The Zionist Federation of Australia has filed a legal action with the Federal Court of Australia against renowned Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis relating to a complaint it first raised with the Australian Human Rights Commission in July 2024, claiming posts she made on social media platform X were antisemitic in nature.

This maligned attempt to charge Kostakidis, the  former face of multicultural television network SBS, with propagating antisemitism, takes its lead from uncountable other such complaints lodged by Zionists globally that have been made against other figures critical of genocidal Israeli state actions, in order to demonise the most high-profile commentators in an attempt to extinguish all such voices.

Zionist Federation chief executive  Alon Cassuto lodged the complaint with the AHRC in July 2024, which was nine months into the Gaza  genocide, the most brutal demonstration of inhumanity in recent times, and it relied on the conflating of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism — or political criticism with religious prejudice — to silence outrage over this crime.

Cassuto has lodged the complaint under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), and, following the AHRC conciliation process having been terminated without any resolution, the Zionist Federation then had 60 days to take the matter to the higher authority, and it lodged the legal action with the Federal Court on the last day possible.

Kostakidis is hardly alone in being locally targeted with these slanderous accusations that serve to shield a genocide, as quite a number of cultural figures have been singled out, with criticism of Israel being purposely misconstrued as religious prejudice. And as she puts her case to the court, Kostakidia will be fighting for the right of all of us to speak freely and honestly about the crimes of the Israeli state.

A settler colonial gripe

Cassuto announced on X on 14 July that  he would be lodging the complaint with the AHRC, because Kostakidis had posted footage of Lebanese Hezbollah leader, the late Hassan Nasrallah, who was warning Israelis they were not safe in the region, at a point in time when Lebanon had been engaged in low-level fighting with Israel since October 2023, which Tel Aviv was to dramatically escalate.

Kostakidis had suggested in the post that the Israeli Government was “getting some of its own medicine”, which was an obvious reference to the then 10-month-long genocidal bloodbath that the Netanyahu Government had unleashed upon Gaza, killing mainly Palestinian children and women; the International Court of Justice ruled on 26 January last year this was a plausible case of genocide.

Section 18C makes it unlawful to publicly act in a manner that is “reasonably likely” to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person or a group based on their “race, colour or national or ethnic origin”.

This is a controversial provision, as the Coalition attempted to remove "offend" and "insult" from the section in 2014, in order to give “bigots” a chance to express themselves in public.

The complaint against Kostakidis was made amidst a political climate that involved the propagation of the idea that antisemitism was on the rise in Australia, and Sky News recently run a highly publicised documentary based on this proposition, which was entitled Never Again: The Fight Against Antisemitism.

The suggested rise in antisemitism was occurring at the same time that the suppression of any mention in the public sphere of the Gaza genocide was being promoted.

But following a Naarm-Melbourne synagogue being burnt down months later, while on Gadigal land in Sydney a three-month-long spate of graffiti and arson crimes that involved anti-Israel and antisemitic messaging erupted, and it appeared to support the idea that rampant antisemitism was a spiralling issue.

The Australian Federal Police, however, publicly revealed last month that the entire spate of “antisemitic” crimes perpetrated in the Greater Sydney region were part of an elaborate criminal hoax that sought to give organised crime figures an advantage over police. None of these crimes were fuelled by any antisemitism, but the synagogue arson attack down south remains unexplained.

The genocide erasing conflation

When Cassuto filed the complaint, claims that it was the result of the local Israel Lobby attempting to propagate the conflation of anti-Israel sentiment with prejudice against Jews wasn’t such an easy point to make. This was because back then, it was little understood, but 10 months on, the local constituency is a lot more educated about this technique.

As US academic Professor Judith Butler explained during a conference in Paris in March last year,  Israeli actors commenced propagating the conflation of Zionism with antisemitism in the 1970s, as the latter carries the weight of the Holocaust, and therefore, is a charge people want to avoid. So, construing criticism of Israel with hatred towards Jewish people makes people reluctant to criticise.

Antisemitism is a term that was coined in 1781 to describe European hatred or hostility towards adherents of Judaism, as prejudice towards Jewish people had been a significant issue across Europe for centuries, and it was such bigotry that resulted in the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.

Zionism, however, is an ideology founded by Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 1880s, which advocated for Israel, a Jewish state, to be created on the historical lands of the Palestinians in order to escape European persecution. But Palestinian dispossession was not a given at first, as Argentina had too been considered a viable place for a Zionist state.

Many Jewish people are not Zionists. Many Zionists are not Jewish people. There are currently more Christian Zionists in the United States then there are Jewish Zionists.

Since the 1970s, critics of Israel have been condemned as antisemites, as their anti-Zionist sentiment has been misconstrued as Jewish hate. Since October 2023, right across the Western world, critics of Israel, who are basically speaking out against a livestreamed high-tech genocide, have been labelled antisemitic and retributive actions have been taken against them, to produce a chilling effect in society.

Universities Australia announced in February that  the 39 institutions it represents have agreed to adopt a new version of antisemitism based upon the 2016-adopted IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism, which does conflate certain criticisms of Israel, including questioning the state’s right to exist, with antisemitism.

Reds under the bed

Following the termination of the AHRC conciliation process in December, Kostakidis made a clarifying statement on X in January, in  which she apologised to anyone who may have misconstrued her posting of the Nasrallah speech as an endorsement. However, as she is a journalist, the content of the Lebanese leader’s speech should “not be a barrier to reporting”.

And as Kostakidis does face court in the coming months, she may have to stand alone, but she will hardly be alone in spirit, as a great number of locals understand that as her lawyers put her right to freely criticise mass atrocities, to stand up for human rights and to reject a settler colonial entity on a killing spree, they too are fighting for the rights of all of us to speak our minds.

Kostakidis is neither alone in being singled out by the Zionist Federation for an official complaint, as many others have borne the brunt of such attacks. Palestinian Australian academic and author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah recently had an academic grant suspended under such circumstances, while Sydney University’s Dr Nick Riemer and Professor John Keane are facing action similar to that faced by Kostakidis.

The political climate in relation to the antisemitic scare campaign, based on the unfounded notion that when people criticise Israeli state crimes this somehow signals a dislike of a religion, is not only preposterous, but is leading to a situation akin to 1950s US McCarthyism, where intellectuals were singled out and charged as communists, as part of a witch hunt by conservatives.

As Kostakidis fronts up to court to ensure all of our rights to speak freely in the face of catastrophic injustices, she can be reassured that a significant portion of the Australian constituency is standing with her.

Republished from Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 4 April