Australia's Federal Court clarifies: Anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic
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In a landmark judgment, Justice Angus Stewart of the Federal Court of Australia ruled that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
The ruling comes after a Sydney-based Muslim cleric, Wissam Haddad, was sued by two senior members of Australia's peak Jewish body, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), over a series of lectures he gave at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Bankstown in November 2023. It was subsequently posted online.
The complainants told the court that Haddad used 'overtly dehumanising' language about Jewish people and that he revelled in being 'deliberately provocative and inflammatory'.
The court found that he had maligned Jewish people and instructed Haddad not to make similar addresses again. Consequently, Haddad was also ordered to take down a series of speeches posted online.
However, while Stewart acknowledged that his statements were problematic, he ruled that other criticisms of the state of Israel and its military did not breach the Racial Discrimination Act. He concluded that it is not inherently antisemitic to criticise Israel.
"I do not consider that the ordinary, reasonable listener would understand Mr Haddad in these passages, either in isolation or in the context of the sermon as a whole, to be saying anything about Jews generally or about all Jews. He is quite specific in the sermon. He is critical of Israel, the IDF and Zionists."
"As mentioned, Jews are only mentioned in relation to the Holocaust, and not in a critical or disparaging way. It is only if the ordinary, reasonable listener heard the sermon in the knowledge of what Mr Haddad had said in Speech A that they might conclude that the references to Zionists was a reference to all Jews because of what he says about Zionists in Speech A. But that is not how Speech B is to be understood. The ordinary, reasonable listener would understand that not all Jews are Zionists or support the actions of Israel in Gaza and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group.
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In his ruling, Stewart cited a local case. "Needless to say, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity: see South African Human Rights Commission on behalf of South African Jewish Board of Deputies v Masuku [2022] ZACC 5; 2022 (4) SA 1 (CC) at [41-[6] and [161]-[166] per Khampepe J for the Court. Indeed, the applicants did not submit that it is. The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other.
Haddad's defence contended that the lectures were delivered for educational purposes and argued that they could not be deemed to have breached section 18C, as they were not public but rather addressed to a private audience.
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