Antinuclear

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 2)

By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974

Part 2

The Commission’s Terms of Reference

‘AND the determination of the Australian Government to respond to the attack, and the factors leading up to the attack, as a matter of urgency by addressing antisemitism within the Australian community, including since 7 October 2023.’

Investigating the factors leading up to the attack could and should have been the responsibility of the mooted and more suited Richardson review. A royal commission is not the most appropriate vehicle towards this end.

Any investigation regarding “antisemitism” in Australia has to put Israel front and centre. The “official” Jewish community, AKA the Zionist lobby, naturally wants to exclude it.

The appalling Segal Report contains no substantive reference to Israel (my dissection here and here), thus being not merely worthless but disingenuous (vide Gwenaël Velge’s summary of the counter-Segal Greenslade and Briskman report, Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out) and dangerous. Ditto the absence of any substantive reference to Israel in the most recent annual report (December 2025) of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (sic) (dissected here).

‘AND that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.’

This submitter is frankly gobsmacked to find that this fraudulent “definition” has been officially adopted. The definition has been widely criticised, including by one of its originators, Kenneth Stern. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition is essentially about demonising criticism of Israel. Any proposed definition of antisemitism that attempts to delineate the terms on which one is allowed to criticise Israel without censure is automatically illegitimate.

The adoption of the IHRA definition nullifies any legitimacy that the paraphernalia of a royal commission might have and destroys any prospect of an honest analysis and a substantive functional prognosis. This adoption of the IHRA definition gives the impression that the Royal Commission, even inadvertently, will serve as yet another front for the pro-Israel lobby.

With the Royal Commission proceeding based on the IHRA definition, it can only turn into an inquisition. It can have nothing intelligent or ethical to offer about real antisemitism and can have nothing to offer in terms of genuinely dealing with it. It will be remembered as a squandering of the significant money that funds it and for the farcical theatre that is its essence.

‘AND recognising that strengthening the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law (social cohesion) provides the strongest defence against antisemitism and other forms of religious and ideologically motivated extremism.’

This sentence reads like it was written by AI. Who wrote this rubbish? One cannot have social cohesion as long as a particular Australian community coheres and operates actively as a fifth column in support of a foreign rogue state and influences Australian politics, both foreign and domestic, and media towards that end.

AND that hearing from the Jewish Australian community will be important to informing the recommendations of your inquiry and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions, and other sections of Australian society.’

Which ‘Jewish Australian community’? Is this obscurantism a product of naivete or of cynical contempt? Is the pro-Israel lobby running this show? Will anti-Zionist Jews and their organisations be consulted? Will anti-Zionist non-Jewish organisations (which have Jewish membership), such as the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, be consulted?

‘…and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions…’ Meaning? Which and whose concerns? Is this an oblique reference to forthcoming censorship, sackings, institutional defunding and hasbara implants as foreshadowed in the Segal Report?

To the Honourable Virginia Bell AC

We do… appoint you to be a Commission of inquiry, and require and authorise you to inquire into the following matters:

(a) tackling antisemitism by:…

This section is at the heart of the Commission’s Terms of Reference misdirection. Misdiagnosed symptoms are highlighted rather than causes.

The authorities need to cut the umbilical cord between the Australian Jewish community (including demolishing the pernicious influence of its Zionist leadership) and the criminal state of Israel.

In particular, (a)(iv) deserves comment. The ‘mental health and wellbeing of Jewish Australians’? No doubt the Commission hearings will consider the mental health of anti-Zionist Australian Jews who experience the mental anguish of seeing Jewish Israelis acting like Nazis (and supposedly in the name of global Jewry), but who also suffer the obloquy of abuse by the Australian Zionist Jewish establishment for their ethical stance.

As for the mental health of Australian Zionist Jews, tied inexplicably to a racially supremacist Israel, it is a psychopathology and to their own account — save that their aberrant mental state has the Palestinians (and now the Iranians and, once again, the Lebanese) as its ongoing victims.

Zionist Jewish University students, fresh from their “faith” schools with their “love of Israel” and now nurtured in the bosom of the Zionist Australasian Union of Jewish Students, find their “sensitivities” affected by campus protests against Israeli genocide. So as not to upset these sensitive souls, inured to the genocide of lesser ethnicities, campus protests have to be shut down.

If the Commission is concerned with shoring up the ‘mental health and wellbeing of [Zionist] Jewish Australians’, it is not an agenda that any Australian imbued with ethical sympathies (which includes anti-Zionist Jewish Australians) could have any tolerance for.

‘(b) making any recommendations to assist law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies…’

Is this code for inhibiting access to refugee status of people escaping Israeli onslaughts and who naturally take a dim view of Israel’s modus operandi?

‘(c) examine the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack…’

This was supposed to be the focus of the Richardson review, but that was merged inappropriately into the Royal Commission’s framework. Now Richardson has retired, recognising the Commission’s structured dysfunctionality. The most important subject for investigation is now without a suitable home and personnel to proceed.

‘(d) make any other recommendations… that would contribute to strengthening social cohesion…’

The means to strengthening social cohesion is to dismantle the pro-Israel lobby in Australia and for the Albanese Government to develop and sustain a principled foreign policy. By contrast, the Terms of Reference of this Commission appear to direct the Commission’s operations to enhance that lobby’s influence and to ignore and to implicitly condone the Government’s cowardice.

Methinks that the Royal Commission’s slip is showing. One gets the strong impression that one is in for more than farce. Rather, the Australian public is in for an authoritarian state run in the interests of an Australian Zionist mafia, with which the current Australian Labor Government is already in cahoots (and the Liberal Opposition even more craven).

May 1, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics