Since the Bondi terrorist attack the Online Hate Prevention Institute has been received strong responses from some opposing our efforts to improve online safety. Under our No Platform Policy we ban those promoting hate or attacking us on our page. The policy explains why. We also, however, capture their comments. Here’s some of what we have removed.

A person from Jundah in Queensland, an outback town with a population of 131 as of the 2021 census, posted:

A similar idea was expressed by another Australian user.

The meaning is not entirely clear, another user tried to push them to clarify (they this to both users) but those speaking about “pay back” declined to do so. It looks like it might be advocating violence against the Muslim community in response to Bondi, but expressed vaguely enough that they hope the can escape any consequences.

Another write more explicitly “The problem is Islam!” this is clearer but they avoided the suggestion of “payback”. This user is from Leura, New South Wales, a village in the Blue Mountains with a population of 4,503 according to the 2021 census.

Another user tries to deflect from the National Day of Mourning for those killed in the Bondi terrorist attack on the Jewish community, and the article about the antisemitism in response to the attack, by seeking to divert attention back to the Middle East. The claim that three journalists were killed is supported by media reports, which also say Israel responded that it was responding to a drone deemed to pose a risk to troops, and that it is investigating the incident. All of this is besides the point, which is that such discussion belongs in its own post, not as a deflection on a post about those killed in Australia.

All of these users had locked profiles. Another profile that was not only locked but fake (it has just 36 friends) wrote “Australian needs to ban Jewish and Islamic immigration”.

Another user, a Melbourne University graduate, calls Jews “the world’s most overrepresented minority” and “genocidal war criminals”. Even as he engages in this rather extreme antisemitism, he complains that “antisemitism is fundamental to the Zionist identity”. His argument seems to be that it is only because of antisemitism that Jews get away with it.

A user from Newcastle, New South Wales, discusses the article from the Australian Jewish News and the Online Hate Prevention Institute’s evidence based report with the words “Zionist funded organisation”. Like many of Australia’s cultural institutions, universities, and hospitals, we are a charity whose work is funded by public donations, and like them members of the Jewish community are general in funding our work, whether it is on antisemitism, Islamophobia, Racism against First Nations Australians, Misogyny, or any of the other topics we cover. Most of our Jewish donors will be Zionists, as is true for the universities, hospitals, cultural institutions, etc. There is nothing at all wrong with this.

This next post from a completely locked down profile is a classic example of the “Racist anti-Zionism” the report discusses. It refers to “filthy Zionists” (a variant on the more classic antisemitic “filthy Jew”). It also refers to “Nazi fucks” and later “putrid Nazi fucks”, and the hashtag “#FuckZionistNaziPigs”. In our description of racist anti-Zionism we describe how the far left make it ok to attack Jews by calling the Jews Zionists, and saying Zionists are like Nazis, to justify attacking then like they attack Nazis. This narrative actually has its roots in the antisemitism of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The post shows the person stating that “everyone” is going to misuse the reporting feature of Facebook to falsely report the promoted post as “Promoting Hate, or Inciting Terrorism”. This shows the abuse of technology to try silence those they decide to attack, and specifically to silence those tackling racism.

Another example of this racist anti-Zionism is shown below. Remember this is on an article about the antisemitism following the killing of 15 Jews in a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney. This person’s response is to justify the antisemitism, they start by saying “They should tell their thieving genocidal Zionist government” , immediately treat Australian Jews at a Jewish religious celebration as foreigners whose government is the Israeli government, not the Australian government. They define Israel’s government as by definition “thieving and genocidal”, this is the rhetoric of demonization from the far-left, and again spilling from Israel to Australian Jews. They are challenged by another user and comes back with more talking points which far from accurate, including the idea that most Israeli Jews comes from Europe and have no connection to Israel. Over half of the Jewish Israeli population comes from elsewhere in the Middle East, not the US or Europe. Around 80% of Israeli Jews today were born in Israel. The ancestors of all Jews originally come from Israel as this is where the Jewish people is originally from. All of this, however, is a distraction from the concerns in the article over antisemitism in Australia, which this person seeks to distract from, with more antisemitism!

This next example makes use of classic antisemitism mispresenting the Talmud (a topic we discuss here and here) and also refers to 271,000 which relates to Holocaust denial as AAP Fact Check explains.

Another post from a NSW user claim “it’s not anti-Semitic either because the Jews occupying Palestine aren’t Semites at all, in fact they’re Ashkenazi Jews which have no claim at all to the lands”. This is repeating what has been spread by Palestinian advocates in a deliberate campaign of disinformation, designed both to deny Jewish people their identity and history, and to contort their way into arguing their racism is ok.

There are many problems with this including:

1. Over half the Jews in Israel are Mizrahi Jews who came (or rather their parents or grandparents came) to Israel when they were kicked out of Arab lands after Israel was formed in 1948.
2. Ashkenazi Jews like Mizrahi Jews have their origins in Israel. The Jews were taken as slaves to Babylon (where modern Iran is) in 597 BCE, they were later allowed to return and many did while others stayed in Babylon. Ancient Rome came to rule the region and there were a number of smaller expulsions of parts of the Jewish population, then the major expulsion in 132-135 CE when the Jews were taken as slaves and spread right across the Roman Empire. It is from those Jews sent as slaves to Europe that the Ashkenazi Jews emerged, as well as Sephardic Jews which are those that settled in Spain and Portugal.
3. There is no such thing as a “Semitic people”. Semitic is a scientific term in linguistics and covers a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, etc. The word antisemitism was only created in 1879. It borrowed from the linguistic term to sound more scientific as Jew hate in Germany moved from being about religion to being about race due to the rise of “racial science” (now dismissed as pseudo-science). It was intentionally coined to mean “anti-Jewish” and it has only every been used in this way. It is better spelled as one word with no hyphen.

This is before we get to the racist anti-Zionism saying “so if you’re a Zionist supporting scumbag, get out of Australia for we don’t need your type here”. Not only is this racist, but the person saying this probably has no idea of the contribution of Australian Zionists to Australia. To name just one, the First President of the Zionist Federation of Australia, General Sir John Monash, Australia’s greatest military leader.

Another comment, this one from Perth, says “Fuck off communist dogs”. It’s clearly against our work highlighting antisemitism online. It associates anti-racism work with communism.

The next one says, from a user in Melbourne, says that by tackling antisemitism we are “representing foreign interests above those from Australia”, this is an example of the antisemitism that claims Jews are foreign outsiders who can’t be trusted as citizens because of “dual loyalty” to Israel or the Jewish people. This most famously occurred in the Dreyfus Affair in France 120 years ago.

The other aspect of this is that it attacks the Online Hate Prevention Institute, which is not a Jewish organisation, for “favouring a certain group of people and not all religions and backgrounds”. The current report on Bondi is because 15 people were murdered in a terrorist attack targeted at the Jewish community. It was not targeted at Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, or any other group. It was not targeted at our First Nations Australians, nor at Asian Australians, nor at Indian Australians. The demand that we don’t address antisemitism, when it is antisemitism that is occurring, is frankly racist and antisemitic.

Beyond this, we very much DO cover other forms of racism, religious vilification and bigotry. You can see some of our work on other topics on via the hate archive on our website.

Another user refers to Neturei Karta saying they “show up Zionism for its evil and that it must be ended as an ideology”. Neturei Karta are the Ultra-Orthodox Jews you see all over social media attacking Zionism and Israel. As the late Jeremy Jones, winner of Australian Human Rights Medal, put it, they are “a numerically and theologically insignificant sect of quasi-religious Jews… [that] enjoys a far higher profile amongst antisemites than Jews.” World wide there are only about 5,000 members of Neturei Karta, meaning they represent less than 0.03% of the Jewish population. Learn more.