Together with many Jews here and around the world, I’m proud to stand with you once again in solidarity with Palestine. On this occasion, I want to talk about the growing hysteria about antisemitism.

I always give a shout out to the Jews Against the Occupation who have been here every week with their banner. Our presence and our solidarity are a clear answer to the accusation that these rallies are antisemitic. Today, Jews are not the victims, we are the perpetrators. For over a year now the horrors of the genocide in Gaza mean that we are all, and especially Jews, facing one of the greatest moral tests of our time.

We have all seen the drone images. Gaza looks like Hiroshima after the atom bomb in 1945. Who in their right mind can believe Israeli propaganda that this is in self-defence, targeting HAMAS militants?

Given the devastation and sheer quantity of bombing on Gaza, Chomsky’s (1971) remarks on the Vietnam War are relevant today. He said:

“With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realise that the war is an overwhelming atrocity”.

We are being subjected to intense propaganda efforts to deny Israel’s crimes, but it’s not working because everyone can see the truth — the obscenity — on our mobile phones. Israel and its flunkies in the Zionist Lobby have had to turn to their traditional methods.

They have been ramping up to unprecedented levels an obsessive, hysterical campaign against antisemitism. This is intended to be a distraction, a diversion from the horrors of Israel’s genocide. We are being inundated in the media with panic about an alleged explosion of antisemitism and concerns about Jewish safety. It’s all bullshit.

And Palestinians are expected to put aside their suffering, their trauma and grief, and to pander to Jewish discomfort about a slogan or poster. The cricket commentator Peter Lalor was sacked because people said they were “triggered” by the sound of his voice. And we are supposed to worry about the feelings of Jews who feel “unsafe” because of seeing a keffiyeh. Well, I say Fuck’em!

The brilliant Randa Abdel-Fattah put it more eloquently: She asks:

“Since when do the victims of genocide have the responsibility to defer to and protect the feelings of those who enact, support, and enable their genocide?”

For her courage and her powerful moral voice, Randa has been targeted by the Zionist Thought Police in a McCarthy-style witch hunt. Her government research grant has been suspended by Education Minister Jason Clare. This is blatant political interference in the independence of universities – something you’d expect in China or the former Soviet Union.

That indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitism.” But it is a desecration of the memory of the victims of real antisemitism when it is weaponised to silence justified criticism of the racist, criminal state of Israel. One Jew online replied appropriately:

“Don’t carry out genocide in the name of the Jewish people and maybe Jewish people will face less blowback? Thanks for endangering us all you genocidal maniac.”

That’s why so many decent Jews here and around the world are saying “not in our name”.

Now, the Australian Jewish News has a headline “Antisemitism ASIO’s top priority” – that is “the number one security concern” in terms of possible threat to lives. But according to Federal Police, the terrifying antisemitism in Australia includes graffiti by people who are paid by foreign actors (SMH January 30, 2025) and who can’t even spell Israel properly. Besides, it’s not antisemitic when graffiti says, “Fuck Israel”. And these clowns can’t spell “Fuck” correctly either.

The entire Australian political class and media are having a meltdown about antisemitism. Sky News held an “Antisemitism Summit” a few days ago and Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-director Alex Ryvchin said: “We face a crisis that has brought open support for terrorism to our streets.” He means us! So Ryvchin proposed a 15-point plan of action. These are totalitarian mechanisms of thought control that would have impressed Stalin or Mao Tse Tung. As one commentator remarked “In short, ECAJ has become drunk on the possibilities of using the state to advance Zionism and suppress its critics.”

For example, Ryvchin proposed that there should be a

• Declaration of a NATIONAL EMERGENCY on antisemitism and a Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force.

And there should be:

• Tougher legislation to overcome restrictions on disciplinary action against academic.

This means weakening traditional protections for academic freedom, undermining the very foundation of universities with punitive action against critical academics like Randa Abdel-Fattah.

Abraham Edwards in Medium

The ECAJ proposals are precisely what American Jewish scholar Peter Beinart (February 14, 2025) has recently described as “The Perils of Universities’ Unscholarly Antisemitism Reports” made by pro-Israel organisations.

However, in a healthy society, Noam Chomsky (1969) suggests, “the social and intellectual role of the university should be subversive”. He says students should learn “intellectual self-defence” – against “the onslaught” of propaganda by government and mass media in their allegiance, “not to truth and justice, but to power and the effective exercise of power”.

Indeed, now Australia’s 39 public universities have adopted a version of the pernicious IHRA definition strenuously promoted by Israel Lobby groups such as ECAJ including its former official Jillian Segal who is the government’s special “Envoy on antisemitism.” But the IHRA definition has even been repudiated by its author Kenneth Stern because he says it is being weaponised to silence criticism of Israel.

Over 1000 Jewish academics in the US have condemned the IHRA definition because it “will delegitimise and silence Jewish Americans — among others — who advocate for Palestinian human rights or otherwise criticise Israeli policies.”

In my article on the IHRA definition in ABC Religion & Ethics, it is significant that the editor judiciously deleted my original sentence in which I mention that “six of the accompanying 11 illustrative examples concern criticism of Israel”.

For example, according to the IHRA definition it is antisemitic to say Israel is a racist endeavour. Well, in 2018 Israel passed a Nation State Law according to which Israel is the state of the Jews alone. Human rights organisations HRW, Amnesty and Israel’s own B’Tselem have recent reports showing that Israel is an ethno-supremacist, apartheid regime. The Israeli NGO Adalah lists over 50 laws that discriminate against the citizens of Israel who are Palestinians.

If those promoting and adopting the IHRA definition really cared about antisemitism as distinct from protecting Israel against criticism, they would endorse the alternative Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) which drafted by hundreds of Jewish experts on the Holocaust and antisemitism.

No-one cares more about antisemitism than I do. My mother and grandmother survived the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz and I grew up hearing their stories. So, l think I know antisemitism when I see it. In fact, there has never been any antisemitism at our rallies, at universities or anywhere in Australia in my lifetime.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer makes the same point about the US. He asks, “Before October 7 did you hear any antisemitism on university campuses?”

https://johnmenadue.com/peter-slezaks-gaza-rally-speech-we-face-one-of-the-greatest-moral-tests-of-our-time/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.