The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph has been caught trying to orchestrate what can only be described as a mass media psyop to inflame public hysteria about antisemitism in Australia.

In a project internally titled “UNDERCOVERJEW” supposedly designed to show “what it’s like being Jewish in Sydney”, a man wearing a Star of David hat and video glasses went around targeting Muslim and Arab businesses trying to instigate hostility from staff members trailed by a video producer and a Telegraph reporter.

The man, who is reportedly associated with the Australian Jewish Association, entered an Egyptian cafe called Cairo Takeaway and postured with his Star of David hatwithout getting any reaction from anyone. He then started making comments to cafe staff, who caught on to what he was doing and started recording him. Police were then called and it caused a big scandal.

It’s obvious that the intention here was to instigate something that could be framed as an “antisemitic incident” and provoke a national outcry and draw all the usual fiery denunciations from Australian officials, followed by arguments citing the incident as evidence that Australia needs even more aggressive speech laws to stomp out all criticism of the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.

And it should here be noted that The Daily Telegraph is owned by News Corp, the Murdoch media conglomerate which dominates the Australian press. Rupert Murdoch became the media giant he is with the help of his ties with the Ronald Reagan administration and US government agencies. Also noteworthy is that Murdoch is a board member and significant shareholder of Genie Energy, which holds a contract to drill for oil and gas in the Golan Heights — territory illegally occupied by Israel.

This is just the latest in a spate of incidents in which a narrative about an urgent epidemic of antisemitism in Australia is being marketed to the public based on false information. Just today we learned from The Sydney Morning Herald that the Dural caravan laden with explosive materials we were told a couple of weeks ago was intended for use in a “mass casualty event” targeting Jewish sites was not only full of unusable 40 year-old explosives with no detonator, but was involved in a scheme by underworld crime gangs to help negotiate reduced sentences with law enforcement.

The entire Australian political-media class lost their minds about this story when it first came out. The words “antisemitic” and “antisemitism” were rife throughout the Australian press. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that “There’s zero tolerance in Australia for hatred and for antisemitism, and I want any perpetrators to be hunted down and locked up.” The federal government’s special envoy on antisemitism, Jillian Segal, called the incident a “chilling reminder that the same hatred that led to the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust still exists today”.

And it had nothing to do with antisemitism. At all.

We saw a similar incident earlier this month when headlines blared about an “antisemitic attack” at Bondi Beach involving eggs being thrown at a group of young women. A couple of days later it came out that the egging was perpetrated by two teenagers getting up to teenage mischief and had nothing to do with anyone hating Jews.

Right now we’re seeing an uproar over two Arab Australian nurses who were baited by an Israeli influencer into saying on the website Chatruletka that they would kill Israelis if they came into their hospital. The comments by the nurses were obviously extremely ill-advised and unethical, but a police investigation has so far found that they’ve never harmed anybody, and if you watch the extended footage of the exchange it’s clear the influencer went out of his way to inform them that he served in the Israeli military and killed Palestinians. One of the nurses has reportedly lost 70 family members to Israeli atrocities in Palestine.

Without defending the irresponsible comments of the nurses, I don’t think anyone would expect a Jewish person who came in contact with a Nazi soldier in the 1940s to maintain their cool and avoid violent speech, much less so if that person had lost family members in the Holocaust, and even less if they believed they were having a conversation in private. These chat roulette sites are not intended as mass public broadcast forums; people participating in them tend to interact on the assumption that they are having a private conversation, so the exchange should be viewed as angry words being hurled at a perceived abuser, not as a public declaration of intent to harm others. I don’t condone a healthcare provider saying she’d kill Israeli nationals in her hospital, even if she has lost scores of family members in the Gaza holocaust. But I also wouldn’t confuse what I was seeing with evidence of an antisemitism crisis in Australia.

 

There is a concerted effort to manufacture the illusion of an antisemitism crisis in Australia in order to protect Israeli information interests — and the call isn’t coming entirely from inside the house. Albanese has acknowledged that the perpetrators of a spate of allegedly antisemitic attacks in this country may have been paid actors working for foreign operatives. The prime minister refused to speculate as to which country might be sponsoring these incidents which just so happen to greatly benefit the interests of Israel, but you don’t exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes to narrow it down.

And some of these so-called “antisemitic” incidents are so obviously staged it hurts. When you see graffiti on a synagogue with “Free Palestine” written next to swastikas, it calls to mind the Mississippi man who notoriously claimed in 2015 that his driveway had been vandalized by black activists with graffiti that said “BLACKS RULE”.

Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. And we are never meant to consider the possibility that this incident was staged by Israel’s supporters or by paid actors working for foreign Zionists.

It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history.

 

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. There is an anti-Palestinian crisis in Australia. An anti-Arab crisis in Australia. A pro-genocide crisis in Australia. The fact that our politicians and media have been shrieking their lungs out 24/7/365 about a made-up epidemic of abuse against Jews while standing with Israel and its American sponsors as they demolish Gaza and prepare to ethnically cleanse a Palestinian territory shows that there is indeed something deeply and profoundly sick about our society — but that sickness has nothing to do with antisemitism.

There are of course people with hateful attitudes and superstitions toward Jews to be found in any country, but they are a small fringe group whose beliefs have far less meaningful impact on people’s lives than prejudices against Palestinians, immigrants, or Indigenous Australians. The average Australian spends very little time thinking about Jews and Jewishness one way or the other, and we’d spend far less if we weren’t constantly being bombarded with false messaging about how our country is full of dangerous Jew haters.

Antisemitism exists in the same way discrimination against divorced mothers exists; it used to be a major issue that did great harm, but in terms of how much it actually affects people’s lives in modern secular times it’s mostly just an obsolete relic of the past. As a divorced mother I might run into the occasional weirdo on the internet calling me a harlot if I mention my personal history, but life is infinitely easier for people like me than it was a century ago. Antisemitism is the same.

Generally when you hear people talking about incidents of antisemitism it falls into three separate categories which are too often conflated:

1. People conflating support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. This is the most common category by an extremely massive margin.

2. People conflating October 7 with a Holocaust-like event in which Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish. In reality October 7 was an act of desperation by the oppressed inhabitants of a giant concentration camp, and they would have killed their oppressors regardless of their religion.

3. Real hatred of Jewish people and real attacks on Jews because they are Jewish. This, while relatively uncommon, is being made more common by Israel’s practice of committing genocide under a Star of David flag while claiming to represent all Jews.

Israel apologists always go out of their way to conflate these three categories. The Anti-Defamation League officially made this conflation a standard practice in 2023 by categorizing incidents of pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic incidents. The Anti-Defamation League recently drew controversy by saying that Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute was not antisemitic, while we’re on the subject.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. As The Daily Telegraph and their agent provocateur found out, antisemitism is one crisis we don’t have. They tried to provoke an antisemitic reaction, and they failed. No one cared.

The real crisis in Australia is that we are the kind of country that would sit and watch a live-streamed genocide without moving heaven and earth to stop it. We have a morality crisis. An apathy crisis. A crisis of our hearts, minds and souls. But what we do not have in this country, in any meaningful way, is an antisemitism crisis.

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