"The Age [is] working on a story"

On Saturday The Age published the first piece of coverage on ‘J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and Academics’ in any major media news outlet. Unlike The Age’s reporting on the ‘Lawyers for Israel’ groupchat that coordinated to get Antoinette Lattouf fired from the ABC, the front-page feature by Age chief reporter Chip Le Grand is riddled with inaccuracies and misleadingly framed to present the groupchat’s members and activities in a sympathetic light.

Le Grand’s piece inaccurately frames the groupchat as a benign place for Jewish creatives to vent about antisemitism. While that may have been the group’s function in part, the transcript was leaked and has attracted such attention because the groupchat became a place where people organised to have people fired and professionally censured for publicly supporting Palestine and a ceasefire in Gaza.

It is also suggested throughout that groupchat members have been criticised because they (or at least most of them) are Jewish. On Sunday this narrative was furthered by Anthony Albanese. In remarks on ABC Radio, Albanese falsely described the transcript’s release as “doxxing” and the groupchat as “just a group to have positive discourse with each other about how they are feeling and a support network”.

Albanese also described the groupchat’s exposure as an example of “the targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish” — a gross misrepresentation of why the transcript was leaked and why people are angry at its contents.

Le Grand’s piece also claimed that groupchat members were the target of doxxing. Le Grand’s article mentions Moshe and his wife receiving an abusive phone call at their business, followed by a texted photo of their four-year-old son, after social media links to their business and Moshe’s band were published online.

The article does not mention Moshe’s activities in the groupchat until its 26th paragraph. For clarity, Moshe offered to “deep dive” into the social media posts of “wildly antizionist” SBS journalist Nadine Chemali, with a view to finding something that could be reported to her employer. He also made offensive comments about Aboriginal people who “weoponise [sic] their indigenous [sic] heritage to make a political point,” comparing them to “anti Zionist Jews who weaponise their Jewish heritage but have little to no connection to the broader Jewish community and ongoing cultural practices of mainstream Judaism”.

I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing the ethics of publishing the transcript or other information. Obviously sending threatening messages to people, as Moshe describes above, is abhorrent behaviour. I also think the debate around this is largely confected and is a distraction from the larger issue — that a groupchat in which people were coordinating to get artists and academics fired for expressing support for Palestine existed in the first place.

I will say that the sympathy outlets like The Age are giving to members of the Zionist groupchat raises the question of why major media outlets do not extend the same attention to Palestinian, Muslim and Middle Eastern people who have been the target of such behaviour for years at a scale that dwarfs this example.

“Across urbane, progressive enclaves of Melbourne and Sydney hundreds of people who work in the media, music, the arts and academia, are today experiencing some of what the Moshe family has been through,” Le Grand wrote in his article.

The fact that this statement is far more true of Palestinians and their supporters in media, music, the arts and academia than Zionists — as evidenced by the groupchat’s existence — is seemingly unworthy of mention. Apparently, exposing a campaign of employment harassment against people who oppose an ongoing genocide is a worse offence than participating in one.

In journalist John Lyons’ recent book Dateline Jerusalem he speaks with Jennine Khalik, a former journalist of Palestinian heritage, who related her experience as a 21-year-old reporter at The Australian. Soon after her hiring, diplomats from the Israeli embassy began meeting with her superiors criticising their hiring of a Palestinian. At one point she was verbally abused by an editor, who screamed at her: “Palestine does not exist”.

Jennine no longer works in journalism. She was drummed out of her profession by the agents of a foreign government with the enthusiastic participation of her employer. But Jennine’s ordeal doesn’t get a front-page story. Who would publish it? The newspaper where it happened?

The Age story and Albanese’s comments also highlight another double standard at work. Palestinian, Muslim and Middle Eastern people — and, increasingly, all people who oppose Zionism, or even Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza — are expected to continuously prove they are not antisemitic. No matter the atrocity they are responding to, coverage like The Age’s falsely suggests that people could only be outraged at Israel’s actions and efforts to defend them out of bigotry.

Zionists are not asked to reassure us that they are not bigoted towards Muslims or people of Middle Eastern heritage, despite often-abundant evidence. They are endlessly given the benefit of the doubt. No media outlet has asked groupchat members to explain why they find women wearing keffiyehs “aggressive,” or why they believe pro-Palestinian marchers would become violent “at the slightest provocation”.

Le Grand’s follow-up piece today, on the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s new push to outlaw doxxing, is a good example of this. Despite quoting ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin extensively, the article makes no mention of Ryvchin’s comments, revealed here last week, encouraging employers to discriminate against people expressing opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.

For myself, I chose not to publish the entire transcript because the lack of contextual information within it can lead to people being misidentified. However, publishing excerpts from the transcript to further expose how people are engaging in such activity is in the public interest.

With that in mind, here are some more excerpts that I think deserve a wider audience.

“There is a journalist at The Age working on an investigative story”

This screenshot caught my eye the first time I went through the transcript last week:

That message from solicitor Alana Kushnir is from November. While the transcript does not mention who the journalist is, it’s worth noting that Alana Kushnir worked with Chip Le Grand on a series of stories from 2021 to 2023.

Kushnir herself resigned from the board of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in October after artists who expressed solidarity with Palestinians complained to the ACCA board about social media posts Kushnir made criticising them.

Julie Szego, Ramona Koval and Osman Faruqi

In November, former Age columnist Julie Szego posted the following in the groupchat about an article by Age culture editor Osman Faruqi (the article in question covered Kushnir’s resignation from ACCA, as if things weren’t knotty enough):

Szego was a columnist at The Age until being fired in June for publicly criticising the newspaper after it refused to publish a column Szego had written about gender-affirming care. Szego’s personal views on transgender people had been under scrutiny since she attended the transphobic ‘Let Women Speak’ rally in March 2023. Szego also publicly resigned from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance in November after the union endorsed another open letter from Australian journalists urging media outlets for more responsible reporting on Israel, Palestine and Gaza.

Two weeks after Szego’s message in the groupchat, former longtime ABC journalist Ramona Koval published an opinion piece in The Australian criticising Faruqi using similar language and talking points. In 2021 Faruqi signed an open letter by Australian journalists and media workers calling on outlets to improve their reportage of Israel and Palestine.

Koval was one of those who posted in the groupchat about exerting pressure on literary magazine Overland to fire editor Jonathan Dunk, and complains about literary magazines “nailing [their] colours to the Hamas mast”.

Koval was also extensively quoted in Le Grand’s Age piece on Saturday. Koval described the groupchat as “a support group, an information sharing group, a group that sought and offered advice for those who were being targeted and suggested perfected legal, normal and well-used ways of legitimately complaining to media groups and other formal organisations about matters they thought were unfair or discriminatory”.

In her November op ed for The Australian, Koval wrote the following:

In that there’s a lesson for The Age, though probably not the one Koval intended to convey.

Yaron Finkelstein

I missed one of the more high-profile members of the groupchat on my first pass: Yaron Finkelstein, the former CEO of lobbying firm Crosby Textor and Principal Private Secretary to Scott Morrison during Morrison’s prime ministership.

Finkelstein’s involvement in the chat is fairly limited, apart from the above and a post outlining his decision to support an Australian Christian Lobby petition in support of Israel.

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