'Anti-Jewish racism ... [is] not generally coming from the neo-Nazis'

Note: this article contains examples of racist and antisemitic language and violence.

Last week Joel Schneider at Red Flag published a great rundown of how the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s annual ‘Report on Antisemitism in Australia’ conflates opposition to Zionism and pro-Palestinian advocacy with antisemitism, and how it’s also appallingly lazy and badly written.

I’m annoyed with myself that Joel got to the report before I did, because it’s been on my radar for a while. It receives enormous amounts of media attention every year and is regularly cited as the authoritative source on levels of antisemitism in the community, even as it counts expressions of opposition to Israeli apartheid alongside Nazi graffiti scrawled outside Jewish schools.

The most recent report only covered the year ending September 30, 2023; ECAJ has flagged that its next report will have a particular focus on expressions of anti-Zionism in the year-plus since October 7, which means that comethe next one there’ll be an avalanche of “huge rise in antisemitism” articles based off ECAJ including every “Boycott Israel” sign at a Palestine protest.

It’s worth it, then, to dig a bit deeper into the ECAJ report to illustrate how atrociously bad it is, and how wild it is that the media widely accepts it as the gold standard of research into Australian antisemitism.

ECAJ’s annual report adopts the controversial IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, which notoriously includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” as an example of antisemitism.

But the views of the report’s longtime author, ECAJ research director Julie Nathan, are also worth examining. In 2018, Nathan was elected chair of the International Council of Jewish Women’s Antisemitism and Racism Committee. Her writing has also been regularly published in The Times of Israel, Australian Jewish News and J-Wire.

In August, Nathan wrote in Australian Jewish News that “anti-Jewish racism and incidents are not generally coming from the neo-Nazis and other far right groups, although these sources remain a serious threat to Jews,” as “they lack any widespread support and lack any political or institutional power to promote their ideology and agenda”.

According to Nathan, the real source of most anti-Jewish racism is “activists within mainstream institutions, such as universities, the arts and entertainment industry, so-called ‘influencers’, and the like, and even elements with parliaments” pushing a “hard-left” agenda.

Nathan singles out teachers, “health professionals including doctors and nurses,” people on public transport and employees in workplaces “publicly voicing, either directly or indirectly, their support for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and/or demonising Jews who defend Israel’s existence” as examples of this supposed hatred, and warns that “the mad hatred and lust for violence against Jews is likely to escalate. It will also engulf others, as it always does, especially those who do not fit into or will not submit to the totalitarian agenda of Islamo-fascists and left-wing fascists.”

“This is how the mass slaughter of civilians often begins.”

On Twitter, Nathan has retweeted a video of far-right commentator Douglas Murray calling Palestinians “a people of death” and Muslims “a cult of death”. Nathan has also approvingly cited Murray’s claim that Muslims in Western countries only protest Israeli atrocities against Palestinians because “the only thing they care about is their hatred of the Jews,” calling him “insightful”.

I have not been able to find any response Nathan has made regarding Murray’s work spreading the antisemitic ‘Great Replacement’ or ‘cultural Marxism’ conspiracy theories, or his imagined remorse on behalf of the Waffen-SS commandos who oversaw the gas chambers.

The most recent ECAJ report itself seemingly refutes Nathan’s belief that the “hard left” poses a greater threat to Jewish people in Australia than neo-Nazis do. While the report does not individually list every recorded incident, the vast majority of those included recount people making Nazi salutes or shouting Nazi slogans, expressing a desire for another Holocaust, repeating antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people running the world and/or the government, or threatening to kill Jewish people.

In Nathan’s catalogue of incidences of violence, harassment and intimidation of Jewish people, there are 17 instances where the assailant mentioned Palestine or Palestinians in some form. In five of those incidents, the assailant also used antisemitic language — one person shouted “Heil Hitler,” for instance, while another yelled “How many Palestinian children did you murder today?” at a Jewish university chaplain, followed by: “You, Jew dog [sic] are going to die.”

Incidents where the assailant mentioned Israel in some form include a carful of people assaulting three Jewish pedestrians after asking if they supported Israel, a male student at the University of Sydney repeatedly spitting at students running an Australian Union of Jewish Students stall while expressing “strong anti-Israel views,” and emails to Jewish organisations where people criticised Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza while denying the Holocaust.

The rest of the provided incidents — dozens of them, if not hundreds — are variations of this:

The same is true in the report’s catalogue of antisemitic graffiti. Messages reading '“BDS” and “Free Palestine” are listed alongside those reading “Kill Jews,” “White Power” and “Heil Hitler”.

Later in the report, Nathan lists the activities of known neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and agitators like Blair Cottrell, Shermon Burgess, Thomas Sewell and the National Socialist Movement, as well as detailing the enormous rise in antisemitic activity on Twitter following its takeover by Elon Musk.

