The Australian discovers an antisemitic trope it’s happy to amplify
News Corp piled on a Jewish lawyer for calling out Peter Dutton’s exploitation of Jews. Now it’s happy to circulate attacks on her using offensive slurs.
It can be difficult following what’s acceptable discourse and what’s not at The Australian, where free speech is a fundamental right to be defended tooth and claw if it’s used by you and your mates to punch down at people, but an outrage if anyone dares to use it to challenge power.
Take, for example, the recent pile-on by News Corp, led by The Australian, on Human Rights Law Centre legal director and Jewish Council of Australia executive officer Sarah Schwartz. Her crime was to point out the incontrovertible truth that Peter Dutton had exploited Australian Jews to push his own political interests in attacking Labor, demonising non-white migrants and demanding support for the slaughter of Palestinians by Israel.
Rather than engage with Schwartz’s point, made during a comedy debate on bad racism takes at a Queensland University of Technology symposium on racism, that this was just one more iteration in the long history of powerful people instrumentalising Jews, The Australian decided she was guilty of using antisemitic tropes. Marcia Langton charged her with peddling the “absolute epitome of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”. Pro-Israel advocates told The Australian it was a “spit [sic] in the eye to Jewish people across Australia”. The articles attacking Schwartz piled up in the normal News Corp holy war fashion, linking her to the teary departure of one conference attendee and the CVs of other conference presenters unconnected to her.
On the basis of all that rage directed at one person for a misinterpreted conference slide, you’d think News Corp would take great care to itself avoid amplifying antisemitic tropes or conspiracy theories.
Enter lawyer and social media figure Zara Cooper, who posts on social media under the handle “clammy_fraud” (a smear of favoured target Clementine Ford) and devotes considerable effort to criticising people who speak out against the Palestinian genocide, including accusing non-Jewish women who speak out of “white supremacy”.
Cooper has posted more than 600 times about Schwartz or the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), often in highly critical terms, and usually focused by name on Schwartz, and rarely on her co-executive officer at the JCA, Max Kaiser. One post in April last year referred to Schwartz and pictured a rat. Two posts picture her on a train (a far-right group had previously warned Schwartz “you will be on the same train as all the other Jews”.) In one post, Cooper invited readers to rebrand the Jewish Council of Australia, with several commenters (not Cooper herself) referring to “kapos” — Jews who collaborated with the Nazis — or Goebbels. Cooper also “hearted” a post saying “Kappo SS will spend the rest of her life lonely and sad…”
While doing this, Cooper has also been CEO of “Digital Defence“, which claims to be “aimed at combatting harmful online behaviour through advocacy, education and support” (Crikey has attempted to contact Cooper for comment, but received no response).
Three weeks ago, after Schwartz contacted Victoria Police about being the target of online hatred from a variety of groups, including neo-Nazis, Victoria Police of its own initiative sought a personal safety intervention order on her behalf against Cooper.
That sparked another series of articles by The Australian, which two weeks ago ran three articles and a podcast about what it — echoing almost exactly terms Cooper herself used — labelled “a dispute between two Australian Jewish lawyers“. This description is false: there is no dispute between Schwartz and Cooper. Schwartz has never posted anything about Cooper — it is the latter who has targeted the former hundreds of times.
The Australian’s coverage of the Victoria Police application has termed it “unprecedented“, “rare”, “highly unusual”, not “general practice” and an attempt to “gag” Cooper. The fact that, as Schwartz confirmed to Crikey, Victoria Police’s application is based on their own assessment of Cooper’s Instagram, and is not an application made by Schwartz herself, is clearly frustrating for News Corp. It has repeatedly invoked Schwartz’s “Dutton’s Jew” slide in its coverage, along with multiple pictures of a distraught-looking Cooper, who complained to The Australian about the harm to her “right to free political speech” and police interference in what was merely “a political debate between two Jewish women who have different views”.
On Monday, Schwartz advised Victoria Police she would not be providing them with a statement in relation to the application, and that she would prefer they did not pursue it, saying she didn’t want to be part of a “shameful Murdoch media circus”.
Whatever the merits or otherwise of the Victoria Police action, it’s curious that The Australian has repeatedly republished Cooper’s attacks on Schwartz, despite Victoria Police arguing some of that content was sufficiently harmful to merit an application for an intervention order. It has published the “rat” picture twice and the train picture once, along with the “kapo” responses.
This seems an interesting position for a newspaper that campaigned against Schwartz for — it falsely claimed — peddling antisemitic tropes. Few, if any, of The Australian’s elderly readership would be active on platforms like Instagram, or have even heard of them, but The Australian chose to platform and amplify posts about rats, and Jews on trains, and accusations a Jewish woman was a “kapo”. The link between such imagery and antisemitic tropes is far easier to make than the confected link between “Dutton’s Jew” and antisemitism.
As Schwartz said in her statement Monday, “News Corp fill its pages with content supposedly about the fight against antisemitism” but “valorise and reproduce images from a social media account which makes images of Jewish women being hunted and attacked”. Antisemitism, she argued, was used by News Corp as “a shield against criticism of Israel’s war crimes, to be weaponised solely against Palestinians and their defenders”.
The exploitation of Jews thus continues.
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