Pearls and Irritations

In my view, some parts of Mary Kostakidis’ Twitter feed displays a particular and disturbing orientation. Despite that criticism, there should be no doubt that the pro-Israel lobby is engaged in a form of coordinated lawfare against critics of Israel on several fronts. Win or lose, the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) will attempt to use the case against Kostakidis to discredit those who support Palestine in general as antisemites. This attack is part of a general assault on media critics.

Editors’ note: A response letter by Mary Kostakidis is included in full at the end of this article.

Sadly, for all the correctness of Mary Kostakidis’ passion for defending Palestinians on Twitter she appears to have gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, confusing verifiable mainstream journalism and reports with unfiltered antisemitic commentary that sees rich Jews, the Mossad, the American Antidefamation League, and others behind everything to do with Israel and a lot else.

This material invariable ends up blaming Jews in general, belying any claims to just being antizionist.

Thus, Kostakidis has ended up with the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) chasing after her, in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, closely followed by Chip Le Grand of The Age/SMH. Kostakidis is claiming persecution, silencing and victimhood status on her feed.

If the IHRA view of antisemitism is adopted in the case, then she may well be condemned, even if she only offered carriage of materials, though I think her comments display a particular and nasty orientation. 

More worryingly, the conduct of the case by ZFA, win or lose, will be used to discredit those who support Palestine in general as antisemites.

Kostakidis’ passion for justly defending Palestinians is not in question. The flaw is that she has uncritically confused vile material with defensible criticism of Israel and Zionism. This has left her wide open for attack by the ZFA under the Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Her defence will be that she is just making people think and she is personally not antisemitic.

My view is that even if we think she is not antisemitic, she has been running, uncritically, a vile Twitter feed. It’s not critical journalism. It’s stuff that draws on the gutter and appeals to the gutter. It’s of a different quality to Randa Abel-Fattah’s confronting statement and accompanying essay “I refuse to provide reassurances to placate and soothe Zionist political anxieties”, which is entirely political, not conspiratorial. Mary Kostakidis has instead been using conspiracy material from the far right, as I show below.

In what I think are egregious examples, in a tweet post about Jeffrey Epstein, she endorses a billionaire Jews and Mossad conspiracy as posted by Keith Wood, a far-right white rights nationalist, based in Ireland. Scrolling through comments to Wood’s post, we find a video of Proud Boys/Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, comments about the Deep State/Jews, the totally fake but beloved of antisemites Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of course, the Mossad turning up everywhere.

In other post, the one launched into by the ZFA, she appears to endorse Hassan Nasrallah Secretary-general of Hezbollah making terrifying statements about getting Jews out of Israel, and a particularly scary use of the slogan “from the River to the Sea”. This is the kind of material that the Australian Jewish Democratic Society-Australian Palestine Advocacy Network saw as beyond the pale in its Joint Statement Against Antisemitism.

As a self-proclaimed journalist seeking the truth, did Kostakidis bother to check the credibility and political orientation of her sources, before posting? 

Just saying that all these posts are meant to provoke questions is not enough. It is pushing a particular and very nasty view of the world.

That is on top of posting tweets that put her in the anti-Ukraine/ Uyghur rights camp, and she is apparently supportive of the Assad regime. In her worldview, even the Guardian and BBC are controlled by evil corporate forces. In another tweet, she also seems to believe that Biden was behind the Trump shooting.

Despite that criticism, it appears that the pro-Israel lobby is engaged in a form of coordinated lawfare against critics of Israel on several fronts where what I regard as craziness like that propounded by Kostakidis is confused with legitimate criticism of the Israeli state and Zionist politics.

What I believe to be Kostakidis’ errors have been conflated with the Israel lobby’s all-out assault and weaponisation of accusations of antisemitism, even though the meaning of the term and such ambiguous slogans as “From the River to the Sea” is strongly contested.

This attack is part of a general assault on media critics, though in my opinion, some of the others who have been criticised have been playing word games to provoke unnecessary negative reactions and feeling in the Jewish community when there is no need to.

A second point to note on this issue, is the current Inquiry into antisemitism in higher education inspired by the Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities Bill 2024 (No. 2), pushed by the Coalition and supported by the Lobby which again have universities in their sights as part of their general culture war. This follows on from similar lobbying over the past several years. AJDS will be making a new submission to the current Inquiry

Thus, I have been involved with a campaign signed up to by Jewish academics here and internationally (including Israel) and the Australian Jewish Democratic Society to parliamentarians, Vice-Chancellors and Universities Australia against the simplistic application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Guidelines being applied to Australian higher education over the past two years, when there are other alternatives such as the Jerusalem Declaration. Similarly, opposition to IHRA and preference for other solutions such as the more nuanced Jerusalem Declaration have been voiced by ADJS to Senate Inquiries and elsewhere. Similarly, the Jewish Council of Australia has been voicing its opposition.

While no one doubts that there is real and abiding “traditional” antisemitism, and its increasing manifestation online, a matter for serious concern is the lack of reliable data, particularly about what is going on in a couple of key campus. As pointed out by us , survey work such as that done by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and particularly the ZFA and the Australian Union of Jewish Students, or now, a shallow report from the Community Security Group (a Jewish organisation affiliated to the Jewish Community Council of Victoria), the “statistics” tends to be self-serving , suffering from category conflation, highly partisan qualitative data, and other Statistics 101 faults. This results in very shonky data that is numerically misleading but pushed in the media, unquestioned. The result is a deliberate moral panic about the extent of antisemitism, particularly confusion between legitimate political advocacy, student politics and campus culture, and outright antisemitic activity. This results in policing of activity about Israel’s War in Gaza and Palestine in general.

