The Times published a deep dive into antisemitism in Australia leading up to the Bondi Beach massacre, and did a decent job detailing many of the anti-Jewish incidents in the year before two ISIS-inspired extremists gunned down fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration in December.
However, the piece ultimately did a profound disservice to readers and the Jewish community, by whitewashing the role played by antizionist extremists in fueling Jew hatred in the Commonwealth.
The article (“Before Bondi: inside Australia’s year of antisemitic terror”, Feb. 14), by Katie Tarrant, describes some of the firebombing attacks and arsons targeting Jewish homes and institutions, while quoting several prominent Australian Jews discussing their fears leading up to the Bondi attack in light of the almost fivefold increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes since Oct. 7, 2023.
It also included interviews with some of the bereaved relatives of those murdered at Bondi.
However, about halfway through the 3,800 word article, the Times account of the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism began to display clear patterns of bias, and seemed to go out of its way to avoid acknowledging the connection between hateful anti-Israel protests and the surge in anti-Jewish racism.
First consider the wording in this paragraph;
On October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, about a thousand people gathered outside Sydney Opera House at a protest calling on the Australian government to end support of Israel, one of thousands that have been held around the world decrying the slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children. The opera house had been lit up in the blue and white of the Israeli flag after October 7, signalling a space for Jews to mourn. At this protest chants of “Where’s the Jews?” were heard.
In a manner normalising the anti-Israel protests – including the one in Sydney held just two days after the Oct. 7 massacre, while rescuers were still searching for the remains of (Trigger Warning) Jewish corpses in southern Israel – the Times journalist, in her own voice, described Palestinian deaths in Gaza as the result of Israel’s military response to Oct. 7 as a “slaughter” of “men, women an children”.
By contrast, Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre was described merely as an “attack”, and, in a previous paragraph, the Jewish victims of Hamas’s mass murder were described by the journalist as merely having been “killed”.
Further, Tarrant omits that, in addition to chants of “Where’s the Jews?” at the Oct. 9th, 2023 Opera House protest, chants of “F*ck the Jews” and “we’re going to kill them all” rang out. Israeli flags were burned, and speeches by Islamist extremists included clear expressions of support for Hamas’ massacre, which speakers framed as the “right to resist”, and as a justified form of “anti-colonialism”.
Further into the article, the agenda of the journalist is made clear when we read the following, again, in the reporter’s own voice.
After Bondi, the conflation between the Sydney Opera House protest and the mass murder on the beach was made within hours by Australia’s own antisemitism commissioner, who said: “It began on 9 October 2023 at the Sydney Opera House… Now death has reached Bondi beach.”
Not only does Tarrant present the putative “conflation” between Bondi and the hate protest at the Opera House as if it was a fact, rather than her opinion, but editorialises on this point without seeking the opinions of those in the Jewish community.
The Times reporter could have included, for instance, the comments of former Australian Jewish association president David Adler, who made a direct link between the Opera House hate fest and the Bondi Beach massacre in an interview on Sky News Australia.
Additionally, Alex Ryvchin, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, made a direct link between ISIS-inspired Bondi massacre by Islamist extremist supporters at the Opera House in an interview on with a US television personality last month. Arsen Ostrovsky, a survivor of the Bondi massacre, wrote, in an editorial at the Wall Street Journal, that the “Bondi attack is the deadly manifestation of the failures to heed the antisemitic chants at the Oct. 9 Sydney Opera House protest”.
Instead of seeking the views of Australian Jews on the connection between Bondi and the Opera House protest, the Times turned instead to Nasser Mashni, an Australian of Palestinian heritage and leader of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network:
Nasser Mashni, a leading pro-Palestinian activist, describes this conflation as “gross anti-Palestinian racism”. Mashni wasn’t present on October 9 but his organisation, Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, has led many other pro-Palestinian protests.
“Fifteen Australians were killed, murdered, massacred in an antisemitic attack, an abomination that we condemn a million per cent,” he says. “But those two blokes were Isis scumbags. Isis has killed more Palestinians and more Muslims than they have Jews or Australians. We’re the biggest victims of that evil mindset. Palestinians weren’t the victims, Palestinians weren’t the perpetrators, yet Palestinians have been blamed.”
However, the Times reporter shamefully omits the fact that Mashni has engaged in terror support and explicit antisemitic rhetoric.
The day after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, Mashni released a statement saying that Gazans had “broken through the walls” and that the assault was a “clear result” of Israel’s escalating violence towards Palestinians.
A month after the massacre, he said, during a radio interview, that “The power structures that exist in the world all focus upon Zionism“, and “Israel is the domino. Israel falls over, not just the Middle East – South America, the Africans, the world is a far better place once we destroy Western imperialist control of the world.”
He added that “The liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that’s the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.”
Also, according to the Herald Sun, Mashni ‘liked’ X posts supporting the Oct. 7 massacre, and praised, as “heroes”, terrorists who murdered Israeli civilians and planned suicide bombings.
Also, in March 2023, during the podcast of Susan Abulhawa, whose X account reads like a social media version combination of the Elders of the Protocols of Zion and Mein Kampf, Mashni admitted to hating Jews, but only because of Jews’ behavior, saying, “Do you think that we hate Jews just because they’re Jews? I wouldn’t care if they were Buddhist, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims. If you take my house, I’m going to hate you. How you celebrate God is removed from the fact that you denied me my home, killed my father, raped my mother, stole my orchards and business.”
So, the Times journalist inadvertently proved what she was trying to disprove: that the ‘mainstream’ pro-Palestinian movement – in Australia and elsewhere – promotes racist ideas indistinguishable from the toxic antisemitism which inspires anti-Jewish violence.
Indeed, the Executive Council on Australian Jewry’s (ECAJ) 2025 report on antisemitic incidents – published on Dec. 2, before the Bondi massacre – stated the following, in the context of the report’s documentation of the role the pro-Palestinian movement played in the record number of antisemitic incidents over the past two years:
The anti-Israel movement continued with its regular weekly protests, post 7 October 2023, through the CBDs of Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere, disrupting normal life and business ECAJ Report on Anti-Jewish Incidents in Australia 2025 3 for many Australians.
For the Jewish community, the protests exhibited anti-Jewish racism predominantly in the forms of chants and placards, notably either calling for the end to Jewish national self-determination in Israel or making false analogies between Nazism and Zionism.
…
When Jewish organisations raise the issue of anti-Jewish racism, or produce reports or hold events, their concerns are belittled and mocked, and even twisted to claim that it is all fabricated, that antisemitism doesn’t exist (except perhaps on the extreme right), and that it is all part of the ‘Zionist’ arsenal to defend Israel. The trail of burnt and damaged synagogues, schools and other Jewish institutions and the damaged lives that have followed in their wake stand as a mute indictment of those who deny or seek to minimise the magnitude of the cancer of antisemitism in our midst.
You can add to the cancerous antisemitic trail, the cold-blooded murder of men, women and children by antizionist, Islamist extremists at a Hannukah celebration ten days after this warning in the ECAJ report was published.
Related Posts
Guardian shields Hamas from evidence it desecrated allied cemetery