That material, replete with the most deranged and hideous antisemitism imaginable, is followed by examples of supposed antisemitism in the “anti-Israel movement”, like this photo posted on the Palestine Action Group’s Facebook page:

One of journalism’s many dirty little secrets is that almost no one actually reads reports in general. Academic bodies and interest groups and think tanks publish reports and studies all the time, often hundreds of pages long, knowing that most journalists are too time-poor or incurious to even skim through them. These range from exhaustively researched and peer-reviewed studies to the pap written by professional timewasters like the Big Four consultancies.

For a lot of journalists, all that matters is that the report exists and is plausibly believable to a casual observer so that they can copy-paste the highlights in the media release and slap a headline on it. So long as the report and the accompanying press release look halfway professional it doesn’t matter what’s in them.

It’s a very, very low bar to clear, but the ECAJ report — even if you put its constant conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism aside — is a terribly, bafflingly amateur document.

I’m actually kind of shocked at how janky the thing is. It doesn’t even aspire to the superficial level of professionalism the rinky-dink “studies” places like the Institute of Public Affairs churn out. ECAJ is an influential and well-funded lobby group, but somehow they’re happy putting out a flagship publication that looks and often reads like a crank’s manifesto of the kind that regularly gets mass-emailed to news desks and MPs’ offices.

Forget that the entire thing seems to have been prepared in Microsoft Word, or that ECAJ — which was awarded $25 million by the government in March — doesn’t appear to have a graphic designer. Or even the fact that the report has no list of citations, unless you count the links dotted throughout, and no explanation of which supporting texts have been cited and why.

There’s a deeper weirdness in this thing. What, for example, is this doing in there? This random AI-generated political cartoon where everyone’s face is melting? Why is one of the students Jim Carrey in The Mask? What is going on?

If Nathan has any academic qualifications, they are listed nowhere in the report or on ECAJ’s website. That might be why the report contains sweeping and wildly untrue pronouncements like this, on page eight:

This is a bizarre and easily disprovable thing to say! Mosques and Islamic schools in Australia typically have security requirements at least as onerous as Jewish religious and community establishments, as anyone who has seen one in the last 20 years — let alone used one — could tell you.

The ECAJ report is riddled with stuff like this. It cites ‘Elder of Ziyon’, a Zionist blog run by an anonymous author, when outlining its methodology defining antisemitism. It repeats as fact claims that have been widely debunked, like the claim that pro-Palestine protesters chanted “gas the Jews” at the Sydney Opera House last year. The first page of the report carries the proviso that “we do not make any representation that people or organisations named in this Report are or are not antisemitic,” which feels less like a legally valid disclaimer and more like one of those “I hereby do not give Facebook permission to use my data” posts Boomers went crazy for a few years ago.

For some reason, at one point it includes a map of Australia — minus the ACT — that’s been sourced from Mappr.co, a website that incorrectly spells the word ‘Countries’ in its URL.

This is all especially weird because there is a lot of really good and rigorous research on antisemitism! It is a very large and well-respected academic discipline! If your organisation wants to publish an authoritative report into contemporary antisemitism there are a lot of very well-qualified people who can help you make it good! Even if you want to put out something that conflates antisemitism and anti-Zionism, there are plenty of places you can commission to do that!

Compare all this to the Islamophobia in Australia report released by the Islamophobia Register of Australia in 2021 — and again, forget the graphic design element for a second. The IRA report was written by Derya Iner, an Associate Professor and research coordinator at Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Islamic Studies; statistician Dr Ron Mason; and research assistant Chloe Smith — all people with some form of relevant qualification in their field. There’s a comprehensive list of references that includes other studies, journal articles and news reports. It raises hypotheses based on the data and includes some base-level information about each reported incident, like the gender of the assailant/s and victim/s and the police response (if any).

If the Islamophobia Register published something half as shoddy as the ECAJ report, their reputation would be shot. The fact that ECAJ can put out something of such poor quality, that is so widely and uncritically cited, is indictive of the free ride the organisation gets in the media

The report reminds me of two things. The first is Jokes and Joys, the insane “joke” “book” Gina Rinehart published in 2021 that was just a collection of deep-fried conservative memes she clearly ripped from Facebook.

The second is the shockingly ignorant claim, made by ECAJ immediate past president Jillian Segal in July when she was appointed as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, that Australia “has no history of antisemitic laws or institutional persecution of Jewish Australians”.

Based on statements like that, and reports like these, what is the basis for ECAJ’s status as the go-to authority on antisemitism in Australia?

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

Become a paid subscriber

If you’d like to further support this newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I don’t paywall anything, but paid subscriptions help pay the bills and let me keep doing this work.

What I’m looking at

• The Israel Genocide Tracker

• CNN’s insane puff-piece interview with an IDF soldier who ran over Palestinians with a bulldozer

• Inside the Lebanese hospital that Israel claims is a Hezbollah base