Third, there is the appointment of Jill Segal as highly politicised Envoy to Combat Antisemitism without a clear brief, and without real political consensus from within the Jewish community. This, it seems, grants de facto permission to hawk around the highly disputed non-legislated IHRA definitions of antisemitism as if they were the be-all and end all of the matter, when they are not.

Worse still of course, is the apparent absence of an appointment of an Islamophobia Envoy (some have said it should have been about Palestinians). And worst of all, these positions stand outside HREOC, draining on resources such as should be there. Some have argued that the positions should not exist at all and be dealt with under the generic category of racism. My view is in fact that there ARE problems at this time, but any such positions should be independent of communities’ interference and be located within HREOC on a needs basis.

But the questions remains: why does such sewerage turn up with the good stuff on Kostakidis’ feed? Is it that her justifiable anger over Palestine has turned off her capacity to sort out the wheat from the chaff?

Naomi Klein, in her analysis of the world view conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf in Doppelganger observed that “diagonalists” uncritically pull together ideas from the far-left and the far-right, “resulting in a more urgent cause than anyone in mainstream politics is willing to recognise”. And as Laura Marsh puts in her review of Klein’s book, such people fail to recognise the precision of good journalism versus hyberbole, or “seeing the difference between rigorous use of sources versus panicky leaps in logic”. For example, this appears to have occurred in Kostakidis’ treatment of sexual violence allegations on October 7, even though more scrupulous evidence has emerged via the UN. Naomi Klein suggests that of Naomi Wolf: “[she] may be a poor researcher, but she is good at the internet”.

That is not the same as being a good journalist. Maybe that is what happened here.

With all this going on there is no doubt that the Kostakidis HREOC case is going to be a fiery one and I suspect, very unpleasant, with severe polarisation. It is going to bring about some real confrontation about whether what she has done constitutes a form of hate speech.

Frankly, I don’t know what the outcome will be, but Kostakidis should cut ties with nutjobs on Twitter. She has shown some real errors of judgement.

Dr Larry Stillman is a member of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. He writes on his own behalf.

Response letter to Larry Stillman

Mary Kostakidis

The left right divide is an old trope. People have a set of values that places them more to one side than the other, but judgement on matters of truth should not be fuelled by ideology or personal politics. I know this is confusing for some people because you won’t take a position that is predictable according to where they place you on the political spectrum.

It is exactly the same for journalists I admire such as Patrick Lawrence, Chris Lynn Hedges and Glenn Greenwald among many, many others. According to Stillman, they would be ‘left wing’ journalists. But they at times support what might be viewed as ‘right wing’ positions – perhaps on the tactics used by the Democrats to remove Trump from the Presidential race – a campaign to undermine democracy in order to deliver a win, similar to the tactics revealed in the DNC email leak around the 2016 election.

Larry Stillman in this article above has a view of how the Twitter space should operate. Some users do use it in the way he believes is the correct way. The vast majority of users do not.

There are many journalists who engage in the X space in a muscular way. Piers Morgan posted a video of Biden with the comment FFS. We at times take the liberty of expressing ourselves differently to the way we would in a considered, measured article published elsewhere, and though Musk has introduced a capacity for longer form posts and we do at times take advantage of that, that is not how the platform is used in general. It is generally a quick communication, it is about sharing new information, perspectives, and includes, yes, hypothesizing.

Why is it acceptable for journalists to sit along a couple of sofas on Insiders and chew the fat? It is done within limited parameters because in the legacy media there is general agreement on who the good guys are and who the evil ones. We are not evil and all countries that are our allies are not evil. There is an enormous reaction on X to the tight strictures of permissible discourse in the mainstream media.

For example, John Mearsheimer who used to be the darling of the US legacy media has been totally banned since he expressed his views about the war in Ukraine, the history of the conflict and the role of the US. Worse now he has expressed his view about what Israel is doing in Gaza.

We don’t hear from a universe of analysts, historians and other experts in the mainstream media if their views fall well outside the sanctioned narrative being promoted. No one is examining the public anger and mistrust as a result.

The enormous appeal of X for many is its role as the village square, or a digital Town Hall, where there is robust argument and a tossing around of ideas, some of which will have no legitimacy and some thought to have no legitimacy will end up in fact being true. I may participate by exposing followers to one view of things, and at another time a different view.

Now if I may deal with one example – the clip of Nasrallah’s threats.

Hearing what the leader of a group involved in a conflict which may trigger a much broader war, is in my view imperative. It is our right. No one should deny us knowledge of what one side in a conflict is saying. And yet this happens all too often.

Why is it that when we share on X the comments of Smotrich or Ben Gavir or Netanyahu and others, relating to killing all the Amalek, expelling all the ‘human animals’ because this land was promised to them by God etc etc, there is no problem? Why are they entitled to say these things, have them reported and shared, and no one is accused of spreading hate speech, neither the person making the comments nor the person sharing them? How do these comments and their sharing make Palestinians feel? No one is concerned about that. Why the double standard?

My comment with the clip was intended to draw attention to the fact that the situation is escalating dangerously due to Israel’s actions – the ‘plausible genocide’ – the endless slaughter of children that most of the world is watching in absolute horror. That you cannot keep doing this without provoking the other side. What did Israel expect? And how different really were Nasrallah’s threats to those of the Israeli leadership? As for the expression From the River to the Sea, it is to be found in the Likud Party’s foundational document.

Enough with the double standards. X won’t have it, and that’s why Musk is being taken to court too.

Mary Kostakidis

16 July 2024

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