to glance it quickly. I remember the first time I looked at it years ago I thought it was kind of crude, now I’ve got a completely different sort of impression of its complexity and artistic excellence. I think that comes from looking at so many examples of Byzantine art and Italian variations of it in 11-13th centuries.

The mosaic - that is close to being a micromosaic ) dates from the later level of early 12th centuries and I believe it was designed to basically offer a moral impression upon the congregation and send a very strong message about obedience and if you don’t you go to hell. Goodness knows how many millions if pieces it is made from There are six panels the one at the top being much larger than the others and the get smaller to eye level, but they’re all full of fantastic level of detail some of it quite humorous such as the skulls and serpents and the devil who represented in various places There is also a river of fire that leads down from the devil to people burning in hell. It’s very active story-telling.

I actually took a break to try and absorb it all and I ascended the tower in the church and then I came back for a second round. It was also because I couldn’t get any Internet access inside the church but I managed to find a website that I’ve got a link to that explains the six panels. It’s really worth reading the article and and looking at a big screen Image of the entire thing and then the details Unfortunately, you can’t take photos inside the church which means that I had to access photos which aren’t always great from other sources . It’s also clear that some of the restoration has been overdone such as the big angels at the top which are just too good to be true. However, you can really see that at least one of them. At least one mosaicist had extraordinary artistic skills in rendering faces and even some of the feet are cleverly outlined with sandals. In one of the panels there is actually rendering of souls in the dark deep and that part of the panel actually curves into an angled corner, and it’s all rendered in a dark blue black with very light grey white tesserae of different hues outlining the floating bodies. It’s really amazing, but I haven’t been able to find a good photograph of it.

“After viewing the 41 items of furniture – sideboards, cupboards, chairs, desks, tables, frames, boxes, and many others – by Schulim Krimper on display at the Bayside Gallery, I was struck by the thought that he brought together an understanding of natural surfaces and domestic interiors as found in European high art.

Krimper’s work can also be read as small-scale architecture, echoing a lightness and spareness found in the buildings of architect and design masters like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.”

The whole article can be read here. Jewish Independent, 7 August 2025.

read here.

For all the joy and relief at the release of Israel hostages /captives and the return of bodies, I’m angry that this should have happened nearly two years ago. All the evidence shows that a deal was possible. But Netanyahu chose the war path and we see this result. This prisoner release is not of his making. It’s now clear that it has come up against Trump’s transactional view of the world/ desire to be number one and his family and US regional interests. It also aligns in various ways with other countries’ strategic interests though the fit is not perfect. Its ugly

And so sadly. little attention is being loss to the weak, emaciated state of many Palestinians being released. Many have been beaten up Based on past history, many will have been swept up and framed in military ‘justice’. Palestinian society is divided and fragmented , and of course Gaza is a bloody graveyard with a traumatized population

Further, I’m concerned that the Israeli public may retreat into its bubble & victimhood and forget about Gaza and the West Bank. The domestic protest movement may well lose steam. No one in government or military may be held accountable domestically, much less in international fora and courts? Israel - business as usual. Even if Netanyahu is ousted, I don’t know if he will ever be held accountable though he won’t be welcome in most countries or be arrested for war crimes . That being said, Australia should increase pressure on Israel with more sanctions.

And of course, Palestinians (which Palestinian representatives?) thus far have no voice or power in deciding their future. I only hope that forthcoming detail indicates how/what is intended and that there is some way that Israel can be prevented from undermining future Palestinian interests. That is where I think the other Muslim and Arab countries may be putting their efforts through bodies on the ground and huge money.

This leads to a brutal reality check. River to the sea dreams are probably over. The most that can be hoped for at this time are two contiguous entities thst are not at war with each other and little by little there is more positive contact with the other

I hope that Israel is forced to give up the West Bank. That would have an enormous deflatory effect on Israeli ideological arrogance, but the resistance could cause an internal revolt and further fracture in the diaspora. Perhaps there will be similar moves for the Golan. US and regional interests will have no time for settler lunatics either.

Don’t expect Israel as a state to engage in restorative justice or a collective admission of guilt for either Gaza or so much else since 48. However, my hope is that there will be enough people in civil society who can lead a reconciliation process with Palestinians similar to that in South Africa. But for the majority, the wounds and hatreds may last for generations. And problems will flare up

As in Northern Ireland, or S Africa, the descendants of colonists by and large won’t be going anywhere. That is a festering sore for Palestinian aspirations that will flare up unless people are satisfied with other political solutions. I hope that Marwan Barghouti and become free to lead and work with sympathetic nations. A strong pragmatic political voice is critical. It is not a zero sum game

All this is also going to challenge protest movements abroad. It’s not a rosy nor radical moment when colonialism and imperialism are not going go fall apart. The Levant has been at the cross-roads of great power and religious interests and settlements for centuries. Nothing is changing in that respect.

But it has also been a hub of innovation and trade since antiquity . But I see that some people are posting video of Ghassan Khanafi of the PFLP from 1970 justifying armed resistance. 55 years on. Further, the current situation upturns the idea that only Palestinians alone can determine their future is wrong. It’s a revolutionary fantasy. There are particular circumstances here in this geo-political intersection. Look at the result.

It’s a grim time.